Narrations of non-motherhood: how context shapes what it means to be childless in the United States and Japan

Abstract In our era of low fertility rates, much research has examined factors behind delayed childbearing and childlessness. While scholars emphasize the role of macro-level context in constraining reproductive decision-making, less attention has been paid to how context shapes what it means, subjectively, to remain childless today. For women, whose childlessness has long been theorized as a deviant, stigmatized identity, this question is especially salient. Drawing on 157 interviews with non-m