Childless

Childlessness is the term for people - men and women - having no children. Childlessness may have personal, social and/or political significance.

Types of childlessness can be classified into three broad categories:

The two first categories are often grouped under the label "involuntary childlessness". The latter category is often called "voluntary childlessness", also described as being "childfree", occurring when one decides not to reproduce.

See also clerical celibacy.

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 nineteenth 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. Social causes of childlessness have now completely disappeared for women in union. This is however not true for single women, who are usually poorer, for whom social sterility still exists.

From 2007 to 2011 the fertility rate in the U.S. declined 9%, the Pew Research Center reporting 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.

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.

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