Grief over not having children (involuntary childlessness)
Grief over children wanted and never had, through infertility, failed treatment, illness, the loss of a partner, or a life that never offered the chance. The loss has no date and no body, it is often mixed with years of hope, and a world organized around families may not see it as a loss at all.
What drives it
Hope and grief run together for years: each cycle or each relationship is another chance, so the grief can start in earnest only when the hope ends, and sometimes it never clearly ends. Useful for identification because the grief has few rituals, returns at other people’s milestones, and seems to weigh more while the wish for a child stays active.
How it shows
Work
Being the one expected to cover the holidays ‘since you don’t have kids’. A pregnancy announcement in the team chat, and a smile that takes the rest of the day to hold. Pouring into work what had been saved for a family.
Relationships
Friends whose weekends moved to school runs and birthday parties, and invitations that thin out. A couple in which one partner has made peace and the other hasn’t. Relatives who ask ‘any news?’ at every gathering, and then one day stop asking.
Self
Notice the numbers you still count: the cycle, your age, the year you told yourself was the last chance. Notice how you answer ‘do you have kids?’ and what follows in your head. Notice whether this grief feels allowed to you.
What tells it apart
Grief after miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death: Perinatal loss grieves a particular baby who died. Involuntary childlessness may include such losses and more likely centers on a whole life that did not happen, with no single child to mourn.
Envy: Pain at a friend’s pregnancy can feel like envy. When it comes with longing and sorrow more than a wish for the friend to lose what they have, grief more likely describes it.
Chronic sorrow and nonfinite loss (Olshansky): Both come back at milestones. Chronic sorrow centers on a loss that is present and continuing, such as a child’s disability, and involuntary childlessness on a child who never arrived, though the way it returns may look alike.
A test
Ask the person when they stopped hoping, or whether they have. If grief comes in waves at other people’s milestones and there is no clear point where the hope ended, the pain may be grief for a future, carried without the recognition other losses get.
Questions to carry
- When the last announcement came, what did I feel before I put the smile on?
- What am I still waiting for, and have I let myself say so?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
moderate. In a random sample of 580 Midwestern women (McQuillan, Greil, White and Jacob, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003), about a third had experienced infertility, most of them later had children, and those who stayed childless showed substantially more distress. A review of 9 quantitative studies (9,052 people in 8 countries) and 9 qualitative ones (Gameiro and Finnigan, Human Reproduction Update, 2017) found that people whose fertility treatment failed had worse mental health and well-being than people whose treatment worked, with medium and small-to-medium differences across follow-ups of 1 to 20 years. In the qualitative studies, adjustment tended to improve with time, and people who accepted the situation and took up new goals did better. Fourteen Swedish women interviewed 20 years after unsuccessful treatment (Wirtberg and colleagues, Human Reproduction, 2007) all described childlessness as a major theme of their lives, about half had separated from their partner, and the loss came back as their friends became grandparents. Most of this research is on people who had fertility treatment, so it says less about people childless through circumstance.
Where it comes from
Barbara Eck Menning, who founded the support group RESOLVE in Massachusetts in 1974, and The emotional needs of infertile couples, Fertility and Sterility, 1980. Julia McQuillan and Arthur Greil, 2003. Sofia Gameiro and Amy Finnigan, 2017