Childless-by-circumstance: is it different for men?

Hadley, Robin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4254-7648 (2013) Childless-by-circumstance: is it different for men? ReValuing Care Research Network Blog.

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Abstract

The grief, and stereotypes, that childless-by-circumstance women experience were movingly described by Jody Day (http://gateway-women.com/) on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on the 1st of October, 2013 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01hvg7l). During the programme, I tweeted that men are also childless-by-circumstance, and this was acknowledged by the host, who went on to suggest that, ‘The stereotypes don’t so easily attach themselves to men do they?’ Jody, to her credit, speculated that although men had a similar emotional journey as women it was a different one. The problem identified here relates to the heteronormative pronatalist view that ‘mothering’ and ‘nurturing’ are the ‘ideal’ default positions for women, while ‘virility’ and ‘providing’ are those for men. Women who do not conform, such as the voluntarily*1 and involuntarily* childless, are subject to a range of reactions from sympathy to antipathy. Moreover, the former tend to be viewed with less sympathy than the latter (Brescoll and Uhlman, 2005).