Childlessness in the Age of Communication

Front matter

Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness

CHILDLESSNESS IN THE AGE OF COMMUNICATION

DECONSTRUCTING SILENCE

Contents

List of figures Author biography Preface Acknowledgements

Introduction: breaking the silence

PARTI

PART II Life journeys

Folder 1 “About me”?

Folder 2 Relationships

Folder 3 Identity

Folder 4 Objects and the body

Folder 5 Media, social wallpaper, and the cycle of silence Folder 6 Narratives I: an old story begins to fall apart

Folder 7 Politics: or why childlessness is everyone’s business Folder 8 Narratives II: what it takes to weave a new story Conclusion: roadmap for the foreseeable futures

Appendix: methodology

Index

176 203 214 228 247 251

Figures

2.3.1 E-receipt

2.3.2 Childless and childfree role models

2.3.3 Fellow (metal) travel companions

2.4.1 Edvard Munch (1894). Madonna

2.5.1 Drawing based on a Norwegian magazine’s cover (Innsikt, March 2017)

2.6.1 The Queen’s speech

2.7.1 ‘In the future it is him who will ensure you get a worthy old age’

2.8.1 On the way to the Fortellerfestivalen

2.8.2 Tweet attack

2.8.3 The new mountain bikes

2.8.4 Trees on cliffs

2.8.5 My feet

2.8.6 The stage after the last performance

A.l Mapping silence: a first draft

57 142 148 150 172

176 211

Author biography

Cristina Archetti is Professor of Political Communication and Journalism at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of three books: Explaining news: National politics and journalistic cultures in global context (Palgrave, 2010); Understanding terrorism in the age of global media: A communication approach (Palgrave, 2012); and Politicians, personal image and the construction of political identity: A comparative study of the UK and Italy (Palgrave, 2014). She won the 2008 Denis McQuail Award for innovating communication theory.

Although the topics Cristina works on at any single time might appear completely different—they are, in many respects, accidents of life and circumstances—she is, in reality, always addressing the multifaceted intersection between communication, politics, and society, particularly questions of theory and method: How do we explain the mediated reality we live in? How and why do we know what we know? She has written about: the relationship between political actors and journalists; international news and foreign correspondence; public diplomacy; strategic communication; and terrorism, the media, and radicalization. She is currently exploring the role of creative practices, including evocative writing, poetry, and performance, in research.

Cristina has founded in 2019 the first Norwegian organization for the permanently childless: Andre Veier-Foreningen for permanent barnløse [Other ways — Association for the permanently childless].

Preface

28 May 2016, Stockholm. A woman out of place

She is a strange mixture of aggressiveness and shyness. She wears a tight red jacket, black trousers and low-heel black boots, minimal jewellery—two sparkly dots on her earlobes, barely visible under her dark, long hair. She is slim, moves fast and energetically, springing up from her seat when the presenter announces she is going to talk next, keeping her eyes to the ground while she moves to the front of the room, towards a high table with a laptop. Her presentation is already on the screen. She looks at the small audience in front of her, mainly women, some couples sitting at the back, guarded by empty seats on either side. She smiles at them while clutching tightly her papers and a pencil, the other hand holding her forearm. Maybe she is a bit nervous. So is the audience, slightly shifting in their chairs. She turns to the side to quickly say ‘thank you for the kind introduction’ to the presenter. She puts the papers and pencil on the table. If they were notes it’s not clear why she brought them, since she is not even looking at them. She takes a deep breath, then begins to talk.

‘I feel a bit like an intruder today because I am not a fertility expert. I have no medical background,’ she says almost apologetically. ‘Just the other day I was at a conference talking about social media and extremism. It is slightly disorienting now being at this event.” She makes another pause to inhale with her mouth, as if, despite the microphone on her lapel, she had been shouting at the top of her lungs and the few words she said had absorbed all oxygen in the room.

‘At the same time I am delighted to contribute to this event because this is a topic very close to my heart,’ she looks down, then her eyes seem to search for somebody in the small crowd. They stop when they find Anita Malmros. Anita is a therapist and spoke earlier about what happens in a woman’s mind when her expectations about motherhood are not fulfilled. Anita is now sitting with her listeners.

The speaker’s eyes seem to sparkle lightly, her shoulders relax, as if reassured, when Anita’s gaze meets hers. ‘A topic I felt I wanted to talk about, indeed I needed to talk about,’ she continues. ‘I even recently started doing research about it. This is my way to deal with problems: if they become an object of research maybe I can manage to create some distance from them.’ Her xiv Preface voice trembles slightly, as if her completely still appearance was hiding a struggle the audience senses, but is not able to see. ‘I felt I really needed this because this issue was overwhelming me,’ she holds in her palm her other closed hand, gently, as if cradling a heart that has fallen out of place. The audience has stopped moving. They know what is happening: the speaker is fighting against a throat that wants her to stop talking and start crying. Anita smiles imperceptibly and nods in approval, not letting the speaker’s eyes go, encouraging her to continue, as if she was visually leading her by the hand. The speaker nods back, her lips sealed, slowly exhaling, as if this required an effort. This inconspicuous, barely perceptible movement has the power to contain and send back into her depths a dark tide that had begun to surge and threatened to flood out. ‘I thought “I need to face this in the open.”’ Her voice is firm again, her eyes determined. ‘It is painful, but I know that something good is going to come out of it.’

This talking woman is me. It is Saturday, 28 May 2016, the day before Mother’s Day in Sweden. I am guest speaker at a Childless Day event arranged by the organization Barnidngtan, a Swedish association for the involuntary childless in Stockholm. I have been asked to talk about my experience. ‘But what shall I say?’ I remember asking, incredulous at the invitation I had just received. ‘Just tell your story,’ said Linda Malm with her eternally smiling voice. This is the fourth such arrangement Barnldngtan has organized. We are at a hotel in the hip area of Södermalm. From here, this morning, while having breakfast in a cloud of cinnamon scent, I could see the dome of the venue where just a couple of weeks ago the country hosted the Eurovision song contest. My academic expertise is in politics and media. I never decided not to have children. I am not infertile either. How did I get here?

Acknowledgements

Words are often inadequate to fully express what we experience. Communicating gratitude is no exception. “Lingering angora sleeves”: that warmth and everso-slight pressure of a caress around the shoulders that turns into strength, reassurance that you are being loved and appreciated, encouragement. This is what I feel when I think of Robin, my husband. He is the most solid person I have ever encountered. We are survivors and veterans of the same war. He fought by my side. We shared both the pain and the adventure of the conflict. He watched my back, took care of me, always found the time to discuss this book, read its multiple drafts, even when it was painful, and provide honest feedback. I still have his words printed out on a sheet on my wall: ‘Of course you will make it!’ (24 July 2017). Wherever our paths will lead us in the future—even if they parted—the bond between us will remain unshakeable.

I did not really talk about my book with my family—my parents, my sister Sonia, and my brothers Marco and Emanuele—until late in the process, when the first draft was complete. They made a difference, though, for simply being that safety net which, I knew without a doubt, would catch me without fail.

The community gathered around the online event World Childless Week, particularly the Childless Champions, supported me by becoming “my tribe” and helping me realize that the issues raised by involuntary childlessness matter to a growing amount of men and women globally: Stephanie Joy Phillips, Berenice Smith, Jody Day, Vicky Page, Michael Hughes, Lesley Pyne. Among them special thanks go to friends Linda Malm—your invitation to Stockholm in 2016 started it all!—and Robin Hadley—for invariably appearing during my darkest hour with humour and a positive message.

Among the “Oslo home-crowd,” tusen hjertelig takk to Hilde Haug for her friendship; Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk for the artistic inspiration; Mette Kaaby for giving me the opportunity to experiment with performance at the Fortellerfestivalen/The Norwegian Storytelling Festival; all my colleagues at IMK (Institutt for medier og kommunikasjon/nstitute of media and communication) at the University of Oslo.

From further afield, thanks to Amanda Brouwers (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) for reading the manuscript (at a stage when it was much longer) and providing helpful comments; and to the “creative family”’— xvi Acknowledgements particularly Johana KotiSova (Masaryk University, Czechia) and Ana Serrano Telleria (University of Castilla La Mancha, Spain)—for being dreamers like me, for saying “yes” to trying anything new, and sharing the belief that creativity plays an essential role in research.

Many more are mentioned in the manuscript and will recognize themselves in the story. Thanks to all for sharing my journey—or, as the Norwegians would say, takk for turen!

Introduction

Breaking the silence

COLLEAGUE: What are you working on at the moment?

ME: I am doing research on media and involuntary childlessness.

COLLEAGUE: [hesitant] Child-what?

ME: I am doing interviews with people who do not have children to see, for example, what media they consume and whether they try and connect online with individuals in similar circumstances.

COLLEAGUE: I see, people who don’t want to have children. Why ...

ME: [interrupting] No, I said “involuntary childlessness”: it involves people who do not have children, but they have not chosen that.

COLLEAGUE: [looks puzzled]

How do you introduce a book about a condition most people do not even know exists?

Untold stories

I started researching about involuntary childlessness because I have a direct experience of it. My husband and I were, a few years ago, diagnosed with “unexplained infertility.” This means that, according to our medical tests, there appear to be no physical or biological obstacles to conceiving with either of us, yet we do not get pregnant and medicine cannot explain why.

I started researching about involuntary childlessness also because, as a communication scholar, I was intrigued. As I found out, on average, one adult woman in five and one adult man in four in the Western world do not have children, mostly as a result of infertility (Kreyenfeld and Konietzka 2016b). Infertility is broadly defined as ‘the inability to conceive after one year of regular unprotected intercourse’ (Quaas and Dokras 2008: 70; see also Larsen 2005). Despite being convinced, at that time, that we had to be an extremely rare case, I learned that 15 per cent of all couples suffer from this condition (Agarwal et al. 2015: 1), 15 to 30 per cent of them affected, precisely like us, by an unexplained form of it (Quaas and Dokras 2008: 69).

What was most surprising for me was the number of individuals affected by involuntary childlessness, either as a result of medical issues or myriad reasons

DOI: 10.4324/9780367810399-0 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

often referred to as “social infertility” (Berrington 2016: 58): being single, the death of a partner, having been ill during fertile years, not being able to afford fertility treatments, among many other possibilities. To make some concrete examples, in Germany, between 1.2 and 1.5 million couples are unable to conceive (Diedrich 2008, cited in Trappe 2016: 281)—we are thus talking about between 2.4 and 3 million adults in that country alone. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) reports ‘approximately 3.5 million people’ having difficulties getting pregnant (NHS 2017). Worldwide, this extends to an estimated 144.8 million people (Boivin et al. 2007: 1509).' By contrast, individuals who identify as transgender account for about 0.6 per cent of the population (Flores et al. 2016: 2). In the US (my range of examples from here onward is limited by the availability of the data), a country of over 328 million—four times the population size of Germany and five times the inhabitants of the UK (United States Census 2018)—this means about 1.4 million people (Flores et al. 2016: 2). Why was I aware (rightly so) of the struggle and needs of transgender people, but had never heard about, not even about their very existence, of the involuntary childless?

Although “1 in 5” (Non-Moms 2016; Day, cited in Marsh 2017) is a catchy expression to give an immediate sense of the scope of the phenomenon, a closer look at the statistics reveals an even broader, yet hidden, reality. According to a report by the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) (Beaujouan et al. 2017: 4), up to a quarter of women born in the 1970s in Southern Europe are expected to remain childless. The proportion of women aged 45 to 49 who, in 2013, lived without children was 37.15 per cent in Germany, 23.57 per cent in Italy, and 32.33 per cent in the UK (OECD 2015: 5). In the US, the share of childless women aged 40 to 44 settled at around 15 per cent during the period 2006 to 2010 (Frejka 2016: 167). In Finland, 20 per cent of women aged 40 to 45 do not have a child of their own (Rotkirch and Miettinen 2016: 140). In The Netherlands ‘one in every five individuals’ remains childless (Keizer 2010: 19). In Japan, the childless rate for women born in the 1970s is 27 per cent (The Economist 2017). According to a report by the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare, based on current fertility rates, 26 per cent of Australian women are expected to remain childless by the end of their reproductive life (Ford et al. 2002: 29). When it comes to men, 24 per cent of Norwegian males born in the 1970s will never become fathers (Bye 2018: 7). This is in stark contrast to the rate of childless women born in that country during the same period: 13 per cent (Bye 2018: 6). In Finland, the proportion of childless men (aged 40 to 45) is 25 per cent (Rotkirch and Miettinen 2016: 140). The rate is above 23 per cent also in Italy, Germany, the UK, and the Czech Republic (Prag et al. 2017: 8).

The great majority of these individuals are childless neither because they don’t want to have children nor because they are barren, but by circumstance. According to Renske Keizer, who conducted a study about the causes and consequences of childlessness in The Netherlands (Keizer 2010), the childless-by-circumstance amount to around 80 per cent of the whole childless cohort—about 10 per cent having deliberately chosen not to have children, another 10 per cent being outright infertile (Keizer, in NWO 2010).? The proportion of childless-by-circumstance, however, depending on which figures we examine and gender, could be higher. According to Eva Beaujouan et al. (2017: 4) only 3 to 5 per cent of women in countries as diverse as France and the US ever decide not to have children.* In Nordic countries the percentage is even lower: in Finland, for instance, it is 1 to 3 per cent (Ruokolainen and Notkola, in Tanturri et al. 2015: 33; Rotkirch and Miettinen 2016: 153). To make the point that the rise of childlessness is not the result of a preference for the ‘childfree lifestyle,’ Anna Rotkirch and Anneli Miettinen (2016: 152) even point out that, in the sample investigated by Eurobarometer 2011 (Testa 2011), ‘0% of the women aged 25-54 said their ideal number of children was to have none.’ Equally few are the individuals who cannot have children owing to physical impairments: again according to Beaujouan and her colleagues (2017: 4), 2 to 4 per cent of women are sterile. In this perspective, the rates of female childlessness-by-circumstance could gravitate more towards 90 per cent of all women without children.

Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) cannot always help. To start with, its effectiveness varies considerably with age: ‘The likelihood of a pregnancy following ART is about 27% per cycle after age 35 and it declines to 15% per cycle at age 40’ (Beier et al. 2012, in Trappe 2016: 279).* Patrick Prag and others (2017: 29), in examining ART across Europe, refer to a (lower) ‘chance of around ten per cent for a successful birth in some treatments such as IVF’ for women ‘40 and older.’ Georgina Chambers (2017: n.p.) summarizes the findings of an Australian study run by the National Perinatal Epidemiology and Statistics Unit at the University of New South Wales (Harris et al. 2016). She points out that ‘[o]verall, for women starting IVF, 33% have a baby as a result of their first cycle, increasing to 54—77% by the eighth cycle’ (Chambers 2017: n.p.). The flip side of her statement, which few notice, is that 67 per cent of women starting IVF will not have a baby as a result of their first cycle, and 46 to 23 per cent (note how wide this range is to account for outcomes becoming considerably poorer as the age of the patient increases) will still not have one by the time they have gone through their eighth cycle.

I realize that, for anyone who has not directly undergone IVF, these are just empty numbers that can be placed neither on any meaningful experiential frame nor time horizon. That is one of the problems with understanding: as I have realized when investigating this topic, I can communicate facts and figures, talk about them for hours, but until one can relate to them through a shared experience and actually feel something hearing them, then they just slide through the attention spans, like ads for products one does not need. Later I will examine in detail, through my own personal story, what it means and how it feels to go through ART, trying to create this experiential bridge with the reader, but for now, even for those who do manage to get pregnant, fertility treatments come at an extremely expensive emotional and physical price, beyond the financial one (when this is not supported, usually for a limited amount of attempts, by a national health service). Trying to get pregnant, from that joyous time filled with expectation it is imagined, even expected, to be, turns into despair, isolation, a sense that life is indefinitely on hold (Bassin 2001; for a couple of examples of life-stories that share the same suffering, despite ending differently, see Hepburn (2014) and Akerman (2014)). Not surprisingly, there are also many individuals undergoing treatment—those who fall into that previously mentioned “23 to 46 per cent” crack of probability—who, even after years of attempts, will never see a successful outcome. Thirty to 40 per cent of couples undergoing treatment will leave without a child (Volgsten et al. 2010: 1291).

Presenting the figures from a slightly different perspective, according to a study carried out in The Netherlands, 4 per cent of all couples who want children, in the end, will remain childless (Lechner et al. 2007: 288). Most would expect them to adopt. For many this is not possible because they are too old, not in a relationship, or they might not qualify under a whole checklist of other requirements: because one has had cancer (as in the case of one of the interviewees in my study), or one’s body mass index is too high (Carter 2009; see also Barford 2016). According to a report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Jones 2008: 1), 26 per cent of American women aged 40 to 44 who underwent fertility treatment ended up adopting a child. This shows, by contrast, the considerable proportion of individuals who do not adopt. Adoption, surrogacy, or egg donation (whether this egg will “implant” and lead to a “live birth”—get a sense of the jargon—is a whole separate story), among some of the possible options, may not be solutions that are affordable, desirable, or ethically acceptable to everyone.

Forming a family and having children is a rite of passage and the tacitly agreed social hallmark of what it means to be a realized individual and have a fulfilling life. Anne Lise Ellingszeter and others (2013: 175) find, in a study of the social meaning of children across France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Italy that ‘childbearing is strongly associated with the idea of adulthood, which [...] rests on the perceptions of economic risk and trust in taking responsibility for a child’ (see also Jensen 2016: 202—203). Even medical academic articles on fertility, to frame the importance of the subject, tend to start with a statement that reminds the reader of the uncontested social value of family. In one of the many examples I could provide, Jacky Boivin and her colleagues write (Boivin et al. 2007: 1506): ‘Parenthood is undeniably one of the most universally desired goals in adulthood, and most people have life plans that include children.’

What happens, then, when the “family dream” does not materialize at all? What do you do, how do you feel, when a life-project, which for many is also one’s life-purpose, cannot be realized?° None of this, among the confetticlouded baby achievements celebrated in the media, ever seeps into the public realm, but for isolated voices that quickly get forgotten, perhaps precisely because they raise scenarios that are so uncomfortable and painful to even think of. Effectively, there are millions of individuals across the world whose life-stories are never told. Who are they? Why do we never see them or hear about their experiences? And most importantly, what is life like from their perspective?

This book deals with this hidden side of involuntary childlessness. It makes the point that this is not just about “not having the baby”: that is “only” the starting point. There is far more that we need to talk about and that affects the involuntary childless in the long term: suffering, mental and physical health issues, social isolation, discrimination, invisibility, and, as a result of it, nonrepresentation and lack of support.

A personal and a public issue

This book is both a diary and an analysis: a first-person reflection on a journey through the existential questions posed by involuntary childlessness, but also a readable account of the way the shame and silence that surround this topic are socially and politically constructed.

As an analysis it addresses the questions: How do we explain the silence about childlessness in the age of ubiquitous communication? It is not possible to answer this question unless we address a second one: What does it mean and how does it feel not to have children in a society that is organized around families? The book is also a writing experiment: How do we uncover the stories that are silenced? How to tell the stories that are written in our bodies? How to communicate what cannot be conveyed by words?

As a diary, this book is the story of how my life began to fall apart, despite having moved to Norway to get my dream job, having been promoted to Professor within six months of arriving in the country, being by all accounts a “successful” academic. It fell apart, piece by piece, like fragments of the arctic pack being hacked at by the sun and gradually released into the sea. A peculiar kind of tearing apart, as if reality was imploding, progressively drained of the meanings and reference points I used to know. A crumbling so slow, yet fundamental, like a shifting of life’s tectonic plates, that it escapes comprehension and makes it unfeasible to get a grip on. One can clear the rubble that follows an explosion, but what do you do when there is no more solid ground, you feel you are in a free fall, and have lost your sense of direction?

Not having children has to do with this. But to what extent, how, and why are the questions I am trying to find an answer to. I have never really wanted a baby, so why am I upset at not being able to have one? Far from being a mere issue of frustrated (supposedly) maternal instincts, I realize that the progressive loss of gravity in my life has many roots—lines of enquiry I want to investigate more closely: taken-for-granted expectations, often smiling at me with white teeth from magazines and milk cartons, about what having a “fulfilled life” means; blurred images of myself as a mother in some undefined projected future that have been in the back of my mind since I was a little girl (who placed them there?); my ego’s refusal to admit its own mortality; the belief in my own perfection, cultivated through decades of training and a near-obsession for nutrition, contradicted by the evidence that I am an ageing and malfunctioning body; anger at the (Neoliberal? Feminist?) broken promise—exposed as a great lie—that I “could have it all”; the practical questions that make my chest shrink at night:

Who shall I leave my wedding ring to when I die? What reason would I have to live if my husband, my job, or both were taken from me? Will artificial intelligence have progressed enough (more realistically, will my pension suffice) for me to have a robotic carer when I am old? What will be left of me after I am gone?

So, although I went through some form of ART treatment, this is not “another book about IVF.” It is about the experience of not having children. Yet, it is not primarily about the absence of children. It is rather about the pervasiveness of childlessness and how it affects every fibre of one’s being, thinking, behaviour, way of relating to others, and reading the world around. It is about what it means to be a woman—in fact whether one feels like one at all—in a world designed for mothers, fathers, and children. It is about how this experience has sparked an existential crisis that has grown, from the boundaries of my own individual experience, into much broader reflections: about history, the future, what keeps us together as a society, inclusion and alienation, who defines what is “normal” and what constitutes “happiness,” whether women can ever be equal to men, the purpose of life.

Aims of the book I: documenting childlessness

Most would think that being involuntarily childless, especially for a woman, is a heart-breaking experience. It is. And it is not. You might be surprised, but most of the time I am happy. My husband and I would have liked, after all, to have a child of our own and did not succeed. But my point is that “not having the baby” is neither the worst nor the most interesting aspect of this experience. It is the anger, the guilt, the incomprehensible—yet disconcertedly real in its tsunami-like solidity—grief that hits you without warning about the loss of a person who neither died nor lived. It is about being constantly confronted with the enormity of the consequences of not having a child. This book is about this everything else.

My aim is to offer a fly-on-the-wall view of what it is like to be childless by circumstance.° I will return to this in the chapters to follow, but I just want to make clear here that I reject the rigid distinction between voluntary and involuntary childlessness. I agree with Gayle Letherby (2002: 8) on the fact that we should rather be talking of a ‘continuum of childlessness.’ I have to use these terms here, reluctantly, because this is part of the way the dominant discourse in our society categorizes the world of a (growing) minority it does not really know much about.

The “childlessness” territory is, in fact, a definitional minefield. To begin with, figures are difficult to interpret and compare due to the fact that fertility does not have a definite cut-off point. As an OECD report (2015: 1) underlines, ‘[d]efinitive childlessness can only be assessed at the end of the reproductive period, which for women is usually between ages 45 and 49.’ This biological window, in turn, leads to uncertainties around categories and their boundaries— who is “childless” and when? Dudley Poston and Cristina Elizabeth Cruz (2016: 84) poignantly capture the nature of the problem:

The temporarily childless [practically all of us at some point in our lives] are [...] enigmatic. They will eventually join the ranks of the voluntary childless, the involuntary childless, or the childed [...] no one knows for certain which group they will join, irrespective of their childbearing intentions.

Ultimately, as the same authors point out, it is impossible to place anyone into the appropriate category unless a researcher knows in detail about an individual’s health, motives, and aspirations—information that can only be accessed through in-depth personal questionnaires (Veevers (1972), in Poston and Cruz 2016: 84). Figures, which tend to be harvested through surveys of large populations, tend thus inevitably to reflect to a lesser or greater extent estimates, projections, approximations. And on top of that they are difficult to read, interpret, and compare across national contexts because not all countries collect the same information, according to the same criteria, to the same standards (Tanturri et al. 2015: 13).

There are of course (few) individuals who have decided that they will never have children and they will stay true to their word and be content with it—they are often referred to in research, among the ‘voluntarily childless,’ as ‘early articulators’ (Poston and Cruz 2016: 77). They often refer to themselves, to emphasize the positive and desirable aspects of not having children, as “childfree” (see e.g. The Childfree Choice n.d.). But mapping the landscape of the remaining “childless,” those who did not want to be without children, is challenging. A quick look at the range of terms used by researchers reveals the ambivalence in between the two extremes of “wanting” and “not wanting.” Prag and others (2017: 17), for example, talk about ‘persistent childless’ (individuals who want to remain childless) and ‘unconvinced childless’ (childless intending to have children in the future). Maria Letizia Tanturri et al. (2015: 35) refer to “permanent postponers,’ who are not against having a child but who keep on delaying the transition to parenthood, and ‘relinquished parents,’ people who would have liked to have children, but no longer intend to have any. These last terms underline how, what were initially intended behaviours—like delaying giving birth as part of family planning—might turn into involuntary outcomes— not being able to conceive because, among many other possible reasons, it might be too late or becoming a parent is no longer either viable or desirable.’ ‘Prescribed childlessness’ also refers to yet an alternative scenario: ‘the case of nonheterosexual people who are excluded from artificial insemination and joint adoption possibilities’ (Tanturri et al. 2015: 40-41). In addition to this, even being childfree does not mean not being involved in the care, upbringing, and mentoring of others’ children (Letherby 2002; Notkin 2014; MacNicol 2018). The status of parent is not necessarily incompatible with being childless either: ‘empty nest parents’ are those whose children no longer live at home (Keizer 2010: 31); ‘estranged parents’ have no contact with their adult children for many possible reasons, such as family dispute (Hadley 2018a: 76); ‘childless parents’ are people whose children have died or live far away (ibid.).