Childlessness in India: life trajectories towards a (non-)transition

Rojin Sadeghi , University of Geneva

The aim of this contribution is to better understand life trajectories of Indian women who are outside the normative framework of motherhood, and the characteristics of those women, through sequence analysis and cluster analysis. Childlessness is an important topic from a demographic, public health, social and cultural point of view. At a micro level, childlessness is seen as a (non-)transition, a crucial issue in the construction of individual life courses. In the developing world, this phenomenon has for a long time been associated with infertility, mainly linked with poverty and low reproductive health conditions, leading sometimes to social opprobrium targeting childless women, much more than men (van Balen 2000; Balen and Bos 2009). However, dynamic demographic transitions in the so-called South, including in large countries like India, have resulted in low fertility (TFR 2.2 in 2020), accompanying complex social changes occurring in cultural settings that remain highly distinct from those of the Western world. In this contribution, we analyse the National Family and Health Survey (wave 2016) to test the hypothesis that the subpopulation of childless women and their life trajectories recently became more heterogeneous. To do so, we reconstruct the sexual and relational trajectories of childless women at the time of the survey. We identify seven clusters of life trajectories leading to childlessness. Our results suggest that the normative framework around motherhood is loosening somewhat.

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 Presented in Session 58. Childlessness and parenthood in the life course