Why Women Are Choosing to Be Child-Free

The choice can be liberating, yet stigmas persist. Here, how to cut through the noise with clarity and confidence to make the decision that's right for you.

- Amy Wilkinson

When Devin Propeck-Silva, a 38-year-old business owner in Portland, Oregon, meets someone new, the introductions follow the same script. "After they find out I'm married, they ask how many kids I have. (I don't have any.)

Then they ask when we're planning to have kids. (We're not.)" That's when the vibe shifts, and Propeck-Silva tries to fill the silence by reassuring the person that she and husband Matt love kids (they're a proud aunt and uncle!) despite not wanting their own children. "I feel I have to explain my decision and clarify that I'm not a monster," she says.

For those who are child-free by choice, confused and critical responses are nothing new. In 1974, Marcia Drut-Davis, a 34-year-old substitute teacher, experienced this on a whole new level when she appeared on a segment of the TV show 60 Minutes in which producers followed her and then-husband Warren as they broke the news to his parents that they didn't intend to have children. Within a day of the episode's airing, Drut-Davis says, she was blacklisted by her school district and received death threats-all because she owned up to the radical notion that she didn't want to be a mother.

"I was terrified," Drut-Davis, now 84, says of the response. "I shut up about it for many years. I didn't say a word." Perhaps unsurprisingly, her husband at the time didn't suffer the same ill consequences, she says. "His job wasn't affected; his friendships weren't affected.

Mine were. I was less than a snail at the bottom of the ocean." Fast-forward 50 years-through the rise of women in the workforce, third-wave feminism, and the #MeToo movement-and, despite some awkward dinner party banter, the convo around being childfree has gotten a little easier, a little less fraught for many with a uterus.