First love, then marriage. And then comes the pressure to have children.
It comes from family, from friends, even from co-workers. Some want grandchildren. Some want nieces and nephews. Some want another smiling face at the neighborhood play group.
What happens if a couple says no? Not because they can’t have a baby, but because they don’t want one.
It’s happening with increasing frequency, but men and women who make that decision say it is a touchy subject.
And, they say, it’s most often the woman who is expected to justify the choice to friends and family.
“The woman hears the silent question all around her because there is an assumption that you’ll have children,” said poet Molly Peacock, who wrote “Paradise, Piece by Piece,” a memoir explaining her decision to remain childless, published by Riverhead Books.
“Women start thinking of themselves and their own motherhood at an extraordinarily early age,” she said. “Think of how young little girls are when they are asked how many children they want. Little boys are never asked how many kids they want when they grow up.”
Married women with no children say they often are called selfish, are asked if they hate kids and warned that, one day, they’ll deeply regret their decision.
Yet the number of childless married, divorced or widowed women who are without children by choice has more than doubled in the United States since the 1970s, hovering in 1990 at about 25 percent, according to a study by the National Center For Health Statistics.
That means 1 in 4 women who have been married and are childless rejected motherhood by choice.
“Early on in my marriage, my mother was certainly hoping to have grandchildren,” said Ellen Peskin, who has been married to her husband, Jan Harrison, for 11 years.
“We basically told her that we probably were not going to have any kids, and the pressure was not going to do anything to change that,” Peskin said.
Harrison agreed that it’s easier for a man to say that he doesn’t want children than it is for a married woman.
“I’ve had many men say to me that if they could do it over again, they wouldn’t have kids,” he said.
“And, while I know that Ellen has a good circle of friends who are also childless, I also know that being cut out of the conversation or the group because we don’t have kids is more of a factor in her life.”
Peskin, a health-information researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, recalled that her mother quickly stopped pressuring them, but “she has said that she thinks I’m missing out on a great experience.”
Maybe, Harrison said.
“We both understood, you know, that some people will not be fulfilled in their lives unless they have children,” he said. “We are acutely aware of what we have given up. . . . But, overall, I don’t think we’d make a different choice.”
Religious philosophy encourages couples to be fruitful. Sigmund Freud declared that motherhood was essential to the feminine psyche, and Margaret Sanger, the early feminist who opened the first American birth-control clinic, in 1916, was jailed nine times for her actions, according to Diana Burgwyn, a Philadelphian who in 1981 wrote “Marriage Without Children: Men and Women Tell What It Is Like to Be Childless by Choice or Chance.”
She contends that while the sexual revolution of the 1960s made birth control easily available and generally accepted, couples who remain childless are still going against a strong societal flow.
Judy Goldschmidt, a publicist for Peddlers Village in Bucks County, Pa., said the biggest misconception people have about her is that she doesn’t like children.
“I love to hold babies. I did baby-cuddling at one of the local hospitals,” she said. “I offer to baby-sit, and people don’t take me seriously. . . . I love children, and people who really know me know that.”
Goldschmidt, 45, said she and her husband, George Tamaccio, 52, knew early on that they did not want children. Last week, they celebrated their 13th anniversary.
“I think that people who do have children come to that decision from different places,” Goldschmidt said. “I really think there is a biological clock in some women, a physical need to have children.”
Goldschmidt said she, too, went through a time when she had second thoughts.
“I started to think that there wouldn’t be another generation, and I said to my husband that I was having second thoughts. We went to therapy,” she said. “Then my sister called to tell us she was pregnant. I thought that in nine months I would be either intensely jealous or decide that my life is incredibly fulfilled.”
She remained childless and became, instead, an aunt and a godparent.
