JANUARY was a confusing month for Americans contemplating humanity's future. On the 29th, President Bill Clinton named Dr Henry Foster as his special adviser on teenage pregnancy. The US records one million such pregnancies annually, twice the rate of the UK. Reducing that statistic "would change the whole face of the country and the future", President Clinton insisted. In the coming weeks, passionate debate over responsible procreation, the subsidised family, contraceptive implants and sterilisation will intensify.

But the week before President Clinton's alert, the New Yorker magazine presented a different social threat in its lead article "Silent Sperm". "Is this the way the world will end?" the headline screamed, referring to the declining human sperm count. So is there now good and bad fertility, like good and bad cholesterol?

At such times, it helps to talk to Elaine Tyler May. Irish students will be able to do just that when the author becomes a visiting Professor of American History at University College, Dublin, for a year beginning in October. She is currently Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and has written extensively on American families - marriage and divorce.

"We are a nation obsessed with reproduction," May observes in her latest book. Barren In The Promised Land: Childless Americans And The Pursuit Of Happiness, ". . . but the public's stake in who has children and who does not has changed over time".

The expectation that only the family can cure the nation's ills has, however, been a political constant since 1903 when President Theodore Roosevelt cautioned Americans against "wilful sterility" and "race suicide". In this presidential election year, with the holy grail of "family values" elevated on all sides, Ms May's historical analysis of that ideal is provocative and timely.

"What did it mean that we live in a society where any single child may have up to five `real' parents: a genetic father, a genetic mother, a gestational mother, a social mother, and a social father?"

Elaine Tyler May's question arose out of the 1980s Baby M case, a battle between natural and adoptive parents for custody of a child. In asking it, she recognised that the family was not what it used to be but also wondered if it ever had been. And where did childless couples belong? The 17th century sin of barrenness may have evolved for many into the 20th century indulgence of being "childfree", but the childless remain an often demonised minority.

More than 500 people responded to May's questions on childlessness and she devotes a chapter of the book to their experiences and sentiments. Most respondents were women, aged between 22 and 99, and their attitude to their state ranged from desperation to exultation.

Some 60 per cent were voluntarily childless. The author places them in a historical and political context, examining groups such as Childfree Network, Zero Population Growth and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, products of the 1960s counterculture.

They "may have widened the cultural space for the childless in American society, but that space remained on the margin," she writes. The decision not to reproduce remains inherently subversive and unsettling.

"WE LIKE to think of some behaviour as fixed and bio rooted," says May from her home in Minnesota, "but social and cultural institutions shape us in even the most private areas of our lives. We can't talk about the family as eternal and grounded in natural laws. It is bound up with the changing meaning of love, what men and women expect of each other, for example."

An increasing number of affluent American couples apparently expect the fulfilment previously associated with child rearing to come instead from their adult relationship. May found voluntary childlessness "more common among those who live in highly privatised communities and less prevalent where child rearing is shared". And if the couple looks exclusively to itself for fulfilment, one reason may be its increasing pessimism.

A recent Times Mirror poll revealed that two thirds of Americans believe that other people cannot be trusted and that civic involvement is a waste of time.

"One reason for many of the childfree respondents' preoccupation with their private lives was their sense that the larger world is a lost cause," agrees May.

Barren In The Promised Land traces the historical drift from communal to private life in the US when the nation was at its most optimistic. "Manifest Destiny" was the guiding principle and it profoundly shaped the idea of a good family and of worthy parents.

"Procreation shifted from a matter of survival and necessity to a source of expansion, national identity and personal happiness in the late 18th century.

In the newly industrialised cities of the young Republic, the home became a private retreat but also the cradle for good citizens. A preoccupation with who was breeding replaced the colonists' more general emphasis on high fertility. "In this new national vision, men were the builders of the nation, women the vessels of propagation and children the hope of the future" and infertility was a disease to be cured by the new wonder, science.

But one person's disease was another's protest. The breeding of slaves by their owners intensified when Congress banned the overseas slave trade in 1807 and many female slaves chose childlessness as their only form of resistance.

"Whole families of women fail to have any children," an out raged physician reported in 1849.

More than 50 years later, a childless white working woman expressed similar defiance: "You can refuse us work, wages or provision for old age. But there is one thing you cannot do. You cannot use me to breed for your factories."

RACE and class were key elements in America's earliest reproductive engineering efforts, and hose efforts peaked in the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. Gripped by race suicide panic, politicians, doctors and psychologists berated pampered, over educated women for avoiding motherhood and causing a "national decline". The fact that poor blacks had higher rates of infertility than affluent whites did not prevent their compulsory sterilisation.

"By the middle of the century," writes May, "tens of thousands of Americans had been forcibly sterilised." All were poor, most were black or Native American. The Nazi's 1933 eugenic sterilisation law was modelled on that of California. "And in this horror story of compulsory sterilisation," she adds, "the only voice crying out against it at the time was the Irish voice in America."

Elaine Tyler May values such ignored facts, because they disturb our complaisant acceptance of received truth. Women need children to complete them, men need families to steady them, healthy nations need independent households. Where do these ideas originate? she asks. "The nation still expects the family to operate as an autonomous unit that builds society . . . by rearing its citizens, even though it has never functioned in that capacity and cannot do so without institutional support," May stresses, adding " . . . the 1950s suburban family . . . was far more dependent on government handouts than any so called `underclass' in recent US history".

Barren In The Promised Land has political and personal points to make and Elaine Tyler May's contention is that the two converge more strikingly in the realm of reproduction than in any other part of our lives. As a mother of two children, her concern is not merely academic.

In the Baby M case, May was struck by the repeated wrangling over parental rights and the silence surrounding the child's welfare. She concludes that "as long as Americans care more about each other's reproductive behaviour than about each other's children, our private obsession is likely to remain".