Understanding of women childless by circumstance needed

Greater understanding of women childless by circumstance needed

January 16, 2015

A University of Canterbury sociology graduate researcher has identified a need for a greater understanding of the ways unintended childlessness impacts on women’s lives.

Dr Lois Tonkin, who graduated before Christmas, says the number of circumstantially childless women who have left it too late to have children is rising markedly in many western nations, yet the situation is not well understood.

“It is impossible to establish statistically how many women are circumstantially childless. In New Zealand, these women are statistically invisible. Childlessness in women aged 40 has increased from less than one percent of women born in 1936 to almost 10 per cent of women born in 1965 and data indicates that this figure will rise to 25 percent for those born in 1975.

“There is no distinction made between those who are childless by decision and those who feel the decision was taken for them by circumstances. My PhD thesis looked at the experiences of 26 circumstantially childless New Zealand women in their 30s and 40s.

“They were women who expected to have children but found themselves at the end of their natural fertility without having done so. I looked at their loss and grieving and their adaptation of their dreams of motherhood.

“Some may have chosen to travel and work overseas or prioritised training or education before they had children and found themselves out of fertility time. Some may not have met someone they wanted to have a child with, or the person they chose may have been unwilling to become a parent with them.

“They may have taken time to establish a career they can come back to after having children, and find themselves with age-related infertility. They are in the unusual—but not uncommon—position of being neither voluntarily childless nor involuntarily childless. Their childlessness is not an active choice they have made but more an unexpected consequence of other choices.”

Tonkin’s interest in the topic initially arose out of her role as a counsellor with a particular expertise in issues of loss and grief. She worked with several women who were circumstantially childless.

She received a Top Achievers Doctoral Scholarship from the Government and was supervised by Associate Professor Rosemary Du Plessis. During the course of her project she spent three months as a visiting academic fellow at Birkbeck, University of London.

“Circumstantially childless women’s grieving is often triggered by times, people, things and places that symbolise motherhood for them. Family times such as Christmas and Mothers’ Day were often spoken of as particularly difficult times. Many talked about how being around pregnant women, small children and families was often unbearable for them and they avoided them where possible.

“My study participants said they felt misunderstood, judged, unacknowledged, ignored and isolated by others around them. Many talked about feeling like a failure and as if they did not belong in the social world around them. But my research showed that over a long period of time circumstantially childless women found other creative ways of being a ‘mother’ in the world,” Dr Tonkin says.

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