Are People with Disabilities Less Likely to Have Children? Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

Background and Purpose: Although there has been a growing attention to parents with disabilities, there is still scant information about this area, including basic demographics. People with disabilities have historically faced many barriers to achieving reproductive freedom, ranging from forced birth control to forced sterilization to termination of parental rights of their newborns. While social work researchers have recently been documenting the lack of appropriate social work services and supports for parents with disabilities, we still do not know what proportions of people with lifelong disabilities actually have children. To address this gap, the study used the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to investigate what proportions of people with lifelong disabilities have children, and if they are less likely to have children compared to people without lifelong disabilities.

Methods: This secondary data analysis utilized data from Wave 9 to Wave 12 of the HRS. The sample size of the current study is 22,937. Among them, 3,098 respondents experienced childhood health conditions and/or disabilities that can lead to lifelong disabilities. We used descriptive statistics to explore the different types of childhood health conditions and/or disability of parents with disabilities. We also conducted logistic regression analyses to explore the odds of having children between people with lifelong disabilities and people without lifelong disabilities and the odds of having children between people with multiple lifelong disabilities and people with one lifelong disability, controlling for gender, income, wealth, race, and years of education.

Results: Our preliminary findings demonstrated that about 15% of people with lifelong disabilities never had a child. Moreover, the difference in the odds of having children between people with lifelong disabilities and people without lifelong disabilities was significant. People with lifelong disabilities were 21% less likely to have at least one child compared to people without lifelong disabilities (p < .001). When the control variables were added to the logistic regression model, the difference remained significant (odds ratio = 0.83, p < .01). There was also a difference in the odds of having children between people with one disability and people with multiple disabilities when controlling for gender, income, wealth, race, and years of education (p <.05). People with one disability were 32% more likely to have children compared to people with multiple disabilities.

Conclusions and implications: There are two key findings from our study. First, as people with lifelong disabilities are less likely to become parents, they might be experiencing a range of barriers to becoming parents, with requires future exploration. Second, despite their lower numbers, this national sample shows that a sizeable percentage of people with lifelong disabilities do become parents, which suggests that social workers in the areas of disabilities and child welfare need to pay further attention to this population when designing services and supports.