There are a great many pressures which encourage uterus having people to reproduce historically and today. This pressure is evidenced by the blatant resistance folks who choose not to have children are met with in society. Much of the stigma those who are willingly childfree face seems to be backed by the large body of research on the benefits or even of having children and the undesirable effects of not. This research serves to uphold a culture which has universalized this stigmatized view, normalizing the practice of having children while othering those who do not have children by choice.
There has been a pattern in research, especially throughout the 70s and 80s, of framing voluntary childlessness as deviant or coming with unique consequences (2). Some scholars have gone as far as to assert that it is every individual who is able’s duty to society to reproduce. The logic behind this bold assertion often follows that our population needs to continue producing offspring in order to guarantee the ongoing existence of society (4). While we will all die and there is nothing we can do about that, a scholar of this mindset will say that we can do our due diligence in ensuring the future existence of society despite out own deaths by having offspring who themselves can then do their duty of having children before they die and so on and so on.
Despite the flaws in this logic, as society will clearly continue to exist independent of each individual’s personal reproductive choices, this thought process has been embraced by many. This presumed responsibility to reproduce has served to frame the family unit as a mere tool of reproduction. The family unit is seen as having the sole natural function of allowing parents to have children, and therefore fulfilling their duty to reproducing society. This frames couples who do not have children as failing to meet their key function, and therefore as a source of disfunction or disorder in society (6). I do not claim that this is overt logic which every person is adhering to consciously. Rather, I claim that because of a broader culture which reinforces research framing the childless as deviant or those with child as dutiful, many folks have internalized the subconscious notion that they must reproduce and that those who don’t agree are odd or lesser. When this view becomes universalized, the act of having children appears to be not only a duty but a part of human nature. This particularly applies for folks with uteruses, who have always been the center of reproductive discourse in the U.S. (5).
All of this work constructing reproduction as a duty or even as part of human nature has othered by-choice childless people via framing them as defying their duties or unnatural. It seems this othering of childfree folks as dysfunctional in society has also served to impact perceptions of childfree individuals’ character or personality. In a literature review regarding attitudes towards childfree folks, researchers found people tended to perceive childfree adults as having a colder personality than parents (2). And childfree folks appear to be feeling the effects of these pro-natalist attitudes. In that same literature review, authors noted that folks who feel the stigma of being childfree report facing criticism, specifically for being too focused on work or for being too “cold and materialistic”. A 1995 study of how child-free baby boomers navigating pressures of the cultural expectation to mother found there was an extreme awareness of the pressure to have children among participants. One individual reported that cultural pressures demand women must have their first child before age 30 and another reported, “if you are a normal woman, you want to have children at some point in your life”(1). In another study, relatively privileged women who choose to be childless were found to experience stigma through popular culture, law and policy, and medicine in a way that makes them uniquely othered and damages moral agency in the pro-natalist culture of the global north (3).
The othering of the willfully childless makes it clear that there is a great pressure to reproduce in the United States today, but this pressure does not exist alone. That said, to consider only the pressures which encourage birthing is to leave out the racism imbued in policy and culture which dehumanizes the bodies of people of color and other marginalized folks such that their reproduction is devalued. While it appears that birthing abroad is being encouraged by the research and cultural pressures discussed above, violent measures are being and have been taken to limit or even prohibit marginalized folks from birthing. This pressure to birth, then, is not a tool to ‘ensure the survival of society’, but rather a tool of white supremacy.
[1] Ainsworth, V. E. (1995). Women displacing reproductive identity: Childfree baby boomers confront the motherhood mandate (Order №9603559). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (304254389). Retrieved from http://ezproxy.msu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/women-displacing-reproductive-identity-childfree/docview/304254389/se-2
[2] Blackstone, A., & Stewart, M. D. (2012). Choosing to be childfree: Research on the decision not to parent. Sociology Compass, 6(9), 718–727. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2012.00496.x
[3] Gotlib, A. (2016). “But you would be the best mother”: Unwomen, counterstories, and the motherhood mandate. Journal of bioethical inquiry, 13(2), 327–347.
[4] Ralph, T. (1965). Population dynamics. Causes and Consequences of World Demograplùc Change. California State at Los Angeles.
[5] Veevers, J. E. (1973). The Social Meanings of Parenthood. Psychiatry, 36(3), 291. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.msu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/social-meanings-parenthood/docview/1301436965/se-2
[6] Winch, R. F. (1952, January 1). The modern family. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
