Female fertility

Definition

The fertility of an individual female is defined as the number of children conceived by the female. Note that the term fertility rate' is typically used when talking about aggregating fertility values across populations, but we simply talk of fertility when referring to a particular individual female. The fertility of an individual female is a nonnegative integer, i.e., it could take values 0, 1, 2, ... Due to biological considerations, it typically would not exceed 20 (there are only about 32 females in recorded history who have had more than 20 children, according to Wikipedia's list of people with the most children).

We use the term completed fertility to describe the fertility for females who will not have any more children. Completed fertility is typically computed for females who are no longer biologically capable of conceiving.

We use the term expected fertility to describe the sum of the number of children the female has already conceived and the number of future children the female expects to conceive.

There are many different ways of aggregating fertility across populations.