CHILDLESSNESS
Childlessness, according to the International Union for the Scientific Study of Populations (IUSSP) demographic dictionary, "refers to the state of a woman, man or couple who have been so far infertile." It should be distinguished from sterility or infecundity, terms which describe impairment of the capacity to conceive or the capacity to produce a live child. Childlessness can be measured for any person or couple in position to have (or to have had) a child, whatever the reason they did not do so. Definitive childlessness, measured at the end of reproductive life, will be treated here. As with other demographic phenomena, proportions childless can be measured in a population at a given time or for a particular cohort (set of individuals with a certain statistical characteristic in common). This entry will focus on the latter.
Causes of childlessness belong to two main categories:
- Involuntary childlessness–the consequence of sterility or infecundity, which may be congenital or caused by malnutrition or disease, especially sexually transmitted disease.
- Voluntary childlessness–the outcome of a deliberate choice, resulting from sexual abstinence, contraception, or abortion, or a consequence of social circumstances such as the absence of an available partner, or inability to provide for a family.
Involuntary childlessness is more frequent in less developed countries but is decreasing with their development; voluntary childlessness is the dominant form in most developed countries and is increasing.
Sources of Data and Measurement
Information on childlessness can be drawn from censuses and surveys or from vital registration. Most censuses and many specialized surveys have questions about the number of children ever born to women or couples, allowing calculation of the proportions childless for a cross-section of the population by various criteria, such as age or duration of marriage at the time of the census or survey. If they contain questions on the reproductive histories of women or couples, or if consecutive censuses are close enough, it is possible to study trends of childlessness by such criteria over time and for birth or marriage cohorts. These trends can also be observed from vital registration data on annual numbers of live births by birth order. In this case, the study of childlessness is the complement of the study of first birth order fertility. Both data sources have measurement problems. In censuses and surveys, the quality of responses, especially on retrospective questions, diminishes with age, especially for older respondents as a result of memory alteration and selection effects. With vital statistics, difficulties come from the multiplicity of definitions used to classify births according to birth order. Births may refer only to those within the current marriage or to all births of the mother. Birth order classification can refer to live births only or to all births (live births and stillbirths), in the latter case underestimating the level of childlessness; in the same manner, to define the order of a live birth, only live births or all births can be taken into account, the latter overestimating childlessness.
The most serious measurement difficulty comes from the definition of birth order used by some countries, especially some in Western Europe, such as France (until recently), Germany, or the United Kingdom: birth order among all the live births of the current marriage. This definition made sense when births outside marriage, and divorces and remarriages, were rare; the increase of births to unmarried women, the high proportion of marriages ended by divorce, and the frequency of remarriages, lead to a larger and larger gap between measurements based on each definition. The very high proportion of first births born out of wedlock, and the frequency of marriages entered into after the beginning of family formation, lead to overestimation of the rate of first births and consequently an underestimation of permanent childlessness. Another group of countries, including Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, Portugal, and Romania, use the concept of biological birth order. In these countries, childlessness proportions based on annual data from civil registration and annual population estimates typically yield values well below 5 percent–the level which would be considered the absolute minimum for the incidence of sterility in a population. These very low estimates may reflect not only the questionable quality of data collected, but also the effect of selection through migration. The latter leads to overestimating the first-birth fertility rate if childless women leave the country or if nonresident women come to the country to give birth.
Trends and Levels
Differences in data availability between developed and developing countries mean that trends and levels of childlessness are much better known in lowfertility societies than under high-fertility conditions. In the developed countries childlessness, defined as the proportion of women who had had no live birth by the end of their reproductive life, was at a low level among cohorts experiencing the baby boom years of the 1950s and 1960s. For women born in the early 1940s childlessness was around 10 percent. It rose rapidly for successive later cohorts. The 1960s birth cohorts exceed 20 percent childlessness in a number of European countries, including England and Wales, Austria, Italy, Finland, and Ireland, and in the western part of Germany. This level, however, is still lower than that of cohorts born in the early twentieth century. In Central and Eastern Europe, childlessness has been at a much lower level (5–10 percent) until recent years when it has been converging to Western European patterns. This is indicated by the proportions childless in cohorts that are approaching the end of reproductive life. Thus, for example, the proportions were as high as 20 percent for the early 1970s cohorts in Poland and Slovakia. (The rise is much smaller in Russia.) At least some of the increase in childlessness is probably due to reduced marriage frequency not offset by a corresponding rise in the frequency of consensual unions and extra-marital births.
The United States experienced an upward trend in childlessness similar to Western Europe's and preceding it by about ten years. It reached 17 percent among women born in 1953, only to level off and even decrease slightly thereafter (15.5 percent among the 1965 cohort).
In some countries, especially those with substantial emigration, the level of childlessness, measured from vital statistics, may have been somewhat underestimated. This may be the case for Portugal, the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania.
The postponement of motherhood in all European countries increases the risk of childlessness because of decreasing fecundability after age 30. The rising infecundity caused by postponed motherhood cannot be fully compensated by medical techniques, as shown by surveys such as the 1998 Netherlands Fertility and Family Survey. The development of in vitro fertilization and similar medical procedures have allowed some women to have children that they would not have had otherwise, but many women who postponed childbearing will never have a birth even with the help of the new techniques.
Social Implications of Childlessness
High rates of childlessness in developed countries create the potential for social conflict. The state (and parents) on the one hand and the childless on the other have differing interests on matters such as the financing of social welfare, pensions, aged care institutions, and education. If children are consumer goods for their parents they are also investments in the future for society. The developed world might encounter a situation familiar in developing countries, where women are often blamed for childlessness regardless of the cause of their infertility. Alternatively, there is the possibility of further institutionalization of a childless lifestyle, entrenching high levels of childlessness.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frinking, Gerald. 1988. "Childlessness in Europe: Trends and Implications." In Lifestyles, Contraception and Parenthood: Proceedings of a Workshop, eds. Hein Moors and Jeannette Schoorl. The Hague: Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute.
Poston, Dudley L. 1982. "International Variability in Childlessness: A Descriptive and Analytical Study." Journal of Family Issues 3 (4): 473–491.
Poston, Dudley L., and Baochang Gu. 1983. "Measurement of Childlessness with World Fertility and National Census Data." In American Statistical Association, Proceeding of the Social Statistics Section 401–406.
Prioux, France. 1993. "L'infécondité en Europe." In European Population, Vol. 2: Demographic Dynamics, ed. Alain Blum and Jean-Louis Rallu. Paris: INED; John Libbey Eurotext.
Rowland, Donald T. 1998. "Cross-National Trends in Childlessness." Working paper in demography 73; Australian National University, Canberra.
Steehof, Liesbeth, and Andries De Jong. 2001. "Infecundity: A Result of Postponed Childbearing." European Population Conference 2001, June 7–9. Theme A, Session A3, Helsinki.
