Brittany Luce

I'm Brittany Luce.

Talk soon.

The American birth rate is declining, and there have been countless theories as to why that is.

But we've mostly explored the falling birth rate from the perspective of people who might otherwise want kids.

But what about people who don't want kids at all?

To get into all of this, I've got Sarah McCammon, senior fellow at Third Way, and Emma Gannon, author of the novel Olive, which explores the decision of being child-free by choice.

Emma, Sarah, welcome to It's Been a Minute.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Hello, hello.

I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

Okay, so I want to start off by defining some terms.

Like when people talk about, you know, those of us who are adults without kids, there are a couple different terms used, childless and child-free.

Sometimes in other media, I'll see those terms used interchangeably, although they're definitely not the same thing.

Childless implies that being a non-parent may be a matter of circumstance.

Like maybe you wanted kids, but it didn't work out.

But the term child-free is much more rooted in the choice to be a non-parent.

That's the group of people we'll be discussing today.

So for the purposes of this conversation, I will be going forward using the term child-free.

So I just want to ground that for everybody watching and listening.