Although the debate on birth issues revolves around women, there are more and more men who want to have children, but do not have them for social reasons, such as the lack of a partner.
Isabel created the Nunca Madres group after the end of an unpleasant relationship, in her early thirties, led her to the conclusion that I didn’t want to have children.
She faces criticism for this choice every day, and not just in Colombia, where she lives. “What I hear most is: ‘You will regret it, you are selfish. Who will take care of you when you are old?”, she says.
For Isabel, not having children is a choice. For others, it is the result of biological infertility. And for many more people, it is a confluence of factors that makes a person does not have the child they wanted — what sociologists call “social infertility”.
A recent study showed that men are more likely to be unable to have children, even if they want to — especially low-income men.
A study carried out in 2021 in Norway found that the childlessness rate among men was 72% among the 5% with lowest incomesbut only 11% among the highest earners — a disparity that has increased by almost 20 percentage points in the last 30 years.
The rise of “social infertility”
There are a number of reasons for social infertility, such as a lack of resources to have a child or not finding the right person at the right time.
But at the root of this is another issue, argues Anna Rotkirch, a sociologist and demographer at the Finnish Population Research Institute, who has studied fertility intentions in Europe and Finland for more than 20 years and has observed a profound change in the way we see children.
Outside of Asia, Finland has one of the highest rates of childlessness in the world. However, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the country was celebrated for combat fertility decline with policies aimed at children recognized worldwide. Parental leave is generous, daycare is more accessible, and men and women have more equal participation in domestic work.
Since 2010, however, fertility rates in the country have declined by almost a third.
Rotkirch explains that, like marriage, having a child was once seen as a fundamental event, something that young people did as they began their adult lives. It is now seen as a culminating event — what is done when the other objectives are achieved.
“People of all classes seem to think that having a child adds uncertainty to their lives,” notes Rotkirch.
In Finland, she found that the richest women are the least likely to be involuntarily childless. On the other hand, low-income men are the more likely to not have the children they wanted.
This is a big change from the past: previously, people from poorer families tended to make the transition to adulthood earlier — dropping out of school, getting jobs, and starting families at a younger age.
A crisis of masculinity
For men, financial uncertainty has a compounding impact that further reduces the likelihood of having children. This has been called by sociologists the “selection effect,” in which women tend to look for someone in the same class social status or higher when choosing a partner.
In 70% of the world’s countries, women are outperforming men in terms of educational attainment, which has led to what Yale University sociologist Marcia Inhorn calls the mating gap. In Europe, this caused men without a college degree become the group most likely to be childless.
Most countries do not have good data on male fertility because only consider the mother’s fertility history when registering a birth. This means that childless men do not exist as a recognized “category.”
Some Nordic countries, however, consider both. The Norwegian study, which identified the huge disparity in procreation between rich and poor men, claimed that countless men were being “left behind”.
Men’s role in declining birth rates is often ignored, says Vincent Straub, who studies men’s health and fertility at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
He is interested in the role of “male malaise” in fertility decline — the disorientation felt by young men as women gain power in society and expectations of virility and masculinity change.
This has also been called the “crisis of masculinity”, represented by the popularity of right-wing anti-feminists such as controversial influencer Andrew Tate.
“Men with less education are in a much worse situation than in previous decades,” Straub tells the BBC.
In many high- and middle-income countries, technological advances have made manual labor less valued and more precariouswhich has increased the disparity between those who have a university degree and those who do not.
It has also increased the “love gap” — and has a significant impact on men’s health.
“O substance abuse it is increasing globally, and it is higher among men of reproductive age, whether in Africa or South and Central America.”
All of this has an impact on social and biological fertility. “I feel like there is a missing link that is not being established between fertility and these types of social and cultural changes”, he says.
And this can have a fundamental impact on men’s physical and mental health. “Single men often have worse health than men who are in a relationship,” notes Straub.
“Just one in every 100 men in the European Union he interrupts his career to take care of a child; in the case of women, one in three does so”, he says. This happens despite abundant evidence that caring for a child is good for men’s health.
Through her organization Nunca Madres, Elizabeth met with some representatives from a large international bank in Mexico. They told her that despite offering six weeks of paternity leave, no man had asked for it.
“They think this It’s a woman’s joband that’s how Latin American men feel,” she says.
And the invisibility of men in fertility debates goes beyond the record. While there is more awareness today that young women need to think about declining fertility, this is not a conversation that exists among young men.
Making this invisible group visible is one way to address social infertility. Another could be the expanding the definition of paternitye.
All researchers who commented on the issue of childlessness made a point of highlighting that childless people still have a vital role to play in raising them.
This is called alloparenting by behavioral ecologists, explains Anna Rotkirch. For much of human evolution, a baby had more than a dozen caregivers.
“I think most people without children are actually involved in this type of care, it’s just invisible,” says Rotkirch.
“It doesn’t appear on birth certificates, but it’s very important.”
