Photo-illustration by Newsweek/ Courtesy Christina Wyman
By Christina Wyman
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On a recent Sunday evening, I sat down to quickly check my email after dinner. As an essayist who writes about women, family and cultural issues—my choice to remain child-free chief among them—I'm used to getting messages from people I don't know who've read my work.
But one I received that evening stopped me in my tracks.
"You come across as a serious, intentional, spiritual, thoughtful person. That's the kind of person who should be having children! I hope you'll keep the discussion open...You don't want to look back later on and say, wow, I could have had kids and it could have worked out great.”
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I instantly felt my breath change as I began to read this stranger's words, which landed in my inbox on a holiday.
When it comes to the choices I’ve made about my body, I’ve heard from far more men than I ever have women. The nastiness, condescension and threats I’ve received over time, on any topic, have invariably been from men. The email above, which I received late on a recent Sunday night, is practically a love letter. Still, it made me see red.
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I thought I was done getting angry when people questioned my choice to remain child-free. I’ve been managing other people's responses to my fertility for almost 20 years—doctors, acquaintances, nosy family members. It’s old. It’s boring. It’s entirely 19th century.
I am so tired of hearing about my choice to remain child-free, especially from men.
I remember when my father pestered me about the topic during a phone call about 10 years ago. I was living in Wisconsin while my partner was in Michigan. We were in a long-distance relationship and not yet married, but our decision to abstain from parenthood had already been solidified.
I had not asked my father for his opinion.
“But Christina!” he protested. “What about grandchildren?”
“If you want more children, you are free to have them,” I replied.
“But if you had kids, you’d have so much more writing material,” he said with a laugh.
“It is not a child’s job to provide me with material,” I scoffed.
My father is a smart man. He dropped the topic and hasn’t brought it up since.
In some ways, I’m sympathetic to the man who emailed me about the status of my uterus late that Easter night. He could not have known that my mother sold her house last year without telling her family, and that we—her children and grandchildren—still don’t know where she is. (We know she’s alive because she has created a hobby out of selling our gifts to her, and also our childhood memorabilia, on Facebook Marketplace.)
The man who sent me this message could not have known that nearly every maternal role model I had as a child failed me—from family friends to godmothers to aunts to an absentee grandmother. Therapy taught me that, if I’m ever in need of maternal support, I must provide it to myself—a devastatingly lonely and depressing task.
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For all these reasons and so many more, choosing to become a mother would have been as painful and fraught a choice as choosing to not become one.
And I am far from alone in my choice to remain child-free. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, births in the U.S. jumped a mere 1% in 2024, and rates have generally hovered at historic lows in recent years. And according to the Pew Research Center, the share of U.S. adults younger than 50 without children who say they are unlikely to ever have kids rose from 37% to 47% between 2018 and 2023.
There’s a lot more this man doesn’t know about me. He doesn’t know my financial situation or the kind of relationship I’m in. He doesn’t know anything about my health, including the fact that I recently underwent a uterine ablation. Thanks to the procedure, which removes uterine lining to treat heavy periods, I have a quality of life that I haven’t experienced in more than a decade. The other side of that coin is that it renders pregnancy life-threatening. My doctor made this abundantly clear before I wound up on her operating table.
“You must, must, must use birth control,” she cautioned. “Your risk of placenta accreta is 20-fold if you get pregnant. It could be a catastrophe.”
According to Mayo Clinic, placenta accreta is a dangerous condition where the placenta attaches too deeply into the uterine wall, potentially causing life-threatening blood loss, alongside other complications during delivery.
As far as I was concerned, the benefits to ablating my uterus far outweighed the risks. I am no longer anemic and my blood pressure has since stabilized.
So when I first received that message from the stranger, I tried to imagine that it was well-intended. He’s older, and a grandfather, I said to myself. He was kind and means no harm, I also said to myself. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
His words certainly come across as caring, don't they? Until you read them a few times.
But as much as I wanted to give this man a pass, I’m tired of giving passes. Women especially are socially conditioned to keep the peace and center others’ comfort at all costs. I don’t know what it is about a person who doesn’t stop to think, “Perhaps this woman does not need to hear my opinion on what she should do with her uterus, nor does she need to manage my beliefs about how she’ll come to regret her decision to not grow her family beyond her spouse and cats.” And this inability to stop and think before we speak has become entirely too normalized.
It took reading and rereading his email before I realized: Telling a woman that she comes across “as a serious, intentional, spiritual, thoughtful person” in a message designed to critique her personal decisions is not kind. Telling her that you don’t want her to look back with regret—as though she is required to care even a little bit about your opinion—is not kind. All of this is patronizing and condescending. Such emails are no better than a child-free person saying to an expecting couple, “You might really want to rethink your choices. I wouldn’t want you to look back later and say, wow, I could have enjoyed my life way more if I had chosen the child-free path.”
And before we get it twisted, writing publicly about our experiences and choices does not make our choices public property.
I care about kids. I write books for them. I meet hundreds of children every year in my life as an author. I am also an educator. I have designed a life in the service of children, on my own terms. It’s precisely why I worked so hard to overcome what I’ve overcome: to build a life on my terms.
I generally do not participate in conversations that question my life choices, and did not respond to that email. I’m under no delusion that people who take the time out of their day to target a stranger’s inbox with their unsolicited ideas about women’s bodies are persuadable, much less teachable. But my hope is that the more women speak out about their experiences to broader audiences, the less normalized judging our reproductive choices will become.
Christina Wyman is a USA TODAY and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of the novels Jawbreaker, Slouch and Breakout.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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