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The day after my boyfriend proposed, his mother asked me, “How do you want to raise your kids?” My boyfriend wanted five children. I was ambivalent. But in the face of his declaration that he wanted to marry me — and start procreating ASAP — the baby question became urgent. I deferred his proposal, and we spent the next six months arguing, often about our possible children. At some point, I went online in search of help, where I discovered a book: The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life, by the therapist and “baby decision coach” Merle Bombardieri.
Originally published in 1981, The Baby Decision is a thinking person’s self-help book. It pairs existential musings on regret with workbook-style prompts — less airport paperback, more in the tradition of the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom with a dash of The Artist’s Way. In our fraught moment of diminishing reproductive rights and demographic panic, this book has become an unlikely cult bible for the baby ambivalent, a group whose ranks have been growing among 30-something millennials in the U.S. Reasons for my generation’s protracted decision-making are, by now, common knowledge: Some worry about housing and health-care costs, others about the environment and political climate. Thanks in part to egg-freezing, which became commercially available in the U.S. in 2012, we can remain on the fence longer than ever. As a woman in my 30s, I sense the anxiety at parties and in my group chats; it sometimes seems like the only thing on anyone’s mind is whether, when, and how to have a kid.
The Baby Decision may be as old as the oldest millennials, but it is still landing with me and my friends. Many readers I spoke to about the book called it “ahead of its time,” citing Bombardieri’s queer-inclusive language, her endorsement of a “one and done” approach to childbearing for some people, and her humanistic belief that there are many ways to build a valuable life. Parenthood, she believes, should not be the default path. Rather, she suggests, everyone — future parents included — should consider not having children. “The more they know about why they are making that choice, the better they are going to be able to cope when things are hard,” Bombardieri told me.
From this premise, The Baby Decision invites readers to picture almost every stage of their life as a parent and as a child-free person. This is the book’s power: It helps readers turn their abstract, often societally generated pictures of adulthood into something vivid and personal.
That’s what happened to me. In those fights with my boyfriend, I saw my future children. Sometimes, I wanted them; other times, I wanted to flee. Now, I just had to choose.
Many people discover The Baby Decision as I did, during a “tug-of-war” with their partner, as Bombardieri puts it in the book. Sara, 27, a student in Seattle, isn’t sure if she wants kids; her live-in partner of nearly seven years does. She learned of Bombardieri on the baby-ambivalence sub-Reddit r/Fencesitter, where people often recommend The Baby Decision. “I never dreamed about having a family,” Sara told me. Her childhood taught her to see family as an “automatic,” all-consuming duty. Her parents, immigrants from Cambodia, have few pastimes and few friends. “Family is sort of their hobby,” she said. Conversely, her partner has always wanted to be a dad. “He would regret it pretty deeply if he never got to experience that in life.”
The Baby Decision has made Sara reconsider childbearing, particularly the chapter entitled “Poison Vials,” in which Bombardieri addresses societal myths about babies. Reading the myths about parenthood — that it’s awful, restrictive, and should be entered into without ambivalence — Sara thought, “Oh, wow, I definitely believe in every one of these.” (Sara says her partner read parts of the book, too; it only reaffirmed his desire to have kids.)
But even as Sara has begun to imagine parenting, she is also tuning in to a part of her that simply does not want kids. Performing Bombardieri’s “chair dialogue,” an exercise in which Bombardieri asks the reader to move between two chairs, enacting an argument between their child-free side and parent side, Sara was surprised: “The child-free side was … more angry than I thought it would be.” She realized she had not given herself permission to truly imagine life without children. “The child-free option just feels a lot more radical, in terms of society,” she said.
If Sara and her partner can’t agree, they have talked about breaking up. Two possible lives loom ahead. They might not pick the same one.
Ambivalence lies at the heart of Bombardieri’s book, as well as much fertility anxiety. Many Baby Decision readers told me they felt lonely with their uncertainty, as though everyone around them is assured in their choices: struck with incurable baby fever or stridently child-free.
For LeeAnne and Sarah Pedrick, a D.C.-based married couple in their early 30s, it’s baby season. “We go to five-to-seven weddings a year, and within the year … somebody’s pregnant,” LeeAnne, an attorney, said. Their fridge is covered in Christmas cards featuring their straight friends’ newborns. (For their queer friends, babies are less imminent.) Last summer, an internet search led LeeAnne to buy The Baby Decision. The couple have been reading it aloud to each other, breaking to journal separately.
The Pedricks’ calculations are familiar: Would raising a child in this political environment, as LeeAnne put it, “be raising a pig for slaughter?” (She hedged, “As a former child, I have a lot of fun being alive.”) The Pedricks may also have to hunt for a health-insurance policy that will cover same-sex fertility treatments or budget legal fees for adoption. Weighing these drawbacks — and imagining investing in their hobbies, like fostering dogs and cats — sometimes has them dreaming of being “the gay aunts,” said Sarah, who works in clean energy.
The Baby Decision has helped them imagine the positives of childbearing, particularly Bombardieri’s visualizations that encourage readers to picture a child as a baby, an elementary-schooler, a rebellious teenager, and a college student. LeeAnne, who worries about sleepless nights caring for an infant, discovered that envisioning a grown-up child, even an angry adolescent, was appealing. When I spoke to the Pedricks in late December, they were leaning toward having kids. But, LeeAnne added, “this could change by noon tomorrow.”
Anna, 37, a researcher in D.C., felt that the discourse she has absorbed around parenthood from friends and social media leans negative. “A couple decades ago, the story was, ‘Oh, motherhood is amazing, and your life will be incomplete without it,’” she said. Today, as people speak more openly about the challenges of having children, “you’re not hearing a lot of good things about being a parent.”
“I think I was kind of struggling with the advice that you shouldn’t have kids unless you really, really, really want them, and I didn’t feel like that described me very well,” Anna said. Her husband did not have strong feelings either way. Reading The Baby Decision was “formative” for Anna, because the book helped her understand that she could be happy with or without kids. She brought it on a trip with college friends. “Whenever there was a quiet moment, I would pull it out.” It spurred conversations and shed light on an intimate, often opaque decision-making process.
Anna and her husband had a child last year. The Baby Decision did not rid Anna of her ambivalence, but it let her come to terms with its inevitability. “I just needed the permission that it was okay to still have a kid,” she said, “even if I didn’t feel 100 percent sure that it was the right thing.”
Last February, I visited Bombardieri in Florida, where she lives for half the year in a squat, pale-green manufactured home in a 55-plus community where residents steer golf carts through narrow lanes and plastic pink flamingos teeter in yards. It may seem odd that Bombardieri, a 76-year-old, has connected so deeply with millennials. But today’s baby-decision-makers can trace their anxieties at least as far back as the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which shaped Bombardieri much as it shaped our contemporary landscape of choice.
In the autumn of 1970, Merle Malkoff, 21, a psychology major at Michigan State University, received a surprise marriage proposal from her boyfriend, Rocco Bombardieri. One of six siblings, Rocco expected to have several children; Merle was less certain. She had worked as a camp counselor for bratty teenagers who made motherhood seem unappealing. Plus having been raised by a bright mother stultified by domestic expectations, Merle feared that children might impede her independence. She resented Rocco’s “assumption that if I loved him and because I had a uterus and because I had breasts, I would want to use those body parts with him.”
Merle turned Rocco down. But they didn’t split up. Instead, the pair spent the next eight months taking walks around the campus botanical gardens, discussing their future, including Rocco’s involvement in child care. Meanwhile, Merle worked in two day cares; she loved those kids and admired their parents, many of them academics with fulfilling family and professional lives who served as a counterexample to her own mother. Merle was altering her picture of what motherhood could mean. She and Rocco married within a year of Rocco’s original proposal. They had two daughters by the time Merle turned 30, moving quickly in part because Merle was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian disease, which she feared might impact her fertility.
Merle had long been an avowed feminist; in college, when sexual freedom was in vogue, she dated around — but “I wasn’t off trying to do the kinkiest things I could find,” she said. Bombardieri’s role models, among them Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, had no children. She told me she was startled to realize recently that Ms. magazine — that essential periodical of the women’s movement, which published its first issue in 1972 — didn’t even exist when Rocco proposed. One pop feminist of the period, Ellen Peck, author of the 1971 book The Baby Trap, seemed to relish mocking parents; on Mother’s Day 1972, Peck published an obituary for motherhood in the New York Times. These were white-feminist debates; many Black feminists’ pictures of liberation had long included motherhood.
For Bombardieri to spend the late 1970s and early ’80s writing a book that cast motherhood and non-motherhood as equally legitimate modes of being a feminist was “really remarkable,” said Peggy Heffington, author of Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother. “In the early ’80s, I don’t know of anyone else who was thinking that way.”
Bombardieri’s measured stance may have worked against her success. Peck sold 10,000 copies of The Baby Trap in ten days, writes Heffington in Without Children; The Baby Decision sold 8,000 copies in five years. After the book went out of print, leftover copies were donated to nursing homes — a joke that seemed to confirm Bombardieri’s irrelevance. Her work sat in libraries through several reincarnations of feminism: the ’80s anti-feminist backlash, the ’90s “mommy wars” between working and stay-at-home moms, the aughts era of women “having it all,” and the girlboss-y 2010s. Occasionally, Bombardieri would hear from enthusiastic readers who had discovered her book in libraries, and in 2016, in part in response to reader interest, Bombardieri self-published the reissue.
She plans to publish a follow-up, Baby or Childfree, this year, in which she will address topics she feels are of unique concern to millennials and Gen Z–ers: among them, climate change, burden-sharing between couples, and fears about the bodily experience of pregnancy.
When Katie Wilson, now 47, learned of The Baby Decision more than a decade ago, a copy of the book cost over $1,000 on Amazon. But at the time, Bombardieri was offering decision-coaching services and running workshops. It was cheaper for Wilson, a consultant, to fly from her home in D.C. to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend one of Bombardieri’s workshops at a community learning center. Wilson remembers paying about $200 for the event; today, Bombardieri runs a version of these workshops online with her daughter Vanessa for $625, which also includes coaching sessions with both Bombardieris.
“This was a very lonely time for me,” Wilson said. She had been with her now-husband since the age of 28, and they had always agreed they did not want children. As she got older, her sense that time was running out made her reevaluate. She spun into anxiety about logistics, finances, and schools, nagged by the sense that she should be planning for a child she did not necessarily want. She was candid with her husband about her “unsettling thoughts.” He was not second-guessing being child-free but was open to rethinking their plans if she developed strong feelings about parenting. But spending a day in a room of other people all torn on the baby decision made her worries less frightening. “After going to that workshop, I had a framework, I had resources, I had tools, I had exercises,” Wilson said.
Among those tools were Bombardieri’s guided visualizations — much of the same material that appears in The Baby Decision — which led Wilson to realize her image of a child was “idyllic”: spinning around in a field with a child wearing a white dress, like in a laundry commercial. By contrast, when Wilson performed the “rocking chair” exercise, a prompt that also appears in The Baby Decision, in which Bombardieri asks her clients and readers to imagine themselves at 75, having lived two potential lives, one with children, one without, Wilson felt like her child-free 75-year-old self “had missed out on nothing.” Eventually, she returned to her original stance with greater confidence.
During the six months I spent arguing with my boyfriend, I pictured myself having children. Sometimes, I wanted them. More often, I did not. I suspected that my boyfriend would leave me to do the lion’s share of the parenting, and I feared losing myself. But I had no picture of an adulthood without children, and I hated to miss out on motherhood, which I had always been told entailed the highest form of love. (Bombardieri describes this idea, often angrily, as a myth.)
In Florida, where I met Bombardieri and her daughter Vanessa, a certified coach who will take over her mother’s coaching practice when she retires, I asked to meet Rocco. I wanted his take on the months he and Bombardieri had spent deliberating; it seemed like a healthier version of the period I had spent reflecting after my own proposal.
Sitting in the Bombardieris’ living room in the late afternoon, Rocco was blithe: He saw children as “total gifts,” and he got them. In fact, he added, tilting in his chair, “I was voting for more children.” He especially would have liked more grandchildren. Vanessa is child-free, though at one point she and her wife froze embryos before preferring to focus on their lives as artists (when not decision coaching, Vanessa is a theater artist and producer); her elder sister, Marcella, a journalist, and her husband have one child. When I spoke to Rocco, his desire to have more grandkids was top of mind, as his sister, a mother of four, had recently passed away. When she was ailing, his sister’s large family descended from across the country to surround her.
Talking to Bombardieri and Rocco in their living room was like seeing a live-action version of the “rocking chair” exercise: two older people reflecting on the life they have created together with all its pleasures and sacrifices. Even at this age, things were still not straightforward. In The Baby Decision, Bombardieri writes, “There is no justification for having a child as protection against the loneliness of old age,” a sentiment she told me she stands by. Yet in her husband’s presence, Bombardieri spoke gently. “We are talking about a loss for Rocco,” she said, in the voice I imagine she uses when she counsels couples.
It was awkward for a moment. Rocco broke the tension. “There’s a line I got from Merle,” he said pleasantly. “Nobody gets everything in life.”
That night, alone at dinner, I found myself shifting between seats as I ate, typed, and flipped through Bombardieri’s book. I looked like a parody of someone performing Bombardieri’s “chair dialogue,” the exercise in which one’s parent side and child-free side argue. I had felt too awkward to try it when I first read The Baby Decision. I wondered if I should do so now.
But I have made my choice. I didn’t marry the baby-hungry boyfriend. A few weeks after I met my now-spouse, Bill, I told him that I did not want children. It felt new to be so firm about it. “Good to know,” he said. He had always been ambivalent about kids. As we dated longer, my mind occasionally flitted to children. I could picture them, as I had with my ex; the difference here was that I could imagine wanting these kids. I pictured myself reading to a child, Bill cooking us dinner. And yet, whenever we spoke about it, we agreed that our interest in real-life children had not changed. We like our days as they are, with their negative space and possibility, with each other, with chosen family.
A few years into our relationship, as our choice calcified into reality, the matter came up again; I was about to publish a novel about reproductive choice. Bill became emotional as we talked. I was terrified: Had he changed his mind? No, he said. What he was feeling had to do with finitude. The baby decision, like any decision, is, as Bombardieri writes, difficult because it is about mortality. Bombardieri encourages child-free people to mourn the children we will not have, an idea that once bothered me. But I think I have done that. I am glad to have spent so much time imagining them. It is a little like living twice.
More From This Series
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