Against all odds and expectations, the number of women who either choose not to have children or, for other reasons, do not, has become a major political issue. This raises the question – are more women today choosing to go childless versus their parents’ or grandparents’ generations?

The answer appears to be yes. A survey found that the number of women of prime child-bearing age who were not having children rose by 4.7 million, compared with fertility patterns before the Great Recession. Going back to 1950, the births per woman peaked at around 3.5 in 1953, meaning the average woman in America at that earlier time had 3 or 4 children. Today that number is down to around 1.8, which insinuates that a lot of women are choosing not to have children at all.

Why? A survey by the Pew Research Center found that among U.S. adult women younger than age 50, 47% said they were unlikely ever to have children – up from 37% in 2018. The reasons varied, but the most common answers were that they just don’t want to (57%) and that they want to focus on other things (44%). A remarkable 38% said they don’t want to bring children into a world that they are concerned about, 36% said they couldn’t afford to raise a child, and 26% said they had concerns about the environment. (20% chose the response indicating that they didn’t like children.)

When the same questions were posed to childless women over age 50, looking back over why they never had children, the most common response (39%) was that it just never happened, followed by (33%) who didn’t find the right partner.

Before we get too alarmed, we should recognize that today’s fertility rate is roughly the same as it was in 1979; the real decline took place from the late 1950s to the very late 1970s, and things have leveled off from there. This roughly follows a global trend of fewer births and a dramatic slowdown in the growth of the world’s population. If a fertility rate in the 1.8 range worries us, then perhaps we should also worry about Belgium (1.5 fertility rate), Canada (1.3), Italy (1.2), or the Republic of Korea (0.8).

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