The number of Americans without children is growing, and research suggests the trend is not going to slow down.
Nearly 45 percent of women aged 15 to 49 were childless between 2017 and 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), up from about 42 percent between 2015 and 2017.
While older CDC data is less directly comparable, as the range of included ages has shifted, it suggests the rate of childlessness has been creeping up for longer still: In 2002, about 40 percent of women and girls aged 15 to 44 did not have children.
And the share of Americans who have no kids will likely keep getting bigger, research shows, because more adults are actively choosing not to procreate or being prevented from doing so by issues related to fertility, finances or partnership.
A recent Pew Research Center survey shows that 47 percent of adults under 50 without children say they are unlikely to ever have them — a 10-percentage point increase from 2018.
In part, that appears to be because an increasing number of adults simply don’t want to become parents. About 57 percent of those younger adults in the Pew survey said a major reason they will likely never have kids is that they “just don’t want to,” compared to about 31 percent of childless adults over 50.
But for most adults in the U.S., Alison Gemmill told The Hill, being childless is the result of circumstance, not choice.
The top reason adults 50 and older gave Pew researchers for not having kids was that “it just never happened.”
Read more at Thehill.com
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