Facets of Agency in Stories of Transforming From Childless by Choice to Mother

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12402
• Author: Julia Moore
• Published date: 01 August 2017
• Date: 01 August 2017

J M University of Utah

Facets of Agency in Stories of Transforming From

Childless by Choice to Mother

Family scholars have explored in depth how

and why some women choose to never have

children. However, some childless-by-choice

(also termed childfree or voluntarily childless)

women—who have declared their desire and

intention to never have children—ultimately

become mothers because of changes in choice

or circumstance. Through a qualitative analysis

of interviews with mothers who once articulated

themselves as permanently childless by choice,

this article presents three facets of agency in

women’s stories about childbearing transfor-

mations: accidental conception, ambiguous

desire, and purposeful decision. Participant

interviews indicated that each facet of agency

was enabled and constrained by multiple indi-

vidual, relational, and cultural considerations,

including self-described biological urges, part-

ners’ childbearing desires and intentions, and

cultural stigma against abortion. Pathwaysfrom

childless by choice to mother often encompass

multiple facets of agency and include move-

ments in and out of various fertility desires and

intentions before conceiving.

During the past 4 decades, scholars have

demonstrated that women’s choice to never

have children is culturally devalued in

Department of Communication, University of Utah, 255

South Central Campus Drive, Room 2521, Salt Lake City,

UT 84112 (julia.moore@utah.edu).

Key Words: childlessness, feminist, fertility/family

planning/infertility, motherhood, pregnancy, qualitative

researc h.

comparison to motherhood (Ashburn-Nardo,

2017; Gillespie, 2000; Houseknecht, 1979;

Veevers, 1980). Although U.S. national surveys

have shown that some women who once said

that they never intended to have children end up

expecting to have children or having children

(Heaton, Jacobson, & Holland, 1999), fewer

scholars have engaged in systematic investi-

gations about how or why women who never

wanted to have children come to be mothers.

“Reproduction has been so taken for granted,”

wrote Franke (2001), “that only women who

are not parents are regarded as having made

a choice—a choice that is constructed as non-

traditional, nonconventional, and for some,

non-natural” (p. 185). Exploring the ways

that women become mothers after articulating

themselves as permanently childless by choice

provides deeper insight into the uidity of child-

bearing intentions. Scholars have already begun

to consider childbearing desires and intentions

as enabled and constrained by many factors

(e.g., Bernardi, Mynarska, & Rossier, 2015;

Letherby, 1994; Meyers, 2001; Miller, 2011;

Park, 2005), and attending to the shifting famil-

ial formations of previously childless-by-choice

women adds a novel layer of understanding

to, and recognition for, women’s lived expe-

riences of (never) having children. To add to

this conversation, I engaged in a qualitative

thematic analysis of the life stories of mothers

who once told others that they never wanted to

have children to analyze three multidimensional

facets of agency that characterized women’s

stories of childbearing transformations.

1144 Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (August 2017): 1144–1159

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12402

From Childless by Choice to Mother 1145

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Birth rates have diminished since the late 1960s

and early 1970s in the United States as a result

of access to abortion and oral contraceptives for

adults and minors, delays in marriage and child-

bearing, and women’s increased participation in

the labor force (Brewster & Rindfuss, 2000;

Guldi, 2008). In 2013, the U.S. total fertility

rate, or estimated number of births per woman

during her lifetime, was 1.86 births per woman,

down from 1.88 in 2012, 1.89 in 2011, and 1.93

in 2010 (Hamilton, Hoyert, Martin, Strobino, &

Guyer, 2012; Martin, Hamilton, Ventura, Oster-

man, & Mathews, 2013; Osterman, Kochanek,

MacDorman, Strobino, & Guyer, 2015). Simul-

taneously, scientists at the National Center for

Health Statistics estimated that the percentage

of childless-by-choice women—who have made

the decision to never have children and are

also termed childfree and voluntarily childless

(Moore, 2014)—rose from 2.4% in 1982 to 4.3%

in 1990 to 6.6% in 1995 (Paul, 2001). Abma and

Martinez (2006) analyzed the National Survey of

Family Growth to estimate that the percentage of

voluntarily childless women aged 35 to 44 years

grew from 5% in 1982 to 8% in 1988, peaking at

9% in 1995 and then declining to 7% in 2002.

However, statistics about voluntary child-

lessness are scarce and muddled; it is difcult

to estimate the number of childless-by-choice

individuals because many large-scale surveys

do not delineate between individuals who delay

childbearing and those who desire never to

have children, between childbearing desires

and intentions, or only survey married individ-

uals (Abma & Martinez, 2006; Bernardi et al.,

2015; Moore, 2014). Furthermore, it may be

impossible to cleanly isolate “voluntary” from

“involuntary” childlessness when considering

how delayed childbearing may contribute to

infertility or how infertility may contribute to

the choice to not pursue alternative avenues

such as adoption or assisted reproductive tech-

nologies (Jeffries & Konnert, 2002; Lundquist,

Budig, & Curtis, 2009). Regardless, in the

United States, the rate of childbearing is on the

decline while the rate of voluntary childlessness

appears to be on the rise, indicating that more

women are choosing to never have children.

Pathways to Voluntarily Childlessness

The choice to never have children is not only

a decision but also an identity that is often

stigmatized (Moore, 2014; Moore &

Geist-Martin, 2013; Park, 2002). Scholars have

adopted multiple perspectives to understand

women’s pathways to voluntary childlessness,

including the study of motives and dyadic

decision making (Blackstone & Stewart, 2016;

Houseknecht, 1979; Lee & Zvonkovic, 2014;

Park, 2005). Motives for choosing childlessness

include the inuence of negative parenting mod-

els, the desire for an adult-oriented lifestyle,

personality and lack of parenting skills, ambi-

tious career goals, negative feelings about

children, and concerns about population growth

(Houseknecht, 1979; Park, 2005). Partnership,

better health, higher education, and more pres-

tigious employment also correlate with chosen

childlessness (Mynarska, Matysiak, Rybinska,

Toccioni, & Vignoli, 2015). Delineating motives

for choosing childlessness is complex because

many individuals only justify their decision

after the fact when called to do so, long after

the choice has been made (Veevers, 1980).

Therefore, pathways to voluntary childlessness

are often processual, lengthy, and complex

(Blackstone & Stewart, 2016).

To delve deeper into the complexities of

dyadic decision-making, Durham and Braith-

waite (2009) investigated what happens when

married couples come together with simi-

lar or different childbearing intentions. The

researchers developed a typology of fam-

ily planning trajectories of couples based on

each spouse’s childbearing preference. In the

accelerated-consensus trajectory, each spouse

entered the relationship with similar preferences

for never havingchildren, resulting in high levels

of satisfaction. In the mutual-negotiation trajec-

tory, each spouse was uncertain about family

planning preferences, resulting in variable lev-

els of satisfaction. In the unilateral-persuasion

trajectory, one spouse persuaded the other never

to have children, also resulting in variable levels

of satisfaction. In the bilateral-persuasion tra-

jectory, one spouse desired children while the

other did not, resulting in a low level of satis-

faction. Alternatively, Morell (2000) adopted

a poststructural perspective to identify two

contradictory experiences of voluntarily child-

less women. Some participants experienced a

“wavering no” where their comfort with child-

lessness was temporarily disrupted, whereas

others transformed the “vacant emptiness”

of childlessness into a “radical openness that

allows for various possibilities” (p. 319). Morell