More women like me are choosing to be childfree. Is this the age(2)

I’m starting with illustrative ostriches because I’ve learned, over the years, that people tend not to believe me if I indicate that I don’t feel, and have never felt, the urge to have children. Indicate, because I rarely say it outright. If directly asked, I respond, “Oh, I don’t know, not yet,” as if there’s a question about it – as though I haven’t been certain, all my life, that I’m at least as disinclined to parent a child as I would an ostrich. I equivocate with the hope of heading off the arguing, the unsolicited assurances about what my body wants and how I should live my life: “You’ll change your mind,” I’m often told. “Hey, you never know.” Except I haven’t; I do. Thus, ostriches.

But how can this be so difficult to believe? My position should be, by now, plausible: the American fertility rate is at a historic 35-year low. The so-called “replacement rate” – the national birthrate believed to be optimal for population renewal and stability – is 2.1 babies per couple; today people with wombs are expected to have 1.71 children in their lifetimes. And that 1.71 estimate came before the pandemic; in this changed world, in which it seems all the parents of young children I know are having by far the hardest time of their parenting lives, it seems likely that fertility rates will keep falling.