The Losers went through a lot in IT, and when they reached adulthood, none of them were able to have children – here’s why. In 1986, Stephen King was responsible for a wave of coulrophobia (fear of clowns) among readers thanks to his novel IT. The book is now a classic not only among King’s works but also in the horror genre, and was famously adapted into a miniseries in 1990 and a film duology directed by Andy Muschietti.
IT follows the story of a group of kids self-named "Losers Club" who come across with an evil, shape-shifting entity living in the sewers of their hometown, Derry. The preferred shape of this creature is that of Pennywise, the dancing clown, though it takes the shape of its victims' biggest fear as that's what it feeds from. The Losers parted ways and reunited 27 years later, when IT awoke to feed again, and it's in that part of the story where readers learned there was something all the Losers had in common: none of them had children.
Although some of the Losers were married by then (Bill, Eddie, Stan, and Bev), none of them had kids, and most had been trying to build their own families to no success. The reason for that is connected to childhood trauma and innocence, two prominent themes in IT. The Losers didn’t fully grow up and were bound to that evil force they couldn’t defeat almost three decades earlier. Having kids would be the final step into adulthood for the Losers, which is something IT couldn’t let happen as it needed that innocence in them to fulfill its plans. Not having children also made it easier for the Losers to return to Derry, as they wouldn’t have risked their lives if they had kids to worry about.
It’s important to note that the Losers weren’t infertile – they just couldn’t have kids before their final confrontation with IT. In the novel, it’s explained that Richie got a vasectomy so he could have unprotected sex without worrying about kids, but the vasectomy “failed and the tubes regrew”, and he was actually fertile, yet he didn’t get any of his partners pregnant. Once IT was defeated and the Losers left Derry for good (and began to lose their memories of IT and each other again), Bev and Ben began a relationship and a few weeks later were expecting a child, thus another curse was broken with the death of IT.
Fans of the novel have also pointed out that the adult Losers were tied to their childhoods more deeply than it appears, aside from not being able to have children. Bev suffered from domestic abuse from her husband, as she did with her father when she was young; Eddie married a woman similar to his mother; Richie was still the jokester and actually made a living out of that; and Mike never left Derry, and was the only one who still remembered everything they went through together. All these are subtle ways in which Stephen King showed the connection between the Losers and IT, as well as how childhood trauma impacts adulthood.