(RoyalPatriot.com )- According to the findings of a recent survey, most American people who have decided not to have children did so early in their lives.
Researchers from Michigan State University selected childfree people for a study that was eventually published in the journal Scientific Reports by utilizing data from a sample of 1,500 adults who had previously completed MSU’s State of the State Survey.
The researchers used three specific questions to discriminate between those who did not have children and those who did not desire children. They went on to say that it usually is challenging to examine groups of individuals using traditional data, and one of the groups that are difficult to investigate is that of people who do not want children.
They discovered that 21.6% of polled individuals, which is equivalent to around 1.7 million people, did not wish to have children, making them childfree. About 3.6 percent of respondents indicated they were already certain before age ten that they did not want children.
According to Jennifer Watling Neal, associate professor in the psychology department at Michigan State University and co-author of the study, people — especially women — who say they don’t want children are often told that they’ll change their mind, but the study found otherwise.
People are deciding to forego having children earlier than in the past, typically in their teen years or early twenties. And it’s not only young individuals who say they don’t want kids—people of all ages are making the claim. Women who decided to remain childfree when they were teenagers are now, on average, over 40 years old and do not have any children.
Watling Neal stated that the study’s conclusions would translate to between fifty and sixty million Americans not having children because of the parallels between the population of Michigan and the population of the United States.
According to some researchers’ findings, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade already posed a threat to the safety of women who had chosen not to have children.
According to Watling Neal, Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court, many Americans are now at risk of being compelled to have children even though they do not want them.
