The Dilemmas of Childlessness

By Martha Smilgis

Babies seem to be everywhere these days. Current movie fare offers Three Men and a Baby, Baby Boom and She's Having a Baby. Even television commercials are using giggling, gurgling newborns to shill for grownup products such as carpets, insurance and automobile tires. Yet despite the highly visible new crop of infants, not all Americans are sure they want to help fuel the baby mania. Observes UCLA Psychologist Jacqueline Goodchilds: "Many people are questioning the assumption that fulfillment for a woman is having children."

By and large, the baby busters are female college graduates of the late '60s and early '70s who questioned the moral imperative to reproduce and instead forged ahead in the male-dominated work force. Many, of course, have had children, but in far fewer numbers than their mothers. In the 1950s, 9% of women of childbearing age had no children; now 25% of college-educated working women between 35 and 45 are childless. If their younger sisters, now between 25 and 35, also decide not to give birth, the childless rate is likely to remain unusually high. Moreover, the younger women's ambivalence is reinforced by economic realities. "In the 1950s a single breadwinner could support a family of five," says Public Opinion Expert Daniel Yankelovich. "Now it takes two breadwinners to support a family of four."

Those who choose not to have children tend to be well educated, live in urban areas, marry late and work outside the home; as a group, they are not actively religious. They fall into two categories: the deliberate types and the postponers. In general, the former make their decision early in life, often after perceiving their own mothers' lives as restrictive and unfulfilling. A disproportionate number are only children or firstborns who had to care for younger brothers and sisters.

Consider Susan Peters, 36, a Los Angeles TV producer who has been married for ten years. Half jokingly, she speculates that her decision not to have children stems from her childhood play with Barbie dolls. "Barbie had a house, a car and a boyfriend, period," she notes. Peters has not been swayed by close friends who have babies. "They spend the first three months staring at the baby. I won't give my life over to that. The Smurfs become your life." Feminist Gloria Steinem, 54, also made a deliberate choice. "I either gave birth to someone else," she explains, "or I gave birth to myself."

The postponers are those who refuse to make a decision, allowing relationships, professional commitments and finally nature to make the choice for them. Dr. Karen Rohde, 40, a suburban Chicago obstetrician, has some regrets about not having had kids, but is devoted to medicine and her second marriage, to a man with grown children. "Time got away from me," explains Rohde. "I never made a firm commitment to say no to having children. Now I've decided it is not going to happen. Whenever I see a particularly sweet-looking baby, I just think of what they're like when you take them home. Then I'm glad I'm not the one who has to lose sleep taking care of them."

Steinem believes women want men to share the burdens of parenting. "Women are on a baby strike. They have said, 'I'm not doing this myself.' " Certainly, many men still want to have children; but most are content to leave child raising to their wives. Still, some men are opting for childlessness too. Ed McCrary, 41, a recovering alcoholic who works for a rehab center in Charlotte, N.C., and his wife, also a recovering alcoholic, have decided against having children because the "chances are too high" that the baby too would become an alcoholic.

The childless have found ways to satisfy their nurturing instincts. Jon Wilkman, 45, a Los Angeles filmmaker, advocates "uncle empowerment," which enables him to take his nephews to concerts and plays. Toni Moore, 47, a schoolteacher from Charlotte who has been married eight years and has chosen not to have children, helps pay tuition for her niece and nephew and takes them along on special vacations. New York City-based Joni Evans, 45, publisher of Random House trade books, openly mothers her authors and colleagues and feels no societal pressure to have children ("People ask, Are you a child person or not? You're not? O.K."). As for fears of growing old without children, Psychologist Goodchilds explains, "For many, not having children removes the concern of being a burden to your children in old age." However, outright regret is not unusual. Despite three nephews, a golden retriever and a cat, Suzanne Childs, 45, a twice-divorced Los Angeles lawyer, says, "Knowing what I know now, I would have married someone different and had a child."

Other women feel the same way. New York Psychologist Felice Gans regularly hears "anticipatory regret" from female patients in their early 30s. Says Gans: "They ask, 'Will I regret this? What is wrong with me that I didn't want a baby all along?' " (She notes, however, that she also counsels many women who regret having had children.) Some discontented women blame feminism for encouraging their childless state. Feminist Author Betty Friedan, who relishes her role as the mother of two children, sharply disagrees. She insists that feminists are addressing the problems of working mothers. "Half of the women who are childless at 40 are not childless by real choice," says Friedan. "They have not had children because they are in male-structured jobs with no good day care available."

A backlash of sorts against childlessness may have already begun: the birth rate among college-educated women 20 to 24 years old is beginning to climb. Nonetheless, the decision to have or not to have children is a profound one. Says Yankelovich: "Society is accepting childlessness, but some women question whether they have violated a biological law." Most childless adults who have deliberately made the choice enjoy their freedom with few misgivings. But some of those who find themselves sitting on the fence may have already made a decision they did not intend to make.