Since 2002, the percentage of women aged 15 to 44 who don’t have children grew from 40 percent to 45 percent between 2017 and 2019. 

A recent Pew Research Center survey shows that 47 percent of adults under 50 without children say they are unlikely to ever have them — a 10-percentage point increase from 2018.    

Factors expected to perpetuate this pattern include choosing not to have children, infertility and finances. About 57 percent of younger adults in the Pew survey said a major reason they will likely never have kids is that they “just don’t want to,” compared to about 31 percent of childless adults over 50.    

Alison Gemmill, assistant professor in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Hill that childlessness is a result of circumstances over choices for most U.S. adults. 

“I think life happens and there are a lot of competing things and there’s a lot of constraints, and that’s how people end up childless,” said Gemmill.   

Factors that facilitate having children — finding a partner, affording the cost childbirth and the cost of raising a child — have all become more difficult to achieve in recent years. 

The U.S., however, still has a smaller percentage of people without children when compared to other wealthy countries such as Canada, whose childlessness rate is about 80 percent higher, according to the Human Fertility Database.