Voluntary, Involuntary and Temporary Childlessness in the United States

In this paper we first examine overall trends since 1910 in levels of childlessness among ever-married White, Black and Hispanic women for the years to 1995, and then among all women for the more recent years. We next use data from the 2006-08 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) to separate the women into three categories of childlessness and a “childed” category. In our analysis of the 3,689 White women, 1,766 or 47.9% were “childed,” 1,130 or 30.6% were “temporarily childless,” 629 or 17.1% were “voluntarily childless,” and only 164 or 4.4% were involuntarily childless. Then we estimated a multinomial logistic regression equation for the White women to predict childlessness. We found that education is both positively and significantly associated with being voluntarily, involuntarily, and temporarily childless, relative to having children. The dummy variable indicating whether the woman is never married is positive and significant for all three categories of childless women; age has no statistically significant effect on being voluntarily or involuntarily childless, but is negatively and significantly associated with being temporarily childless. If our paper is accepted for presentation at the IUSSP meetings, we will also conduct similar analyses of Black women and Hispanic women.