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.  Which raises the question: are more women today choosing to go childless vs. their parents’ or grandparents’ generation?

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 prior to the Great Recession.  Going back to 1950, the births per woman (fertility rate) 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 around 1.784 per woman, which basically means 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 wanted to focus on other things (44%; apparently the respondents could choose more than one answer).  A remarkable 38% said they did not want to bring children into a world that they were concerned about, 36% said they could not afford to raise a child, and 26% said they had concerns about the environment.  (20% chose the response indicating that they did not really 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: it just never happened, followed by (33%) I did not find the right partner.

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.

This article was written by an independent writer for Brewster Financial Planning LLC and is not intended as individualized legal or investment advice.