LJ MARTIN ASA 2019

DELAYERS, DEBATERS, AND DECLINERS:

TRACKING CHILDLESS WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE TRAJECTORIES

Lauren Jade Martin

Penn State University, Berks
ljm37@psu.edu
 Delayers, Debaters, and Decliners: Tracking Childless Women’s Reproductive Trajectories

ABSTRACT

This paper tracks the reproductive desires and trajectories of a sample of childless women using

a mixed-method, longitudinal approach. During Wave 1, interviews were conducted with 72

childless American women between the ages of 25 and 40 about their reproductive desires and

intentions. Approximately four years later during Wave 2, a subset of the original sample

participated in surveys to assess consistencies between fertility intentions and outcomes, and in-

depth interviews to elicit information about the changes in their lives that transpired in the

intervening years. Although 25% of the Wave 2 participants had attempted to have children,

mostly successfully, the majority had either decided to remain childfree, were still debating

whether or not they wanted to have children, or did not yet feel that they were ready to start

trying to have the children that they desired. By collecting qualitative and quantitative data from

participants about their reproductive plans and desires at more than one point in time, we may

track how motivations and desires change over time, whether actions and behaviors remain

consistent with motivations and desires, and how women interpret these changes, inconsistencies,

and fulfillments of their desires.

INTRODUCTION

In the United States, women are having fewer children, waiting longer to have them, and

increasing numbers do not have children at all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(CDC) reports that the fertility rate in the United States continues to decline as the mean age at

mothers’ first birth continues to increase (Ely and Hamilton 2018; Martin et al. 2018).

Approximately 45% of American women between 15 and 44 are childless (Martinez, Daniels,

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and Febo-Vazquez 2018). The declining fertility rate and increasing percentage of childless

women has led to some public concern about why women are not having children, yet the

childless statistic is not static (Anon 2018; Cha 2018; Press 2018). That is, some of those

childless women captured by statistics include those who will not always remain childless. The

group of women identified as childless in one point in time includes women who are planning to

have children, women who would like to have children but cannot because of biological and/or

social circumstance, and women who have voluntarily chosen to be childfree.

As women age, fewer numbers of them remain childless, with 48.9% of women aged 25-

29 reporting childlessness in the National Survey of Family Growth, and only 15% of women

aged 40-44 (Martinez et al. 2018). This raises questions about the processes that occur over time:

how do women decide whether or not they want to have children, transition from wanting

children to attempting and having children, and/or change their minds regarding various

reproductive decisions? Because time and aging play an essential role in women’s perceptions of

their ability to conceive and give birth, the passing of small periods of time—in years or even

months—is important both symbolically and bio-medically. Part of childless women’s

calculations about whether or not they would like to have children, when, how many, and by

what means, is shaped by their self-assessments about their biological and social ability to have

and raise children (Martin 2017).

Sociologists and anthropologists of family have studied how women make meaning in

their family-building efforts, and demographers have researched the relationship between

women’s stated fertility desires (whether or not they want to have children), intentions (their

plans to have children), and outcomes (whether or not they had children, and how many). This

paper tracks the reproductive desires and trajectories of a sample of childless women over a four-

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year period by using two waves of longitudinal data collected from a sample of women that

initially participated in a cross-sectional interview-based study. Interviews with 72 childless

American women aged 25-40 about their plans and desires regarding having children, and their

attitudes regarding reproductive technologies were initially collected between 2012 and 2014.

I refer to those women who express desires for children but do not yet have any as

delayers. Debaters are those women who are unsure or ambivalent about having children.

Decliners are those women who have made the decision not to have children. In the second wave

of data collection, now three to five years older than they were at the time of their initial

interviews, a subsample of 51 women completed a follow-up electronic survey about current

attitudes and changes in the past years regarding their reproductive desires, and 22 women as a

further subsample of that group participated in in-depth follow-up interviews. To what extent did

women stick to their original plans to have or not have children? Did women change their minds

and reevaluate their desires? As women moved further along the life course with marriages,

divorces, new jobs, new cities, or degrees completed, did they feel more or less prepared to

become parents?

Given popular understandings of the “biological clock,” one would assume that a few

years time would lead women to be proactive about putting their reproductive plans into action

and/or lead them to reassess the feasibility of having children. In this paper, I describe the

reproductive outcomes and current fertility desires of those women participating in the second

wave of data collection via electronic survey, tracking how these compare with their stated

desires in the first wave. I also present qualitative findings from open-ended responses and

interview data with a subsample of participants in order to assess the subjective motivations and

more nuanced details of their reproductive decisions and behaviors. By comparing both the

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quantitative and qualitative Wave 2 data with the findings from Wave 1, I make the case that

ethnographic scholars of reproduction consider incorporating longitudinal methods into their

research, and that demographers interested in comparing fertility intentions with fertility

outcomes incorporate qualitative methods to better understand the motivations behind the

regional trends they identify.

BACKGROUND

As Ann Oakley pointed out in her foundational study on mothers, “People do not have

clear motives so far as having children is concerned; few organise their lives according to some

overall plan. The subject of children provokes ambivalent feelings, so that ‘planning’ is a

euphemism for allowing one particular feeling or pressure to gain an upper hand” (1979:32). The

process of reproductive decision-making has been studied empirically within the sociology and

anthropology of family and reproduction: how do individuals determine and make choices about

their reproductive lives and bodies? Rosanna Hertz (2006), for example, in her study on women

who chose to become single mothers, describes the “catalytic events” such as breakups,

interruptions of daily routines, deaths of loved ones, and medical interventions that push some

women to decide to pursue single motherhood. Becker (2000), Franklin (1997), and Harwood

(2007), among others, have pointed out how individuals and couples, faced with infertility, wind

up pursuing more and more fertility treatments, at great expense, that often go beyond what they

had originally planned or felt comfortable pursuing. An increasing number of scholars have also

been studying the childless and childfree, some of whom resign themselves to not having

children, and others whom have deliberately and freely chosen not to have children (Blackstone

and Stewart 2012; Inhorn and van Balen 2002; May 1995; Notkin 2014).

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 Reproductive aging has been explored as a factor that individuals consider when making

decisions about family building. For example, one line of research has attempted to discern how

much knowledge individuals have about the role of aging in fertility decline (Boivin, Bunting,

and Gameiro 2013; Gossett et al. 2013; Lavender et al. 2015; Martin 2017). Age-related fertility

decline has been explored in relation to assisted reproductive technologies such as IVF (Daly and

Bewley 2013; Franklin 2013; Friese, Becker, and Nachtigall 2006), and is particularly relevant in

studies of the elective or “social” use of egg freezing to delay childbearing (Baldwin 2018;

Brown and Patrick 2018; Martin 2010; Myers 2017; Rothmar Herrmann and Kroløkke 2018;

Waldby 2015).

In addition to ethnographic and qualitative explorations of how individuals make

meaning of their aging bodies or decisions about the use of technologies, another line of research

that engages with questions about family building transitions can be found in demographic

studies about the relationship between fertility intentions, behaviors, and outcomes. Work has

focused on family size (Berrington 2004; Gunther and Harttgen 2016; Morgan and Rackin 2010),

planned and unplanned pregnancy (Bachrach and Morgan 2013), changes in reproductive

intentions (Iacovou and Tavares 2011), and couple-level dynamics (Matias and Fontaine 2017;

Thomson 1997). Included in this body of work are studies that incorporate longitudinal data into

their explorations of fertility desires and outcomes. Researchers have described the relationship

between fertility intentions and realizations in the United States (Quesnel-Vallée and Morgan

2003), Hungary (Spéder and Kapitány 2009), France and Italy (Régnier-loilier and Vignoli 2011),

Netherlands, Switzerland, Hungary and Bulgaria (Kapitány and Spéder 2012), and Hong Kong

(Chen and Yip 2017) using regression analyses and large-scale surveys. These longitudinal

studies compare demographic circumstances in different regions and countries, and point to

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places where people’s desires regarding children may be impeded by law, policy, poverty, or a

number of other factors.

Such research using large-scale survey data helps to identify country-wide and regional

trends in the sometimes contradictions between fertility intentions and behavior, but we should

also learn about the subjective experiences of women as they age over time. How do women

anticipate their future fertility, in terms of their biological ability to have children, cognitive and

emotional preparedness, social milieu and extenuating structural factors, and knowledge of,

access to, and willingness to use reproductive technologies to assist reproduction (Martin 2010;

2017)? Below, I will discern some of the “unclear motives” that Ann Oakley alluded to, by

combining the ethnographic insights of what was initially a cross-sectional study, with

longitudinal data collected over two waves of time. That is, an average of four years has passed

between the first and second waves of data collection in this study. In this critical time period of

their lives, when in both the popular and medical imagination the average woman’s fertility is in

decline, do women’s motivations, anti-motivations, and ambivalences regarding having children

remain consistent, or are they subject to change? Furthermore, how do they interpret the

consistencies or inconsistencies of their desires and intentions?

METHOD

Wave 1 Data Collection and Sample Characteristics

Between 2012 and 2014, I conducted 72 in-depth, semi-structured interviews in person,

by phone, and on Skype, with childless women between the ages of 25 and 40 in the United

States. I asked participants about reproductive intentions, awareness and attitudes regarding

assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), and questions about relationship status, education,

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and career. Each interview lasted approximately one hour, and was audio recorded with the

permission of the participants. Interviews were professionally transcribed, and then I

thematically and inductively coded and analyzed transcripts using qualitative data analysis

software. All names that appear in this paper have been changed.

For the Wave 1 sample, I used a combination of purposive and snowball sampling to

recruit a diverse cohort of individuals who identified as women who did not have children, were

between the ages of 25 and 40, and resided in the United States. I initially recruited by word of

mouth through my own social networks, and then participants spread the word among their own

real and virtual networks or gave me contact information for friends and acquaintances to contact

directly. To compensate for the limitation of a small nonprobability sample, I aimed to include a

geographically dispersed sample that was diverse in terms of race/ethnicity, age, relationship

status, and sexual orientation (see Table 1). I recruited and conducted interviews until both a

diverse sample and data saturation had been achieved (Morse 1995). The sampling method and

inclusion criteria resulted in an overrepresentation of both highly educated and queer-identified

women.

Table 1. Wave 1 Sample Characteristics

Wave 1 Wave 2
Characteristics
(n = 72) (n =51)
Age
Mean 32 36
Race/Ethnicity
White (not Hispanic) 56 (78%) 41 (80%)
Women of color 16 (22%) 10 (20%)
Sexual Orientation
Heterosexual 45 (62.5%) 31 (60%)
Lesbian/ Bisexual/ Queer/ Other 27 (37.5%) 20 (40%)
Relationship Status

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 Single 22 (31%) 10 (20%)
Partnered/ married 50 (69%) 41 (80%)
Highest Level of Education
H.S. graduate or some college 5 (7%) 4 (8%)
Bachelor’s degree 22 (30.5%) 16 (31%)
Master’s degree 27 (37.5%) 15 (29%)
Doctoral or professional degree (JD, MD, or
18 (25%) 16 (31%)
PhD)

Wave 2 Data Collection and Sample Characteristics

In 2017, I contacted all 72 participants using their last known email address, and sent

them a link to an electronic survey created using Qualtrics. The survey combined multiple-choice

and open-ended questions about whether or not they had children, if they wanted to have

children in the future (in addition to any they already had), if they had attempted to conceive,

whether or not they used birth control and what kind, and if they had used or anticipated using

fertility treatments or other medical assistance for help in conceiving. A total of 51 participants

completed this survey.

A final question on the follow-up survey asked participants if they would be willing to

participate in a follow-up interview. In order to flesh out the survey findings with more

descriptive and qualitative details, I contacted 30 of the women who had indicated that they

would be willing to participate in a second interview. As an additional incentive, I was able to

offer them a $15 gift card to Amazon.com. In 2018, I conducted 22 of these in-depth semi-

structured follow-up interviews, again in person, over the phone, and on Skype. Audio

recordings were transcribed by a transcription service, and then I wrote summative narratives for

each interview.

As displayed in Table 1, the demographic characteristics of the Wave 2 subsample is

slightly different from that of Wave 1. An average of four years and three months passed

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between participants’ first interview and final data collection (either survey or interview), and the

mean age of the Wave 2 subsample is thus four years older. On the survey, I did not re-ask

participants to identify themselves by race/ethnicity or sexual orientation. Relying upon their

identification from Wave 1, the Wave 2 subsample is similar to that of the first wave, in terms of

race and sexual orientation. The relationship and education status of participants has changed,

however, with Wave 2 participants more likely to be partnered/married, and a greater percentage

having earned a doctoral or professional degree (J.D. or Ph.D.).

Delayers, Debaters, and Decliners

In conducting my first round of interviews with 72 childless women, I began most

interviews by asking participants whether or not they wanted to have children, and revisited this

question throughout the interviews. Based on grounded theory techniques, I was able to then

group participants into three emergent categories—delayers, debaters, and decliners—in order to

compare the trajectories of those who desired children, those who were undecided, and those

who did not want children (Glaser and Strauss 1999). These are not always discreet categories,

because participants’ answers sometimes contained nuance, hedging, and contradictions.

Regardless, as the investigator I inevitably made a decision in each case based on the overall

tenor of the entire interview. Of the 72 women interviewed in Wave 1, 27 (38%) were delayers,

27 (38%) were decliners, and 18 (25%) were debaters.

Attrition

A consequence of collecting additional data from participants four years after the first

Wave was collected is attrition of participants. The retention rate for Wave 2 was decent at 71%,

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but this means that the fertility outcomes for 21 participants, or 29% of the initial sample, are

unknown. Thus, Wave 1 and Wave 2 are not directly comparable. However, the goal of this

primarily interview-based project was not to generalize across all childless women, therefore

Wave 2 data continues to flesh out the initial findings from Wave 1.

Significantly, the biggest rate of attrition was among the delayers—those women who

indicated in Wave 1 that they wanted to have children, with only 56% participating in Wave 2.

Of those who indicated decliner status in Wave 1, 81% participated in Wave 2, and 78% of

debaters (those who were unsure or ambivalent about having kids) were retained. I can only

speculate why 44% of delayers chose not to complete the survey. Did they not want to respond

because things had not worked out as they had planned? Did they have children and were now

too busy to complete a survey?

The longitudinal data that I have collected in Wave 2 allows me to analyze changes in

fertility intention and desire of a subsample of the women in my study. Collecting additional data

in the form of surveys and interviews is a means of “returning to the field,” so to speak, in order

to add a longitudinal dimension. Over time, how do women reassess their desires for the future in

terms of how plans for children fit into their other personal and professional goals and the social

structural circumstances of their lives?

FINDINGS

In the course of interviews with the women in my study—who were all, in the initial

wave, childless—I learned that most were aware of a relationship between age and having

children, although this knowledge included both medically-informed expertise as well as hearsay

about the deterioration of egg quality, increased risks of genetic conditions, and a general loss of

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energy as they get older (Martin 2017). Many confessed worry about “waiting too long” to have

biological children, but some were also increasingly skeptical about popular statistics about

fertility decline happening at age 35, several of them citing a popular Atlantic Monthly article by

psychologist Jean Twenge that had been circulating (2013).

First, I present descriptive data from the follow-up survey about changes in fertility

desires and outcomes between Waves 1 and 2. This includes statistics about the reproductive

trajectories, reproductive outcomes, use and anticipated use of assisted reproductive technologies

(ARTs), changes and consistencies in fertility desire, and subjective assessments of preparation

and readiness to have children. Next, I present qualitative findings from the follow-up interviews

in order to provide more nuanced details regarding the motivations of participants in their

decision-making processes.

Reproductive Trajectories and Outcomes

Overall, 13 of the 51 Wave 2 participants (25%) had attempted, or had a same-sex partner

who attempted, to conceive, and 11 participants (22%) had successfully had at least one child

since the time of their initial Wave 1 interview (Table 2). Of the fifteen delayers who

participated in Wave 2, nine responded that they or a same-sex partner had attempted to get

pregnant since they were initially interviewed. Eight delayers had been successful in these

attempts and had children (two had two children, the other six all had one child), and one delayer

had still, as of last contact, not been successful in conceiving.

Table 2. Reproductive Trajectories of Delayers, Debaters, and Decliners at Wave 2

Reproductive Trajectory

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 Attempted to Did not attempt Had children Did not have
conceive to conceive children

Delayers (n = 15) 9 (60%) 6 (40%) 8 (53%) 7 (47%)

Debaters (n = 14) 4 (29%) 10 (71%) 3 (21%) 11 (79%)
Decliners (n = 22) 0 (0%) 22 (100%) 0 (0%) 22 (100%)
Total (n = 51) 13 (25%) 38 (75%) 11 (22%) 40 (88%)

Of the 14 debaters participating in Wave 2, ten had not made any attempts to get pregnant.

Four responded that they or a same-sex partner had attempted to conceive, three of whom were

successful and had each had one child. One woman who had been attempting to conceive had not

yet been successful. Perhaps not surprisingly, none of the 22 decliners in Wave 1 who

participated in Wave 2 had attempted to conceive or had had children. Their reproductive

outcomes have thus been most consistent with their earlier stated fertility desires.

Fertility Desire

Assessing women’s fertility desire was slightly more complicated for the Wave 2

subsample, as 22% of this group had already had children. Participants were asked, “Do you

want to have children in the future (including by birth, adoption, and/or fostering), in addition to

any children you may currently have?” The responses can be split into two groups: those who

have not had children, and those who are already parents (Table 3). Of the non-parents, eight

(20%) can now be classified as delayers who would like to have children, 23 (57%) can now be

classified as decliners who do not want to have any children, and 9 (23%) can be placed into the

debater category as being unsure or ambivalent. Of those who have already had children, two

(18%) would like to have more children, two (18%) did not want to have any additional children,

and seven (64%) were unsure or ambivalent.

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Table 3. Fertility Desire of Parents and Non-Parents at Wave 2

Fertility Desire
Want (more) children Ambivalent/unsure Do not want (more)
children

Non-parents (n = 40) 8 (20%) 9 (23%) 23 (57%)

Parents (n = 11) 2 (18%) 7 (64%) 2 (18%)
Total (no = 51) 10 (20%) 16 (31%) 25 (49%)

Survey data reveals both objective and subjective data about how participants’ fertility

desires have changed since they were interviewed in Wave 1. I compared responses to the

question about whether or not they would like to have children in the future with their responses

to this same question in their Wave 1 interview (see Table 4). For the delayers, a slight majority

(53%, n = 8) fulfilled their desires to have children and became parents. Another third (n = 5)

still wanted children but remained delayers, and 13% (n= 2) were now ambivalent or unsure and

had thus moved to the debater category. The decliners were the most consistent, with 91% (n =

20) still not wanting to have children, and only 9% (n = 2) becoming unsure or ambivalent

debaters. Significantly, there were no 180-degree flips from delayers to decliners or vice versa.

The debaters had the most varied outcome. 36% (n = 5) were still deciding whether or not they

would attempt to have children, but equal numbers had become parents (n = 3), made the

decision that they did want to have children (n = 3), and decided that they did not want to have

children (n = 3).

Table 4. Comparison of Fertility Desire with Fertility Outcome

Status at Wave 2 (Desire + Outcome)

Parents Delayers Debaters Decliners (Do

(Want (Ambivalent/ not want
Children but unsure about children)

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 have not had having
any) children)
Fertility Desire at Wave 1

Delayers (n = 15) 8 (53%) 5 (33%) 2 (13%) 0 (0%)

Debaters (n = 14) 3 (21%) 3 (21%) 5 (36%) 3 (21%)
Decliners (n = 22) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 2 (9%) 20 (91%)
Total (n = 51) 11 (22%) 8 (16%) 9 (18%) 23 (45%)

To assess how participants subjectively assessed changes in their fertility desire, I asked

“Has your desire for children increased, decreased, or stayed the same since you were first

interviewed?” Again, this is complicated by the inclusion of both women who had and had not

had children, so I have split their responses (See Table 5). Of those who have had children, 3

(27%) report an increase in their desire, 7 (64%) report no change, and 1 (9%) is not sure or does

not remember. No women who had children report a decrease in their desire to have children. Of

those who have not had children, 3 (17.5%) report an increase in desire to have children, 6 (15%)

report a decrease in desire, 20 (50%) report no change, and 7 (17.5%) are not sure or do not

remember.

Table 5. Subjective Assessment of Change in Fertility Desire

Change in Fertility Desire

Increased Decreased No Change Not sure/ Don’t

remember

Non-parents (n = 40) 7 (17.5%) 6 (15%) 20 (50%) 7 (17.5%)

Parents (n = 11) 3 (27%) 0 (0%) 7 (64%) 1 (9%)
Total (n = 51) 10 (20%) 6 (12%) 27 (53%) 8 (16%)

Social Fertility

Based on the concept of “social fertility,” which I have elsewhere defined as “the ideal

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social arrangements that enable a woman to be supported in childbearing and childrearing,” I

asked women to compare how prepared they were to have and raise a child, regardless of their

desire for or intention to have a child (Martin 2017). Specifically, they were asked, “Would you

say that you are MORE or LESS prepared to have and raise a child today than when you were

first interviewed?” Now that the women in Wave 2 are on average four years older than they

were in Wave 1, one might expect that their social fertility has increased (see Table 6). In fact,

the majority (67%) responded that they felt more prepared, and 20% felt just as prepared. Only

three women (6%) responded that they felt less prepared, and three (6%) answered that they did

not know or were unsure. Not surprisingly, most women who had become parents (82%)

reported feeling “more prepared” to have and raise kids, and zero reported feeling less prepared.

Table 6. Subjective Assessment of Change in Social Fertility

Change in Social Fertility

More Prepared Just as Prepared Less Prepared Don’t Know

Non-parents (n = 40) 25 (62.5%) 9 (22.5%) 3 (7.5%) 3 (7.5%)

Parents (n = 11) 9 (82%) 1 (9%) 0 (0%) 1 (9%)
Total (n = 51) 34 (67%) 10 (20%) 3 (6%) 4 (8%)

Those women who answered that they felt more or less prepared to have and raise

children were then prompted with the open-ended question: “If you can, please elaborate on why

you feel either more or less prepared to have and raise a child today. What factors about you or

your life have changed since you were first interviewed?” The responses women wrote in can be

clustered into structural, emotional, relational, and experiential factors.

By structural factors, I refer to those factors having to do with finances, employment,

education, and housing. The three women who reported feeling less prepared to have children

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provided only structural factors in their open-ended answers: “My work demands have increased,”

“Moved … to start building a tiny house with my husband. No room, no money, and no desire to

procreate,” and “Spouse has been unemployed, money is tighter than it was years ago.” Several

women who reported feeling more prepared to have and raise children also responded with

structural factors in their open-ended responses, including having a higher income and financial

stability, having a better job and job stability, completing a degree, and buying a house. One

participant who had been in graduate school and living with her boyfriend during the initial

interview responded in the follow-up survey very succinctly: “I’m married and I make a lot more

money.”

Emotional factors refer to feelings of being more psychologically and cognitively mature

and secure, and having improved mental health. Participants wrote on the follow-up survey with

such responses as, “I am generally more self-assured. I know my place in life and what my

personal ethics and goals are which I think would make me a better parent. I feel more

emotionally and mentally settled,” and “Emotionally/conceptually, it doesn't feel foreign and

impossible in the ways it did before.” A few participants mentioned that going to therapy has

helped prepare them emotionally.

By relational factors, I refer to responses in which women reported having greater

support from their partners, families, and communities. For example, regarding partners, women

reported feeling “more in tune” with their spouses, being “in a committed life partnership with

someone who is a great co-parent,” and having a relationship that has “strengthened in ways that

seem vital to raising a child as a team.” Others cited support from family members, neighbors,

and friends who have had children.

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 Finally, some women included in their open-ended responses experiential factors. That is,

they have had experiences that have led them to feel more prepared to be parents. These include

those who had become parents, with responses such as, “Having one makes me feel more

prepared on what to expect for a 2nd both from a personal perspective and how I can manage my

career and children.” Others felt more prepared because they have learned “vicariously” about

being a parent from their friends who are parents: “More mature, have seen my friends raise kids

so I have a better sense of what works (and what will just drive you nuts), I'm less afraid of

ruining them.”

Women who responded that they felt “just as” prepared, or were unsure if they were more

or less prepared to have and raise children did not necessarily have static, unchanging lives since

they were interviewed in Wave 1. They also experienced structural, emotional, relational, and

experiential changes in their lives, but did not identify them as factors in their preparedness for

being parent. In response to an open-ended question about what significant life changes they had

experienced since they were initially interviewed, answers included similar responses to those

cited above: marriage, moving, having a baby, new jobs and career changes, buying a house,

break-ups, and health issues.

Findings from in-depth interviews

Numerical data cannot fully capture the nuances of women’s thought processes regarding

deciding, planning, and attempting to have children. A subsample of 22 women participated in

in-depth interviews. This group included 6 delayers, 11 debaters, and 5 decliners (based on their

Wave 1 categorization). By speaking with them one-on-one in person, over phone, or by Skype, I

was able to gain greater insights into what had transpired in their lives over the past few years

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and ask probing questions about their decision-making processes. Below I present several

narratives of delayers, debaters, and decliners as examples of their reproductive trajectories.

Some delayers had stopped delaying, and shifted into the parent category or were

actively attempting to conceive. Simone was one of the delayers who had transitioned to

parenthood:

In Wave 1, Simone was 33 years old and knew that she wanted kids, but was waiting

until she had money saved up, had her health issues under control, and had moved to a

larger apartment. When I Skyped with her five years later, she had had one child and was

32 weeks pregnant. True to what she told me in her first interview, it was largely getting

her health and chronic pain issues under control that pushed her to attempt getting

pregnant. Yet even after she and her husband decided to try to conceive, it took them over

a year before they sought out help. They consulted with a fertility specialist, but wound

up conceiving one month later without receiving any fertility treatments, and she gave

birth to her daughter when she was 35 years old. For the second child, the most

significant factor in terms of timing was Simone’s age. At age 38, she was aware of the

“fertility window” as she put it, but she also didn’t want to feel like she was “too old,” in

terms of having enough energy, and being around for more of her children’s lives.

Marie, however, continued to delay:

I initially interviewed Marie when she was 29 and “pretty confident” that she wanted to

have children, although she would prefer to adopt and her partner would prefer to try to

have them biologically. Five years later, she still would like to have children, but the

impasse about how to have them remains. Marie told me that they were “on the verge of

starting to make a decision,” within the next three years, if not sooner, and that they

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 would like to have more than one child. In the meantime, they were waiting for Marie’s

partner’s job to stabilize and, because of a prior medical issue, will probably get fertility

testing to “see whether any of these options are foreclosed.”

Debaters were more likely to have changed their mind regarding whether or not they

wanted children, moving from the maybe to yes or no categories. Below are two narratives that

illustrate two of these moves from the debater category to the decliner or delayer categories,

respectively.

Belinda at age 34 was ambivalent about having kids, but when she completed the survey

and participated in a follow-up interview three years later, had moved into the no

category. It was in part the fact of aging that led her to ultimately decide not to have kids.

In her early 30s, she felt pressured by her aging body to have children, but kept not

feeling ready. Finally, by her mid-30s, she realized that the milestone of having kids “just

isn’t for me.” The certainty she now felt regarding this decision brought her a sense of

relief. “I felt like this is a choice I’m making. This isn’t something I’m missing. This isn’t

something I don’t get to experience, being pregnant and having a baby. This is a choice

I’ve made because I wanted these other things.” For Belinda, the choice not to have kids

meant that she could focus on travel, work, and, somewhat ironically, taking care of her

14-year-old niece, who she gained guardianship over.

Alex’s feelings regarding children had gone in the opposite direction from Belinda’s. She

was 31 when I first interviewed her, and unsure if she wanted to have children. When I

spoke to her on the phone five and a half years later, she had decided that she did want to

have children, and was in fact pregnant with an imminent due date. She said that it took

19
 her several years of deciding whether or not she wanted to have a child and become a

parent. I asked her how she went from being ambivalent to ultimately deciding to try to

conceive, and she answered that it took “a lot of talking.” She had an unintended

pregnancy that she terminated, but she and her husband kept circling back to whether or

not they would ever have a child. She also had one of those “catalyzing” moments that

Rosanna Hertz (2006) describes, in which an event occurs that spurs one to pursue

parenthood, and for Alex, this was the death of her beloved dog. Alex said that it “opened

up this … emotional space. … And when she was gone it kind of, it made me realize that

I was already doing a lot of the things. And it's not the same thing, and I don't think it is,

but I think that I was getting some of the same emotional hits from that experience. Once

I didn't have that anymore, I was like maybe I am more interested in being, in seeing

what else I could fill that space with, and maybe it's not a dog. Maybe it's an actual

human. And just jumping off the bridge and doing this.” Additionally, Alex was in a

more secure job than she was at the time of the first interview, had excellent benefits, and

was living in a much bigger apartment more amenable to growing a family.

In both cases, a combination of self-reflection and external factors pushed Belinda and Alex into

being confident in no longer being debaters. Belinda was now happily childfree, and Alex was

happily preparing to become a parent.

All debaters have not been able to make a final decision about parenting, however, and

many retained their ambivalence and uncertainty:

Brenda was 27 at the time of her initial interview, and when I caught up with her by

phone five years later, she was still unsure if she wanted children or not. At age 32, she

felt pressured to make her decision. In the first interview, finances weighed heavily in

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 Brenda’s decision to have children or not. By the time we talked in the follow-up

interview, Brenda said that work/life balance was a bigger factor for her. Because she

knew that she was someone who felt compelled to work, she didn’t know if she wanted to

be “super stressed” trying to balance work and kids. “I guess the question in my mind is,

‘Do I want that life? Is that who I want to be?’ And I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever

know. So am I just in limbo and will never know, and then I’ll be 50 and regret it? I don’t

know, maybe. Maybe not.”

Similarly, Marta still went back and forth, but was on the fence between being a debater and a

delayer because she never quite felt ready:

Marta was 30 when I first interviewed her, and four years later, she was leaning more

towards yes. However, at age 34, she was still “waiting for all of these external factors to

be in place.” The goal posts of these external factors, however, kept moving so that she

was always, somehow, never at the point where she would feel comfortable having a

child. When she was initially interviewed, she was working at an unstable start-up

company without any benefits or much job security, but she was now employed by a

university, had great benefits, and married her partner. Her new goal was to make at least

25% more than she currently earned so that she could save more money towards buying a

house. Marta recognized that her focus on “external factors” was masking her anxiety

about what was going on with her emotionally, and that she would be turning 35 sooner

than later. Maybe it was “easier than actually really focusing internally: Why isn’t this an

easy decision to make? … I just do feel a bit of pressure from the biological standpoint of

things.”

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Being ambivalent does not necessarily preclude one from attempting to become a parent. In this

case, Emily was both a debater and a tryer:

Emily, at age 34, was ambivalent about having kids when she was initially interviewed.

Four years later, she remained ambivalent, yet found herself actively trying to conceive,

in part because her wife really wants to have kids. The main impetus for Emily and her

wife to start trying to conceive was her age and the fact that she was now in a job that she

liked and was hopefully not going to move around anymore. “It was kind of a now or

never.”

Those who were categorized as decliners experienced the least amount of transition

between Wave 1 and Wave 2, the majority remaining within this category.

Kathleen was 32 years old when I initially interviewed her, and she did not want to have

children, although she said that she would consider fostering. When I talked with her

again four years later, she still did not want children, and no longer thought about

fostering. Something else that had changed was moving in with her partner, who has an

8-year-old daughter who sometimes lived with them. Her role, however, was not that of a

co-parent. “I just think of myself as a friend for her. … Or like a funky aunt or something.

… But not any sort of parenting role.” She was resolute in how having her own child

would detract from her current life by “taking away time to make art, go on vacation,

sleep in. I mean, I could probably go down the list of five billion reasons why I don’t

want to have kids, but basically, it would detract from my time, finances, and social life

and career, and artistic life.”

22
Since being initially interviewed, a number of the decliners were no longer capable of becoming

pregnant, either because of voluntary sterilization or a medical condition requiring removal of

reproductive function:

Orchid was 30 years old when I initially interviewed her, and she did not want to have

children. When I met up with her five and a half years later, she told me that she still felt

the same, and that after the discovery of a precancerous tumor, she no longer even had

the possibility of having a biological child because she had a hysterectomy and

oophorectomy. Orchid had been put in the unique position of having to make a quick

decision about having both ovaries removed at once, or waiting to remove one in order to

give her time to try to have children. She said she immediately decided to have them both

removed at once. “It was not even a question.” Presented with a choice, she did not

hesitate to eliminate the possibility of ever having kids. She has remained okay with her

decision since having the surgery, but conceded that she “had some mourning of like, ‘Oh

god, all the woman parts are gone,’ but not about motherhood or anything like that.”

Not all of the decliners from Wave 1 remained so absolute, however. Although Grace was still

leaning towards not having kids, she seemed to be slightly more open now:

When I initially interviewed Grace, she was 29 years old, and said that she did not want

to have children. By the time she completed the online survey three years later, she had

moved into the “maybe” or debater column, even though she had also indicated that her

desire for children had decreased. When I talked to her over Skype a few months after

she had completed the survey, I got a better sense of what her thinking regarding children

was. “My feeling right now is, I still don’t want to have kids. There’s still lots of places

for me to go, and things for me that I want to do. … It’s possible. I’m not saying I

23
 definitely want kids, but I could see myself maybe wanting kids in the future.” For now,

Grace was not planning to have children, because she liked the flexibility of her lifestyle,

but also thought that it could be fun, and that her boyfriend would make a good father.

By conducting intensive interviews with a subset of Wave 2 participants, I was able to

gain more insight into individual women’s motivations for becoming parents or choosing to be

childfree, changing their minds about whether or not they wanted children, and how they self-

evaluated their fertility desires and plans. In addition, through coding interview transcripts, I was

able to look across this group as a whole to draw out two emergent themes that seem to be most

relevant in reproductive decision-making. These were the ongoing issue of work-family balance,

and the role of aging and biology.

Struggles over work-family balance were articulated most obviously by those who had

become parents and now were stressed about managing their careers, children, relationships,

hobbies, and even sense of their own identities. However, this theme also came up by those who

were not parents. Some delayers and debaters worried about how they would manage the pace or

demands of their jobs once or if they had kids. Decliners also had busy lives, some of whom

deliberately made the choice not to have children so as not to sacrifice their careers or lifestyles.

This struggle over finding enough time in one’s life to commit fully to the people and activities

they found most important remained consistent from Wave 1 to Wave 2. As women got a few

years older and advanced further in their careers, making time for children did not typically get

any easier. Many of those who became parents, however, as strapped for time and stressed as

they were, realized that they just had to let go of some control over their and their partners’

schedules.

24
 Age and the biological clock pushed some women to start trying to conceive their first or

second child, feeling that the limited window of their fertile years left them little time to wait.

Those who had not yet decided when, how, or whether to have children also felt this “bit of

pressure from the biological standpoint of things,” as Marta put it, to finally go ahead and make

those decisions. However, not all women who considered biology as a factor necessarily viewed

it as a pressure point. Some treated their aging bodies in terms of fate—if they waited so long

that having children would be impossible, so be it, it was not meant to be. In that case, their

bodies and/or the passing of time would make the decision on their behalf to not have biological

children, and rather than pursue fertility treatment, these women imagined that they would either

remain childless or move on to adoption or fostering a child. As for the decliners, one might

expect that the biological clock was largely irrelevant to their reproductive decision-making, but

some looked forward to the day that they no longer had to worry about getting pregnant. Again,

the theme of the biological clock and anticipated infertility was also present across Wave 1 data,

but in Wave 2 we see some women having been propelled into action, increased anxiety, or

resolution.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

By the second Wave of research, the women in this study were now on average four

years older than when first interviewed. This puts the average age of participants at 36, one year

past what some women in their Wave 1 interviews had referred to as the “magic age” of 35

(Martin 2017). Many of them were aware or had been informed by doctors that pregnancy after

the age of 35 would mark them as being “geriatric” or of “advanced maternal age,” that risks of

genetic defects such as Down Syndrome increased, and that the quality of their eggs were

deteriorating, potentially making successful conception a more difficult process. Worries about

25
their so-called “biological clock” weighed on many of their minds as they contemplated whether

or not they wanted children, and how old they would be if and when they attempted to have them.

Descriptive statistics from the survey indicate that only 25% of the subsample of women

surveyed in Wave 2 had attempted to have children in the intervening years, 22% successfully. If

we remove the decliner population, however, 60% of delayers and 29% of debaters had

attempted to have children. Of those who had not become parents in the intervening years, the

ones who had changed their minds the most were, perhaps not surprisingly, the debaters. That is,

55% of the women who were unsure or ambivalent about having children during Wave 1 had

ultimately made a decision—27% decided that they wanted children, and 27% decided that they

did not want them. The remaining 45% were still struggling over this decision.

Qualitative data from open-ended questions and in-depth interviews reveal that a number

of factors contributed to decisions these women made regarding whether or not to take the

plunge into parenting. Age and the biological clock factors into the pressure that women felt to

either attempt to have children, or to finally make a decision about whether or not they would

ever have them. However, in addition to their aging bodies, structural, emotional, relational, and

experiential factors contributed to whether or not they actually felt prepared to have and raise

children—whether they attempted to have them, or even wanted to have children or not.

In sum, by collecting qualitative and quantitative data from participants about their

reproductive plans and desires at more than one point in time, we may track how motivations and

desires change over time, whether actions and behaviors remain consistent with motivations and

desires, and how women interpret these changes, inconsistencies, and fulfillments of their desires.

In their critique of interview-based studies, Jerolmack and Khan (2014) argued that “talk is

cheap,” and that there are often contradictions between what people say and what they do. By

26
asking women in one particular moment whether or not they want children, and then coming

back several years later to see if they’ve followed through on their initial plans, we are not

necessarily verifying the truth of their initial statements, but rather are tracking how life happens,

how people change, how some individuals are remarkably consistent and others do not stick to

their convictions, and how humans are not entirely rational, especially around such an emotional

topic as having children. Including longitudinal elements to studies of reproductive motivations

and desires helps us to compare them with reproductive outcomes, yet what is also essential

beyond statistics are details about the feelings and cognitive processes that accompany

individuals as they make decisions and take actions regarding becoming parents.

27
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