Childlessness is the state of not having children. Childlessness may have personal, social or political significance.
Childlessness, which may be by choice or circumstance, is distinguished from voluntary childlessness, also called being "childfree", which is voluntarily having no children, and from antinatalism, wherein childlessness is promoted.
Types Voluntary
Personal choice, having the physical, mental, and financial capability to have or adopt children but choosing not to (that is, voluntary childlessness), also called being "childfree".
Involuntary Involuntary childlessness can be due infertility and inability to adopt. Infertility, the inability of a person or persons to conceive, due to complications related to either or both a woman or a man. This is regarded as the most prominent reason for involuntary childlessness. Biological causes of infertility vary because many organs of both sexes must function properly for conception to take place. Infertility also affects people who are unable to conceive a second or subsequent pregnancy. This is called secondary infertility.Mosher, W.D. and Pratt, W.F. (1991) Fecundity and infertility in the United States: Incidence and trends.
Types of involuntary childlessness can be classified into several categories: natural sterility randomly affects individuals. One can think of it as the minimum level of permanent childlessness that we can observe in any given society, and it is of the order of 2 percent, in line with data from the Hutterites, a group established as the demographic standard in the 1950s. social sterility, which one can also call poverty-driven childlessness, or endogenous sterility, describes the situation of poor women whose fecundity has been affected by poor living conditions. people who are childless by circumstance. These people can be childless because they have not met a partner with whom they would like to have children, or because they tried unsuccessfully to conceive at an advanced maternal age, or because they suffer from certain medical issues, such as endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), that make it difficult for them to conceive.
Obstetric or gynaecological problems, including physical injury caused by a previous pregnancy.An example is obstetric fistula, which has left many women unable to bear further children and is often invoked by their husbands and communities as a reason for rejecting them. The Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital is the only hospital of its kind in the world dedicated exclusively to women with obstetric fistula. It was founded by Doctors Catherine and Reg Hamlin.
Mental-health difficulties, such as impairment of executive functioning, that prevent a would-be parent from being able to raise a child properly.
Chronic illness/disability: Many serious chronic health conditions put the health of the mother and baby at undue risk if she were to become pregnant. These women are advised not to become pregnant. Some chronic health issues/disabilities obviate a parent from being able to care for a child.
Practical difficulties involving features of one's environment: Effects of social, cultural, or legal norms (sometimes"Sexual Function and Social Infertility," available at referred to as "social infertility"): Combination of Lack of a partner or a partner's being of the same biological sex as the person in question Social or legal barriers to family formation through non-biological means (adoption or family "blending"), e.g., prohibitions against adoption by single persons, adoption by same-sex couples, marriage to a partner of the same sex who already has children, etc. Economic or social pressure to pursue a career before having children, increasing the odds of eventual infertility due to advanced maternal age Lack of resources sufficient to make bearing or raising a child a practically viable option: Insufficiency of financial resources vis-à-vis the level of family and other community support available Insufficiency of access to medical care (often overlaps with insufficiency of financial resources) Insufficiency of access to supportive care necessitated by employment commitments or mental-health impairments to daily functioning (see above) Unwillingness of one's partner, where existent, to conceive or raise children (includes partners who are unwilling to adopt children despite being biologically infertile, of the same biological sex, or physically absent). Involuntary celibacy
The death of all of a person's already-conceived children either before birth (as with miscarriage and stillbirth) or after birth (as with infant and child mortality) coupled with a person's not having yet had other children for reasons ranging from physical or emotional exhaustion to having passed childbearing age. Infant and child death can happen for any number of reasons, usually medical or environmental, such as biological malformations, maternal complications, accident or other injury, and disease. Both the existence of many of these causes and the severity of harm when present can be mitigated by ensuring that the infant's or child's environment features resources ranging from parenting and safety information to pre-, peri-, and postnatal medical care for mother and child.
Statistics
According to the statistic by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), declining total fertility rates (TFRs) across OECD countries are associated with an increase in childlessness and smaller family sizes among women. The rise in permanent childlessness has varied significantly by country and generation. In Canada, childlessness increased mainly among women born between 1935 and 1955, while in most OECD countries the trend accelerated among cohorts born between 1955 and 1975. By 2024, approximately 28% of women born in 1975 in Italy, Spain, and Japan remained childless, more than double the rate observed in earlier generations. Austria, Germany, Italy, and Spain reported childlessness rates of 20–24% among women born in 1975, whereas most other OECD countries recorded rates between 10% and 20%.
The data do not distinguish between voluntary and involuntary childlessness, though research indicates a discrepancy between intended and actual fertility outcomes, particularly among highly educated women in Europe and the United States.
United States The analysis of the three broad categories of childlessness (natural sterility, social sterility, voluntary childlessness) outlined above helps to understand how it has changed over the last century in the United States. At the end of the 19th century, income and education levels were low. This made levels of social sterility very high. In addition to the causes mentioned above, the Spanish Influenza epidemics meant that pregnant women who were infected were particularly vulnerable to miscarriages. The Great Depression also impoverished these generations, for whom voluntary childlessness was almost absent. On the whole, the rates of childlessness for married women born between 1871 and 1915 fluctuated between 15 and 20 percent. The rise in both education and overall income allowed subsequent generations to escape from situations where couples were “constrained” from having children, and rates of childlessness began to fall. Over time, the nature of childlessness changed, becoming more and more the chosen outcome of some educated women. A low level of childlessness of 7% was achieved by the generation of the baby boom. It started to rise again for the subsequent generations, with 12 percent of women born in 1964-68 remaining childless.
From 2007 to 2011, the fertility rate in the U.S. declined 9%; the Pew Research Center reported in 2010 that the birth rate was the lowest in U.S. history and that childlessness rose across all racial and ethnic groups to about 1 in 5 versus 1 in 10 in the 1970s. The CDC released statistics in the first quarter of 2016 confirming that the U.S. fertility rate had fallen to its lowest point since record keeping started in 1909: 59.8 births per 1,000 women, half its high of 122.9 in 1957. Even taking the falling fertility rate into account, the U.S. Census Bureau still projected that the U.S. population would increase from 319 million (2014) to 400 million by 2051.
Europe
In a paper presented at a 2013 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe work session on Demographic Projections, Swedish statisticians reported that since the 2000s, childlessness had decreased in Sweden and marriages had increased. It had also become more common for couples to have a third child, suggesting that the nuclear family was no longer in decline in Sweden.
The number of people over 50 in the UK without adult children in 2023 was reported to be 20 percent.
Solutions for involuntary childlessness
Medical interventions may be available to some individuals or couples to treat involuntary childlessness. Some options include artificial insemination, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and in vitro fertilization. Artificial insemination is the process in which sperm is collected via masturbation and inserted into the uterus immediately after ovulation. Intracytoplasmic sperm injection is a more recent technique that involves injecting a single sperm directly into an egg; the egg is then placed in the uterus by in vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is the process in which a mature ovum is surgically removed from a woman's ovary, placed in a medium with sperm until fertilization occurs, and then placed in the woman's uterus. About 50,000 babies in the United States are conceived this way and are sometimes referred to as "test-tube babies."Hammond, P., et al. (2009) In vitro fertilization availability and utilization in the United States: A study of demographic, social, and economic factors: 1630-1635. Other forms of assisted reproductive technology include, gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT) and zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT). Fertility drugs may also improve the chances of conception in women.
For those facing social infertility (such as single individuals or same-sex couples) as well as heterosexual couples with medical infertility, other options include surrogacy and adoption. Surrogacy, in this case a surrogate mother, is the process in which a woman becomes pregnant (usually by artificial insemination or surgical implantation of a fertilized egg) for the purpose of carrying the fetus to term for another individual or couple. Another option may be adoption; to adopt is to take voluntarily (a child of other parents) as one's own child.
Contraception All forms of contraception have played a role in voluntary childlessness over time, but the invention of reliable oral contraception contributed profoundly to changes in societal ideas and norms. Voluntary childlessness, resulting from contraception, has influenced women's health, laws and policies, interpersonal relationships, feminist issues, and sexual practices among adults and adolescents.
The availability of oral contraception during the late 1900s was directly related to the women's rights movement by establishing, for the first time, a mass distribution of a way to control fertility. The so-called "pill" gave women the opportunity to make different life choices they may not previously have been able to make, such as, for example, furthering their career. This led to monumental changes in the current gender and family roles.