Evening When She Was 14 Years Old, Laura Scott was washing dishes in the kitchen with her mother when she decided she didn't want to have a child. "You might change your mind," said her mother, whom Scott describes as "bone tired" from a life in which she "didn't have any time for herself." Scott's mom worked as a samplemaker for an upholstery company; after making dinner for Scott and her brother, she'd park them in front of the television and go down to the basement to spend her evening cutting and sewing. That life was what "doing it all" meant to Scott. "I learned you could—but did you want to?" she says. At 26, Scott got married and waited for her mind to change. "I thought 1 would be struck by a biological lightning bolt," she recalls. "It never happened. And I realized I was going to be fine." As she says from her Tampa office, where she works as a professional coach, writer and documentary filmmaker, "My main motive not to have kids was that I loved my life the way it was." Now 50, Scott is more than fine: she's fulfilled. And she's not alone. The birthrate in the U.S. is the lowest in recorded American history, which includes the fertility crash of the Great Depression. From 2007 to 2011, the most recent year for which there's data, the fertility rate declined 9%. A 2010 Pew Research report showed that childlessness has risen across all racial and ethnic groups, adding up to about 1 in 5 American women who end their childbearing years maternity-free, compared with 1 in 10 in the 1970s. Even before the recession hit, in 2008, the proportion of women ages 40 to 44 who had never given birth had grown by 80%, from 10% to 18%, since 1976, when a new vanguard began to question the reproductive imperative. These statistics may not have the heft of childlessness in some European countries— like Italy, where nearly one-quarter of women never give birth—but the rise is both dramatic and, in the scope of our history, quite sudden.
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