Every now and then, 40-year-old Luna Bhattarai gets badgered by her relatives and strangers about her and her husband’s choice not to have any children.

Bhattarai has been married for 18 years, and the couple have no desire to have children. But they have had to hear unsolicited remarks and baseless assumptions about their decision.

“My sister and cousins have children, who I obviously love,” Bhattarai says. “But when I’m looking after them, I’ve had to hear my relatives telling me, ‘Just live your life looking after other people’s children!’”

Sometimes, relatives would tell her they wouldn’t want to die without playing with her unborn children. Other times, they would act as if she could produce the baby right there for them to care for.

This situation is common among many Nepali childless couples like Bhattarai’s. Society at large otherises them, as if everyone has to abide by its conception of ideals. Nepali society doesn’t yet accommodate the idea of staying childless as a choice, says Bindu Pokharel, a retired head of gender studies at Tribhuvan University.

“If they do not have any child after a year or two of marriage, they get badgered by families and relatives—it’s common in our society,” Pokharel says.

There are couples who wish to only delay the first birth, but they too are pressured to have children as soon as possible. A 2020 research supports this assertion. According to the study, couples are often pressured into having a child in the first year of their marriage, despite their shared desires to not do so.

Couples often wish to delay the first birth to build their financial capability, and mature into the marriage. Pressure to get pregnant before the husband leaves to work abroad, and the fear that society will perceive there to be something ‘wrong’ with the couple if they don’t conceive, means that couples would feel pressured into having children.

For those couples who wish to remain childless entirely, society is harsh. People more often than not assume the couple has infertility issues, and think it's okay to ask invasive questions about their fertility status. And often, it’s the women who they point their fingers at.

Research conducted in West Africa revealed that infertility in itself is not the only cause of distress in women—it is also the Social Pressure for Pregnancy (SSP). Most women in the study related external pressure from families and societies to be the reason behind extreme distress among women following failed attempts at conception.

“I recently talked to a woman who, when she discovered we didn’t have children, asked me whose ‘weakness’ was that they couldn’t have babies,” Bhattarai says.

A range of infertility issues, either on the part of the man or the woman, could be the reason behind the inability to conceive a child, but it’s usually the woman who ends up getting the short end of the stick.

Dr Uma Shrivastava, programme director at Infertility Clinic Bijulibazar and Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Academic Specialist, says that despite coming to the conclusion that it’s the husband who’s going through infertility issues, it's usually the woman who has to bear the brunt from mother-in-law and families alike.

“It’s usually the woman who has to face constant questioning from family members about being childless,” Shrivastava says. “The men are often unwilling, or embarrassed, to address that they’re the ones who have issues.”

Bhattarai says she has observed many couples succumbing to the societal pressure to have children. Somebody she knows was shunned by her villagers for the couple’s choice to wait a while before having children.

Experts and observers say that couples these days don’t feel the need to have children right away as was the case before. But not having them after years of marriage definitely raises alarm among family members and the society. Badgering from parents, relatives and friends alike means the couples end up in a very stressful situation.

“We have women from all kinds of successful careers coming to us who wish to just focus on their professional life at the time,” Shrivastava says. “But pressure from families and relatives means they are pushed to have children sooner.”

This means that gender equality and a woman’s right to exercise her independence play a significant role in acting out her desire to not have children.

Going back to Bhattarai’s case, she recalls a time when she shared an article on a couple’s choice to not have children. After that, she was told off by a relative to not do so, because it would send a wrong message to people in social media.

However, awareness regarding family planning, increased literacy rate, job opportunities and better access to contraceptives have been attributed to a decrease in fertility rate in the country. According to the National Health and Demographic Survey 2022, the fertility rate in the country has decreased by 50 percent in the last two decades.

This decrease in fertility rate is true of the entire world. A study published in the Lancet journal predicted that by 2050, 155 of 204 countries will not have a fertility size high enough to sustain their population. The global fertility rate was 4.84 in 1950, which has now dropped to 2.23 in 2021.

However, there are still strides to make in Nepal’s case. The gender gap in literacy is still pronounced in Nepal. According to the National Census of 2021, the male literacy rate stood at 83.6 percent, whereas the female literacy was 69.4 percent. And despite the increasing literacy rate over the years, financial independence for women in the country is still a hard won battle, as evidenced in a Financial Access Report published by Nepal Rastra Bank. It showed that men account holders outnumber women account holders by almost two to one.

“To be able to make decisions on childlessness, inequality embedded in the fabric of our society needs to be fully addressed first,” Pokharel says. “With political, social and economic independence comes the ability to make independent choices.”

Bhattarai, who is quite confident in her stance to not have children, has learned to shut away societal expectations, and live her life on her own terms.

“People think I’m so sad that I don’t have children, and that’s why I don’t attend social events,” Bhattarai says. “Well the truth is I just can’t be bothered with these conservative views anymore.”