Premarital fertility is not extraordinary, but marital fertility is so limited as to warrant extensive discussion. Our measurement of marital fertility consists of a count of children born in the marriage. The incest offenders were the most fertile, the median incest offender vs. adults having five children, the incest offender vs. minors nearly five, and the incest offenders vs. children three. These are the only groups whose fertility is at or above replacement level. The control group is fourth in number of children with 2.13—a rather low figure which demands explanation. Most of this control-group infertility is the result of certain coincidences: the older men, who are from a less-educated social stratum, spent most of their reproductive years of marriage during the depression; the younger men, whose reproductive span escaped the depression, tend to come from a better-educated (grades 11—12) stratum and were hence more inclined to limit the number of children. These younger men were interviewed chiefly during the World War II years when parenthood was often being postponed. Finally, our interviewing of the control group was unfortunately so timed as to miss virtually all the postwar “baby boom.”
The remaining groups of sex offenders and the prison group all have even lower levels of fertility. The homosexual offenders vs. adults and minors are the most infertile, averaging less than one child per marriage. While this is in part due to the brevity of the marriage and in part to contraception, one cannot use coital inactivity as an explanation, for these homosexual offenders had quite adequate coital frequencies. Indeed, there seems little relation between coital frequency and fertility; duration of marriage seems a more important factor. Note that the three incest-offender groups and the control group spent more of their postpubertal lives (46 to 58 per cent) as married men than any other group.
*308\161\2*
