No One Can Decide Whether to Have a Baby—Here’s Why
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It began as so many things do: with an inescapable urge to doomscroll. Not long after I got engaged in April 2020, I found my pandemic-isolated brain in a panicked state that couldn’t be soothed by obsessively reading celebrity blind items. As a woman over 30 on the cusp of marriage, I was confronted (or more aptly, tortured) by an overwhelming sense of uncertainty over whether or not I wanted to have kids.
If you’d asked me when I was a teenager how I saw my life turning out, I would have predicted that by age 30, I’d be married with kids. In my twenties, the idea of having kids shifted to a very malleable “maybe”—I didn’t want anyone to tell me I couldn’t have them, but I also didn’t feel committed to the idea. The topic had resurfaced time and again in my relationship, with both of us on the fence. Now, night after night, while most normal people were sleeping, I found myself wide awake and spiraling in the depths of Reddit and TikTok, praying that some faceless, nameless person would help me find an answer to a question I knew inherently could only be found inside myself.
I spent time on TikTok’s #childfreebychoice, where people who’ve decided not to have kids brag about unlimited sleep and the many things that they can do with their DINK (dual income, no kids) savings. The posts made it hard to see what joy a cute but tiny dictator who needs you constantly could bring, so I would pivot to #MomTok to try to understand why people became parents. I appreciated how candid many women were in sharing their frustrations but also their wins, like when a silly song cured their toddler’s muffin-induced meltdown.
After months of scrolling, I felt like I could win an Olympic gold medal for how informed I was, but I felt no closer to figuring out which side of the divide I was on. I found myself haunted by a 2011 advice column from The Rumpus titled “The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us,” about a man grappling with the idea that all of us have a “ghost ship,” or another path, we could have taken. At least once a week, I would conjure such a ship in my head, and watch with anxiety as the life I had not chosen drifted away. Before long, I found myself seething with envy when friends revealed a sense of certainty about their decisions. Why couldn’t I be sure, too?
Indecision is a lonely—and scary—place to be when you’re starring in your own version of Sliding Doors. My life felt like it had become a constant pro-and-con list, ever-shifting as I weighed factors like job insecurity, abortion bans that have made pregnancy more dangerous, climate change, the rising costs of child care and housing, the recent election results, and the general state of the world. That’s something that haunts Samantha, 33, a former high school teacher who lives in “deep-red small-town” Georgia: “Do I want to put a child through that kind of trauma and experience of just growing up in the United States with gun violence?” she says. She and I definitely weren’t the only ones who felt their stomach fall through their asshole when the election results were called this year. In an instant, all of my torturous indecision came with a stark realization: The choice may no longer be mine to make. After all, we’re living in a world where Vice President JD Vance has called childless people “sociopathic.”
Then there’s the fear of missing out. Friends who’ve had kids have told me how fulfilled raising a child had made them feel; that a parent’s love for their child was like nothing they’d known before. There’s also the “Don’t I want to have someone to take care of me when I’m older?” crowd—I personally believe that’s not a reason to bring a child into the world—and the “Won’t I be lonely?” folks. (Maybe! I do worry about that, but I don’t think loneliness is exclusive to child-free people.) And then, of course, there’s the internal nagging—What about my legacy?—to which I say, There are multiple ways to leave a legacy.
While I felt isolated in my anxiety, I wasn’t actually alone. There’s not only a term for people like me—“fence-sitters”—there’s also a 70,000-plus-member Reddit subgroup of people who pose questions like, “Will being a mom suit my personality type?” Like many corners of Reddit, it’s become a support group. After a devastating breakup initiated because she wasn’t 100 percent sure kids were in the cards for her, Elizabeth Kirsch, 29, a teacher in Ontario, realized she didn’t want to lose anyone to indecision again. That’s when she joined r/Fencesitter. “I figured reading other people’s perspectives would be validating and give me some clarity,” she says. “It’s done both of those things and has been immensely helpful in feeling more solid in being in that gray area of indecision.”
There’s a particular horror of being a fence-sitter today. In our parents’ generation, having kids was the default, at least for straight couples. That made the decision comparatively easy, because there wasn’t much to decide at all—it was just what you did, unless you were infertile. “People were just having kids more easily, because that’s what happened,” says Laura Carroll, pronatalist expert and author of The Baby Matrix. “So the decision process was very different unless you wanted to be celibate—and most people did not.”
But as increasing numbers of people may have chosen not to procreate—the national birth rate has been on the decline since 2007, and reached a historic low in 2023—what was once a given is now an open question, with plenty of room for debate. Women having more control over their own destinies is unquestionably a good thing, but it also means there are a whole lot more of us stuck in the middle. According to 2023 survey data from Pew Research Center, roughly a third of U.S. adults under 35 without kids revealed their uncertainty about having them, and nearly half of adults under 50 in the U.S. who are currently child-free think they will ultimately remain that way. The biggest reason they cite? They just don’t want to have kids.
Like me, Olivia Bellon, a PR executive in Chicago, always thought a “moment of clarity” would come once she met her “person.” “Now I’m 33, still single, and I am more unsure than ever,” she admits. Still, the looming age of geriatric pregnancy is haunting her: “That’s in two years!” she exclaims. “I don’t even have a boyfriend, let alone a husband, let alone a prospect.”
The indecision has started to pervade our culture, with podcasts like Should We Have Kids? and The Kids or Childfree Podcast, as well as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator Rachel Bloom’s forthcoming ABC comedy Do You Want Kids?, which will explore the alternate universes of a couple who are parents in one world and child-free in the other. There are also “Motherhood Clarity” therapists and coaches, and a deck of cards from the Gottman Institute that offers “52 Questions Before Baby.” Deep down, I knew I needed more than Reddit to find an answer, so after years of agonizing, I decided to consult the professionals. Could this finally cure my years-long agita about procreating?
For 34 years, Ann Davidman, a marriage and family therapist, author, and “Parenthood Clarity” mentor, has been helping people decide if parenting is right for them. Speaking to her was a wake-up call for me—there is no shortcut to ending what she calls “unending torturous mental gridlock,” but she did provide a plan, which gave me a sense of control that I’d been missing. She encouraged me to watch a video on her website that featured a series of exercises for anyone ready to begin the decision-making process. With her meditative lilt, she told me to close my eyes and write down my gut reactions to a series of questions she posed; suggested putting a moratorium on discussing having a child with my husband or with friends; and explained why this decision wasn’t one I could merely think my way out of—I had to put in serious work in therapy. “It’s about identifying your fears and beliefs and details of your life so that you can put them on the sidelines, just temporarily,” she says, which allows you to get to the root of what is making you feel stuck.
Davidman has also observed that sometimes the indecision is rooted in one’s own experiences in childhood. That rang true for Leah Forney, 37, a sexual assault advocate in Maryland. “I wasn’t raised by my parents; my grandparents adopted me,” she says. By her early twenties, she came to the realization that she had “deep abandonment issues.” “That was the first time I realized I don’t necessarily want to be a mom,” she says. I could relate: It was so obvious to me that my long-floating fears ranging from financially supporting a child and being a mentally and emotionally healthy parent stemmed from the scars of my own upbringing.
“Perhaps I might get postpartum depression, or I would be unfit to be a mother because I have these struggles, and I don’t want to put my kids through that,” says Sophia Meyer, 29, a dating and mental health podcast host in Portland, Oregon. Watching TikToks of squishy babies tugs at her heartstrings, but that’s countered by the idea of coming home to a screaming child after a difficult day of work. “I constantly think about how lucky I am to not have to deal with that,” she says. For now, she’s approaching her indecision by spending time with her sister and her children and asking herself how that makes her feel: “Do I want to be in this big home with four kids celebrating holidays together, or do I want to be in a villa in Italy by myself with my husband?”
I, too, can’t deny that I relish my freedom—the ability to meet friends for a spontaneous brunch, plan a last-minute getaway, and travel for writing assignments on a whim. The thought of having a child and being restricted gives me anxiety and, at worst, makes me worry I’ll be bored. Meyer tells me when she hears mothers describe their perfect day, “It’ll often involve something like, ‘Oh, I want to be able to sleep in, have a quiet day, and read my book.’ And I think to myself, ‘Wow, that’s your ideal day, and I’m able to live that every day right now as it is,’” she says, laughing. “Because I don’t have children.”
As many millennials can attest, we were essentially raised to have our careers consume our identities. Rumor has it becoming a parent transforms who you are at your core, which is terrifying to me. While I’m cheering for those who make being a mom their personality if it makes them happy, it’s not something that I want for myself. That’s also what’s most daunting for Bellon. She’s fiercely independent and career-oriented. “The idea of losing all that scares me. I love my life, my independence, and my freedom, and the idea of having that taken away is not appealing,” she says.
As I lean into being an auntie and watch my friends parent, I’m also haunted by the reality that even in the most equal-seeming partnerships, women carry most of the load. Sometimes I barely have the mental capacity to put together a meal for myself, so how will I manage doctors’ appointments, peewee soccer games, and parent-teacher conferences? Kirsch is keenly aware of how much work many women do at home when they have kids, on top of their other responsibilities. “They work full-time jobs; they go pick up the kids; they take them to extracurriculars; they come home; they do all the cooking and all the cleaning—it just seems like they almost lose their identity in motherhood,” she says.
In the face of such realities, I sought the guidance of Merle Bombardieri, who is an active participant in the Reddit fence-sitter group. She is also a clinical social worker and author of The Baby Decision, and Baby or Childfree?, coming in 2026. Bombardieri understands the decision I am up against—she even initially turned down a marriage proposal from her husband, Rocco, because she wasn’t sure if kids were in her life path. (They have two grown daughters.) Now people from all over the world clamor to hash out their indecision in one of her highly coveted coaching sessions, which cost between $200 and $300.
After listening to me spew every anxiety I have about parenting, Bombardieri suggested that, in addition to traditional therapy, I try the “empty chair technique,” where I sit in one chair and argue why I should have a child, before moving to the other chair to declare why I should be child-free. According to Bombardieri, people “realize that their voice is stronger, their posture is stronger, they feel more authentic in one chair than in the other.” The idea isn’t that you’ll reach 100 percent certainty, Bombardieri says, but if you can get to 60 percent in favor of one or the other, that is the beginning of the decision. She also helped me think of my indecision in a refreshing, less doomed light: “If you’re having trouble deciding, that means that you have a capacity for happiness with either choice.”
Most aspects of making this decision felt like things I may ultimately be able to work through, but the nagging fear of regret felt especially insurmountable—you simply won’t know until you’re there. I realized I’d perhaps find some relief from speaking with someone in their golden years who was child-free: Enter Marcia Drut-Davis, 82, author of Confessions of a Childfree Woman and What?! You Don’t Want Children? Drut-Davis decided to be child-free in 1974, though she tells me that she’d known this from a young age. She saw the work and worry that went into taking care of not just a baby, but a human. “The lifestyle turned me off,” she says. “I just didn’t want it.”
Parenting is undoubtedly a lot of work—there’s the mantra “It takes a village” for a reason, and modern society doesn’t provide much of a village. Speaking with Drut-Davis reminded me how child-free people could find joy in bonus family roles. As a longtime teacher, she “adored” her students— “four of them are in my will,” she adds. Some of the little ones in her life even call her “Marma,” as in “Marcia grandma.” It reminded me that I could be important to kids even if I don’t have my own.
By the end of my soul-seeking journey, I considered all of the experts’ advice and felt more at ease about having the tools to craft a plan. I accepted there wasn’t ever going to be an easy answer, and thinking about it constantly wasn’t going to help. Now, when that familiar ache of indecision lingers, something Bombardieri says plays in my mind. “Whatever you decide, you’re going to grieve and let go of all the pleasures of the other choice.” While I already feel like I’m grieving both versions of myself, she said it was simple: Go with the choice you will regret the least. “That’s where you get your answer.”
This story appears in the February 2025 issue of ELLE.
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