Childlessness in contemporary Polish society and its determinants

Abstract

It is commonly said that Poland is experiencing a demographic crisis. Consequently, the issue of childlessness and its determinants is increasingly being addressed in the literature. This article focuses on the determinants of childlessness primarily from a sociological perspective, while also considering other perspectives deemed necessary from a substantive viewpoint. These determinants are categorized into: objective (independent of the individual’s will – biological childlessness, i.e., involuntary), subjective (individual – resulting from personal decisions – the individual’s free will), and ambivalent (subjective-objective, e.g., restrictive abortion laws that hinder an individual’s decision regarding procreation). Given that the decision to procreate primarily belongs to a woman but undeniably concerns both women and men, statistics on childlessness over the years both among individuals in marriages and those living in heterosexual informal relationships are presented. Regarding objective factors, it refers to biological childlessness; subjective factors represent the individual’s personal choice, their free will (childfree); ambivalent factors, according to Anthony Giddens’s terminology, are the result of individual life plans of each spouse/partner considered in a macrostructural context.