The Child Not Had: Voluntary Childlessness and Reproductive Politics in the United States

• In Event: Anti-Capitalist Feminisms (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Sex and Gender Section)

Abstract

Voluntary childlessness is becoming an increasingly visible feature of the contemporary United States. In 2023, the US total fertility rate reached a historic low, and recent estimates suggest that over one-fifth of adults may ultimately identify as childfree. At the same time, feminist political economy scholarship argues that neoliberal restructuring has intensified reliance on the privatized family as the primary site of social reproduction. This conjunction suggests closer empirical examination of how orientations toward parenthood are being reshaped under conditions of neoliberal crisis.

Existing research has effectively linked childlessness to transformations in labor markets, gender relations, and family structure. However, it often treats reproductive decision-making as either rational individual choice or structural constraint, overlooking how these conditions are lived affectively. Emerging self-narratives reveal a striking paradox: many voluntarily childless individuals frame their decision not as rejection but as care, responsibility, or protection—captured in the recurring sentiment, “I love my child so much that I will never bring them into this world.”

Building on this tension, this study asks how voluntarily childless adults in the United States narrate and make sense of their decision not to have children. I argue that this reproductive stance is best understood as an embodied social formation emerging within the neoliberal care crisis. Drawing on social reproduction theory and affect-centered approaches, this study examines how structural conditions are lived through intimate orientations toward the future - the next generation. The paper draws on semi-structured interviews with voluntarily childless adults in the United States and presents preliminary thematic patterns regarding care, precarity, and reproductive orientation. In doing so, it contributes to anti-capitalist feminist debates by deepening the examination of how the contradictions of contemporary capitalism are experienced at the level of intimate life.

Author

• JY Lin, University of Oregon