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 35-year-old integrative nutrition health coach Melissa Lainn meets someone new, the introductions always 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 Melissa tries to fill the silence by reassuring the person that she and her long-term partner love kids, despite not wanting their own children. "I do feel like women are judged far more for being child-free, whether by choice or by circumstance," she says.

For those who are child-free by choice, confused and critical responses are nothing new. In 1974, American 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 thenhusband 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, Marcia says she was blacklisted by her school district and received death threats - all because she owned up to the radical idea that she didn’t want to be a mother.

“I was terrified,” says Marcia, now 84, 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, thirdwave feminism and the #MeToo movement – and, despite some awkward dinner party banter, the convo around being child-free has gotten a little easier, a little less fraught for many with a uterus.