Higher Rates Of Childlessness Research Articles

Patterns of reproductive health in inflammatory rheumatic diseases and other immune-mediated diseases: a nationwide registry study.

Rheumatic diseases may impair reproductive success and pregnancy outcomes, but systematic evaluations across diseases are lacking. We conducted a nationwide cohort study to examine the impact of rheumatic diseases on reproductive health measures, comparing the impacts with those of other immune-mediated diseases (IMDs). Out of all of the 5 339 804 Finnish citizens, individuals born 1964-1984 and diagnosed with any of the 19 IMDs before age 30 (women) or 35 (men) were matched with 20 controls by birth year, sex, and education. We used data from nationwide health registers to study the impact of IMDs on reproductive health measures, such as reproductive success and, for women, ever having experienced adverse maternal and perinatal outcomes. Several of the rheumatic diseases, particularly SLE, JIA, and seropositive RA, were associated with higher rates of childlessness and fewer children. The risks for pre-eclampsia, newborns being small for gestational age, preterm delivery, non-elective Caesarean sections, and need of neonatal intensive care were increased in many IMDs. Particularly, SLE, SS, type 1 diabetes, and Addison's disease showed >2-fold risks for some of these outcomes. In most rheumatic diseases, moderate (1.1-1.5-fold) risk increases were observed for diverse adverse pregnancy outcomes, with similar effects in IBD, celiac disease, asthma, ITP, and psoriasis. Rheumatic diseases have a broad impact on reproductive health, with effects comparable with that of several other IMDs. Of the rheumatic diseases, SLE and SS conferred the largest risk increases on perinatal adverse event outcomes.

Stability and change in male fertility patterns by cognitive ability across 32 birth cohorts.

The relationship between cognitive ability (CA) and childbearing remains unsettled. Using Norwegian administrative registers with population coverage, we study how male lifetime fertility patterns differ across cognitive score groups, and how these changed across the 1950-1981 birth cohorts, covering a period characterized by rapid social and economic change. The analyses reveal systematic differences in fertility and fertility timing across CA groups, with high scoring males having delayed but ultimately higher fertility than lower scoring males. This pattern remains stable over time despite strong trends towards delayed and reduced fertility. The overall positive relationship between CA and fertility is primarily driven by high rates of childlessness in the lowest scoring group, with low-scoring males showing higher rates of parity progression at higher parities.

LONELINESS IN LGBTQIA+ OLDER ADULTS: A SCOPING REVIEW

Abstract Loneliness in older adulthood is responsible for poor mental and physical health, cognitive decline, and early mortality. Older adults in the LGBTQIA+ community experience additional layers of vulnerability, such as discrimination, higher rates of childlessness, health inequity, and economic disparity that place them at high risk for loneliness. The purpose of this scoping review is to explore the existing literature on loneliness in LGBTQIA+ older adults and identify knowledge gaps to inform future research recommendations. Using the Arskey & O’Malley methodological framework, our team searched PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, PsychINFO, Scopus, and Google Scholar using keywords related to older adults, sexual and gender minorities, and loneliness. We identified 61 articles from 1980 to 2022. Most of the research in this literature reflected studies using descriptive and qualitative approaches. Intervention studies were the least reported. One opinion piece is included. Initial findings highlight associations between discrimination and loneliness, poor mental health and loneliness, the challenges of HIV in older adulthood and loneliness, and loneliness experienced in caregiving and end of life in LGBTQIA+ older adults. Importantly, many studies emphasized the protective nature of strong social support and community ties against loneliness. Equally, the literature suggests that limited social support is a significant risk factor for loneliness in this population. Older gender non-binary and LGBTQIA+ people of color were underrepresented in many studies. Future research should include intervention research that targets loneliness in this population as well as studies focused on understanding loneliness more comprehensively in underrepresented LGBTQIA+ older adults.

A Research Note on the Convergence of Childlessness Rates Between Women with Secondary and Tertiary Education in the United States.

A gap in childlessness rates between women with and without tertiary education in low-fertility settings has been well documented by scholars. However, in the United States, high rates of childlessness are declining for women with tertiary education. Will this current trend lead to a closing of the gap in childlessness across educational subgroups in this country? We answer this question using data from the Current Population Survey from 1976 through 2018. We present population-level trends in permanent childlessness by level of education and estimate the differences in the prevalence of childlessness across educational subgroups. Our findings indicate that the rates of childlessness for women aged 40-44 with tertiary education in the United States are the lowest they have been in over three decades and that rates of childlessness are converging among women with secondary and tertiary education. The declines in childlessness rates and the convergence in childlessness rates between women with secondary and tertiary education are observed for all of the three largest race/ethnicity sub-populations of American women: non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, and Hispanic women. This report contributes to the emerging literature on the convergence of childlessness rates across sub-populations of women with different levels of educational attainment, which questions the well-established observation that there is a positive relationship between education and childlessness.

Does counters’ responsibility end at the margin of the marginal utility? : Reflection on „The Marginal Utilities and Marginal Costs of Having Children” by Péter Mihályi

In his article published in the 2019/4 issue of the Public Finance Quarterly, Peter Mihalyi argues that in Hungary, population reduction and aging cannot be significantly reduced within national frameworks, no matter how large the amount of money by which the state tries to reduce the individual costs of childbearing is. In contrast, on the one hand, this article points out that there are realistic options for reducing the gap between the number of children desired and the number of children actually delivered, and thereby significantly increasing the fertility rate. On the other hand, the article outlines a number of factors (emigration, high rates of childlessness) that should be taken into account when designing a model for the individual utility of childbearing, and thus give families additional aspects to consider when making decisions in terms of childbearing.

Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children

Our goal in this paper is to analyse the extent to which completed fertility, and in particular childlessness, is a valid predictor of living alone at advanced ages, an increasingly important residential option in advanced societies with crucial implications for social policy design and the organization of welfare services. Based on micro-data from the 2011 Spanish population census, logistic regression techniques are used to assess the impact of fertility on living alone among elderly women net the effect of age, marital status, educational attainment, and other standard population controls. Our results show a clear relationship between completed fertility and living alone. Childlessness is strongly associated with living alone, while having offspring acts as a powerful buffer against living alone, particularly in larger families. A relevant conclusion of this study is that a growing deficit of family resources available for the elderly women will take place in those societies where low fertility and high rates of childlessness have prevailed in recent decades, leading to substantial growth in the number of childless elderly women and in the incidence of living alone during later life.

Family Data and Research in the Health and Retirement Study

Abstract I discuss the data in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) that can be used to study family change and intergenerational family relationships and offer suggestions about what might be done to enhance the uses of the HRS family data going forward. A number of family demographic behaviors are altering the family context of more recent cohorts of the HRS. These family changes need to be well-captured in the data collection and and should also inform future design decisions. Changes include the higher rates of childlessness, delayed marriage and childbearing after age 30 among the Baby Boom cohorts just now being enrolled in the HRS. Cohorts coming into the study also have higher rates of (lifetime) labor force participation on the part of women and much higher rates of nonmarital childbearing, marital disruption, and informal cohabitation than the original HRS cohorts. There is also great heterogeneity in family patterns by race and class among Baby Boom cohorts. Many of these changes increase the value of collecting family data in the HRS but also complicate the collection of useful data on transfers between parents and children or among siblings. I offer four suggestions for enhancing data collection in the HRS in light of these family changes. These include the following: 1) Reevaluate decisions about the family members on whom to gather information, particularly the decisions about when to collect data on siblings. 2) Consider collecting more information directly from each spouse (and perhaps expanding the definition of “spouse” to include cohabiting partners as cohabitation is on the rise among cohorts now entering the HRS). 3) Begin to experiment with interviewing adult children of HRS respondents and consider broadening the content to include more on parent-child relationship quality and/or on everyday activities and exchanges. 4) Make the family data in the HRS easier to access and use.

FAMILY BACKGROUND, SCHOOLING AND CHILDLESSNESS IN AUSTRALIA

Using data from Wave 1 of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, this paper analyses the extent to which childlessness among Australian women aged 40-54 years varies according to the size and type of family in which they were brought up, and the level and type of schooling they had. Multilevel logistic analysis shows that having been educated in a non-government school, having stayed at school to year 12, having a small number of siblings, at age 14 having a father who was either dead or absent, at age 14 having a father who was employed in a professional occupation, or being a migrant from North or West Europe, North America, East Asia or South-East Asia, all are significantly associated with higher rates of childlessness among women in the 40-54 years age range. The effects of these early lifecourse variables on marital and socioeconomic status in later life, and hence on childlessness, are also considered. The implications of the findings for fertility trends and for Australia's public debate are discussed.

Childlessness among American women.

Abstract The rate of childlessness in the United States has increased over the last two decades. Changing or differential rates by different segments of society have important implications for society. Most previous studies have relied on unrepresentative opportunistic samples to identify those segments of society with lower or higher rates of childlessness. These types of samples may misestimate both the number of women planning to remain childless and the magnitude of the correlates of childlessness. The present study uses these previous studies to identify predictor variables, but tests their significance using a recent national representative sample of women in the United States, aged 20–44: Cycle III of the National Survey for Family Growth, collected in 1982. The most important demographic factors are marital status and fecundity status, followed by age, race or ethnicity, education of the respondent, labor force status, and region. Father's education and mother's education are slightly, but not sig...

The symbolic meaning of childbearing.

Women born during the baby boom are predicted to have historically high rates of childlessness and low fertility. Many popular explanations for such predictions point to the costs involved in having and rearing children—both direct and opportunity costs. The evidence for such costs, however, is quite weak. In this article, the costs in earnings, labor-force time, and time with one's spouse are considered and argued to be inadequate to explain contemporary women's low fertility. Instead, it is argued that fundamental values held by women about male-female relationships and the role of women in society are quite important in affecting women's fertility. Limited empirical tests of this argument provide consistent support. This article concludes by noting how, for growing numbers of women, the role of mother is being redefined in ways quite similar to the traditional role of father—financial support of children.

VOLUNTARILY CHILDLESS MARRIAGES

Five years ago a conference on Children and Marriage would probably not have included a paper on marriages without children. Having children in marriage conforms to one of society's strongest expectations; conversely not having any is portrayed as both undesirable and deviant. Society's prescriptions relating to parenthood have given rise to a number of assumptions about childless marriages. Briefly, these maintain that the causes of childlessness are almost always involuntary, that marriages without children will be less satisfactory and more prone to divorce than parental marriages, and that childlessness is generally associated negatively with various measures of mental health. It is only recently that such assumptions have been questioned, and that voluntary childlessness has become a subject of research in its own right, rather than as an aberration from the “normal” pattern of behaviour. In Britain three chief reasons for an upsurge in interest in childless by choice marriages are apparent. Firstly, there have been indications that couples are delaying childbirth in marriage and this has led to speculation that in some cases, at least, this delay would lead to higher rates of childlessness when this cohort of women had completed childbearing. Figure 1 illustrates both this trend and the fact that in the past high rates of childlessness in early marriage were associated with high rates of final childlessness. Secondly, in 1976 a pressure group was formed by some voluntarily childless individuals; its aim was to campaign for a reduction in pronatalist pressure in society. This group attracted a good deal of interest from the popular press and in the late seventies and early eighties many articles looking at various aspects of voluntary childlessness have been published. Thirdly, and most significantly, voluntary childlessness represents an alternative family form and has come into the realm of sociological studies of the family along with other lifestyles (such as one‐parent families or homosexual couples) that were once considered deviant and therefore outside the mainstream of society. It is now recognised that such living arrangements are both valid as subjects for study in their own right and in terms of the understanding they may give of more traditional arrangements.

Socio-Demographic Correlates of Childlessness: An Analysis of the 1971 Canadian Census

"The purpose of this paper is to examine childless women and the different socio-demographic characteristics associated with this demographic pattern. The study focuses on the proportion of ever-married and currently married women 15 years of age and over who were childless in 1971. The data source is the 1971 Canadian census 1 percent sample tape based on individual files, which yields a total sample of 46,376 women from all across Canada. The major correlations with childlessness among these women are age and marriage duration. The longer (and earlier) a woman is married, the lower the levels of childlessness when obvious demographic factors are controlled." It is found that "ascribed characteristics of ever-married women provide no meaningful associations to childlessness, and this description is applicable to the variables of religion, ethnicity, mother tongue, home language, and place of birth. Achieved characteristics, especially among the younger cohorts of women, are more revealing, and women who have higher family incomes, higher levels of education, who are living in large urban places and are involved in the labor force (among themselves highly correlated variables) generally have higher rates of childlessness. Implications of these findings are discussed."

Trends in childlessness in the United States, 1910-1975.

Abstract This paper examines trends in childlessness for ever‐married women in the United States. Data assembled from assorted census materials permit cohort and period investigations for a number of time periods, from 1910 to 1975, for various color and ethnic groups. Whether examined at the period or cohort level, the incidences in percentage rates of childlessness have varied irregularly over time. We focus particularly on the younger cohorts of white women (those beginning fecundity after 1965); they show higher rates of childlessness at each age than any of the older cohorts at similar ages in the reproductive cycle. We suggest that a major portion of the increasing rates of these younger cohorts may be attributed to increases in voluntary childlessness, which in turn may be linked to broader changes in the fabric of society regarding fertility control, contraceptive technology, female work preferences and patterns, and sexual and family norms.