Recent years have seen a rise in childlessness rates in the US close to levels not seen for more than a century. In new research which examines the drivers of childlessness then and now, Thomas Baudin, David de la Croix and Paula E. Gobbi find that while in the early 20th century poverty meant that many women were forced into having fewer children, better education and higher income for women are now the causes of childlessness

Baudin, Thomas

de la Croix, David

Gobbi, Paula E.

LSE Research Online

blogs.lse.ac.ukhttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2015/09/15/childlessness-is-high-in-the-us-once-again-but-this-time-its-driven-by-choice-not-poverty/Childlessness is high in the US once again, but this time it’sdriven by choice, not poverty.Recent years have seen a rise in childlessness rates in the US close to levels not seen for morethan a century. In new research which examines the drivers of childlessness then and now,Thomas Baudin, David de la Croix and Paula E. Gobbi find that while in the early 20th centurypoverty meant that many women were forced into having fewer children, better education andhigher income for women are now the causes of childlessness.Childlessness was much higher for the generation born at the beginning of the twentieth centurythan it is today. As Figure 1 shows, rates of childlessness for married women born between 1871and 1915 fluctuated between 15 and 20 percent, while only 12 percent of women born in 1964-68remained.  In new research, we provide a framework to understand the deep causes ofchildlessness and how their importance have changed over time. We find that the main causes ofchildlessness of 100 years ago have largely altered from poverty-induced necessity to a choicedriven by higher levels of income and education among women. Figure 1 – Childlessness rates of married women by generation in the United StatesIn our analysis of childlessness, we first looked at three reasons why individuals may remain childless:First, natural sterility can randomly affect any individual. One can think of it as the minimum level of permanentchildlessness that we can observe of the society, and is of the order of 2 percent, in line with data from theHutterites, a group established as the demographic standard in the 1950s.Second, social sterility, sometimes called poverty driven childlessness, describes the situation of poor womenwhose fecundity has been affected by poor living conditions. Indeed, lower-income groups are more exposed tosexually transmitted diseases, malnutrition, psychopathological problems, and environmental pollution than therest of the population. The poor also have less access to quality medical services, which makes them morevulnerable to medical mistakes in abortions, and also have difficulty in affording fertility services.Third, women can remain childless “by choice”. Most of these women are educated and tend to postponemarriage to invest more in their career, or have an opportunity cost to bear and rear a child takes time that is tooexpensive in terms of foregone labour income.The observed U-shaped relationship between childlessness and the mother’s education, shown in Figure 2 below,is driven by the coexistence of social sterility and of a high opportunity cost of parenting for educated women.Figure 2 – Childlessness rates of women born 1920-45Source: 1990 Census data The breakdown of childlessness into its three causes just outlined helps to understand how it has changed overthe last century. At the end of the nineteenth century, wages were low and people were generally poorly educated.This made levels of social sterility very high. In addition to the causes mentioned above, the Spanish Influenzaepidemics, which particularly affected the generations born between 1890 and 1910, meant that pregnant womenwho were infected were particularly vulnerable to miscarriages. The Great Depression also impoverished thesegenerations, for whom voluntary childlessness was almost absent.The rise in both education and overall income allowed subsequent generations to escape from situations wherecouples were “constrained” from having children, and rates of childlessness began to fall. Over time, the nature ofchildlessness changed, becoming more and more the chosen outcome of many educated women. In recent years,more education has become more linked with higher rates of childlessness. Social causes of childlessness havenow completely disappeared for married women. This is however not true for single women, who are usuallypoorer, for whom social sterility still exists.Two other changes have been particularly important in recent decades: returns to schooling have increased andthe gender wage gap has diminished, though the effect of these changes on average childlessness rates hasbeen less important compared to those of education and overall income. The reason is simply that these changesaffect the individuals that are in the tails of the distribution of education. As aggregate numbers are mainly drivenby the middle educated group, the impact on childlessness from these changes are hidden. Since childlessness isparticularly present at the tails of the education distribution, these two changes are however worth discussing.First, the rise in income inequality and skill premiums in the U.S. makes those who have less education poorer (inparticular single women) which increases social sterility. For the highly educated, the opportunity cost of havingchildren is increased by higher skill premiums (for both men and women), and more of them choose to remainchildless. On the whole, childlessness of the two sorts increases with inequality.The closing of the gender wage gap has helped to make women better off, with fewer poor women experiencingsocial sterility. Educated women face a higher opportunity cost of raising children and are more likely to bechildless. The move towards more gender equality therefore contributes to the overall transformation ofchildlessness from involuntary to voluntary.Childlessness among the poor is of particular importance as far as policy is concerned. According to the notion of“capabilities”, even though poor and rich childless individuals have the same “functioning” (being childless), theydo not have the same “capability set”. Indeed, whenever an individual does not have the opportunity to achieve a“valuable functioning” (in this case parenthood), this individual suffers from “capability deprivation”. Fighting thecauses of social sterility could then allow the set of capabilities of the poor to increase. We show that reducingwage inequalities and promoting gender parity on the labor market are powerful tools to limit the proportion of(involuntary) childlessness generated by poverty. A drop of 7 percent in the Gini coefficient could reduce thepercentage of socially sterile women by 25 percent.This article is based on the paper, ‘Fertility and Childlessness in the United States’, in the American EconomicReview 2015. Featured images credit: Nathan O’Nions (Flickr, CC-BY-2.0), and Gordon Joly (Flickr, CC-BY-SA-2.0)Please read our comments policy before commenting.            Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics.Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/1Kk6z4c _________________________________ About the authors Thomas Baudin – Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium)Thomas Baudin is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Research in Demography and Societyat the Université catholique de Louvain. His research interests include family economics,demographic economics, public economics, cultural dynamics, and development economics.  David de la Croix – Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium)David de la Croix  is Professor of Economics at Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). Hehas taught on a visiting basis at UCLA, Copenhagen, Aix-Marseille, Nanterre, Capetown, SaoPaulo and Rostock. He is the instigator and editor-in-chief of the Journal of DemographicEconomics. His research interests cover demographic economics, human capital, conflictbetween generations, and growth. His choice of topics reveals that he is mostly interested inunderstanding households’ incentives and how they shape the future of our societies. Paula E. Gobbi – Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium)Paula Gobbi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (“chargé de recherche”) at the Universitécatholique de Louvain. Her research fields are family economics, quantitative macroeconomics, development andgrowth. CC BY-NC 3.0 2015 LSE USAPP

Childlessness is high in the US once again, but this time it’s driven by choice, not poverty.

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