Do people naturally want children and large families?
The Claim
Birthgap says…
“When it comes to this crisis, if we were able to re-engineer our societies to reduce unplanned childlessness… many more people would go on to have one, two, three, four or more children just like parents naturally do.”
(Birthgap Part 3, 44:51)
The Reality
There is no evidence that people naturally desire a specific number of children. Meanwhile, cultural norms and pressures play a huge role in influencing how many children, if any, women have. Evidence to date suggests that social engineering to increase fertility rates does not produce the intended results. While Birthgap repeatedly invokes the “crisis” of unplanned childlessness using an inaccurate definition and unreliable statistics, it does not acknowledge the longstanding crisis of forced pregnancy and birth, which impacts hundreds of millions of girls and women globally.
The claim is false.
The Research
There is no evidence of an innate desire to have children or “natural” fertility for human beings. While natural selection may favor a sexual urge leading to reproduction, there is no universal natural desire to reproduce (Elgar, 2015).
Nearly half of all pregnancies each year worldwide are unintended – an estimated 257 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are unable to do so. This is due to a lack of access to modern contraception, abortion care and contraceptive counseling and pressures that societies place on women and girls to become mothers, which often include sexual violence and reproductive coercion (United Nations, 2022c).
Pronatalism – the pressure to bear children – is a globally pervasive phenomenon, and ranges from familial pressures for children or grandchildren, to religious mandates for large families, to political restrictions on reproductive healthcare services and abortion. Women without children face enormous stigma in most cultures that can include domestic abuse, divorce, and social ostracisation (Bajaj & Stade, 2023).
Reproductive decisions are greatly influenced by cultural norms and expectations, and preferences for family size tend to conform to average family size in the community. Norms for children and large families are often enforced through stigmatization and other punishments for those who do not conform (Dasgupta & Dasgupta, 2017).