For years, science has been trying to explain whether having children makes us live less: a recent study had found that pregnancy accelerates aging (but that the effect, fortunately, is reversible), but the research conducted so far on the link between children and longevity had returned conflicting results – some highlighting a link between reproduction and lower life expectancy, others not.
To understand more, researchers analyzed 4,500 Finnish women who lived for 250 years, and discovered that the environment and the times in which we live make the difference. The results of what we discovered are published on Science Advances.
The role of famine. The period analyzed by scholars also included the years of the Finnish famine of 1866-1868, due to which 270,000 people died (8% of the population). In women who lived before or after the famine, no associations between children and life expectancy were found. Mothers who lived during the famine, by contrast, lived on average six months less for each child.
The reason is rather intuitive: pregnancy and breastfeeding require an enormous expenditure of energy – energy which, if we do not feed ourselves sufficiently, we must subtract from the body by lowering the basal metabolism (the minimum number of calories that the body requires to survive) and therefore sacrificing other functions.
And today? Combining what we discover from this research with what we know from previous studies, we can say that nowadays in Western countries having children does not make us die sooner, unless we are suffering from hunger due to war, famine or extreme poverty or we have a large number of children (at least five).
This reduction of reproductive cost (i.e. the fact that children do not impact mothers’ life expectancy as they once did, also because they have fewer of them) could be one of the factors that contributes to forming the gap in life expectancy between men and women – together with other more obvious aspects such as men’s greater propensity to smoke and drink alcohol.
