Recent European fertility patterns: Fitting curves to 'distorted' distributions

Recent patterns of fertility in Europe show marked differences between coun tries. Recent United Kingdom and Irish fertility curves show 'distortions' in terms of a 'bulge' in early age fertility, distinct from the smoother cu rves of other European countries. These patterns may not be adequately desc ribed by mathematical functions used by previous studies to model fertility curves. A mixture model with two component distributions may be more appro priate. The suitability of the simple and mixture Hadwiger functions is exa mined in relation to the fertility curves of a number of European countries . While the simple Hadwiger model fits recent period age-specific fertility distributions for some countries, others which display a 'bulge' in early age fertility require a mixture Hadwiger model. Some of the parameters of t he Hadwiger models appear to be related to familiar demographic indices. Th e simple and mixture Hadwiger models appear useful in describing and compar ing fertility patterns across European countries.