The Decision to Be Childfree
There wasn’t a single moment when I decided I didn’t want to be a mother. If I had to explain it, it felt like waiting for an important phone call that simply never came. For a long time, the term for women like me was childless, which suggests a lack of children, maybe even a longing for them. I prefer the term “childfree.” In 2023, Statistics Canada reported that one-third of Canadians between 15 and 49 years old did not intend to have children. Fertility rates have declined across every childbearing age group over the past decade, except for a slight uptick among women aged 35 to 44. The overall Canadian fertility rate in 2023 was a record low of 1.26 per woman.
My decision stemmed from hundreds of small experiences that compounded over the years—the way teenagers yelled and swore at teachers in my Mississauga high school, the tired eyes of an old friend who became a teen mom, the high costs of post-secondary education (though I was lucky that my parents paid for some of mine). As a young person, I acknowledged that parenthood required a lot of time and patience, which even then, I knew I didn’t want to make room for.
Throughout my twenties and into my thirties, many of my friends were on the same page. They couldn’t fathom having children. They wanted to go back to school, travel the world or throw themselves into their careers. We were always on some form of birth control. We compared our methods, experiences and side effects—all aspects of our lives that we just accepted as the price of admission for having a uterus, for the feeling that we were in control of our reproductive destiny.
However, things changed, slowly but surely: my friends met their partners and started the next phase of their life. This was when I hoped the longing I kept hearing about would kick in. (“You’ll start wanting children when your friends start having children.”) Watching baby picture after baby picture fill my social media feeds, I felt absolutely nothing.
In early 2018, when some of my friends were talking to their partners about when they would start their families, I had just ended a relationship because he wanted children in the next two or three years. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t that. I was about to turn 30 that year, and that was the wake-up call I needed. I asked friends and acquaintances with older children about their experiences. They said that while raising children had lovely moments, it could be tiring and sometimes thankless. With the chaotic and polarized state of the world, coupled with the cost-of-living crisis here in Canada, I worry about the kind of society we’re leaving for the next generation.
It’s exceedingly difficult to raise a family. In my home province of Ontario, daycare can cost thousands of dollars a month—if you’re lucky enough to find a spot. And women are the ones more likely to put their careers on hold to raise children: one in three cite full-time parenting as their reason for stepping away from work, compared to just seven per cent of men. Mothers also take nearly twice as long off work as fathers for parenting. We can see where we are going wrong, but not doing much to change it.
In late 2018, I went on a first date with a professional musician who I met through someone in my circle. Some of my friends who wanted children were going on dates every night—they were direct with these men about how they wanted to be married within two years and pregnant within three. I decided to be just as blunt. Sitting across from my date in a dimly lit bar in Toronto, I told him: “I never want kids, so if you do, you’d better leave now.” It was the first time I had ever said it out loud and it felt so right. It didn’t bother him, and he stayed—we just got married this year.
I was also tired of depending on hormonal birth control. I didn’t want to remember to take a pill everyday, and I was terrified of painful IUD insertions after hearing horror stories. My doctor recommended experimental birth control methods to see if the side effects could be reduced. One method he mentioned was the progestin arm implant, but it was still being studied and hadn’t been approved by Health Canada.
I did consider freezing my eggs when I turned 30. I’d been told that this is when a woman’s biological clock goes into high gear. At the time, I was working for a company that provided financial support for egg freezing—it costs upwards of $10,000—so I could have made it work. But then I reflected on how I’d feel at 40 or 45 years old if I didn’t freeze them. And, honestly, I didn’t care.
Today’s birth control is often lauded for its reversibility: many women can become pregnant mere months after going off of it. At this point, I was sure there wouldn’t be biological children in my future. If I used hormonal birth control until I reached menopause, I felt like I would be putting something into my body that didn’t need to be there. I started reading about sterilization, specifically about a bilateral salpingectomy, or the removal of fallopian tubes. While this procedure is common, it’s usually performed immediately after a woman gives birth, or to excise painful cysts or tumours. It intrigued me because I’d never have to think about birth control again—and the idea felt freeing.
Resources, both online and off, helped me reach a decision. On Reddit, women from all walks of life—some with kids and some that didn’t have kids, but wanted them—shared stories about their experiences. Through friends and work, I met people who were decades older than me who’d never had children, and their lives seemed exciting and full. I looked up to them; they had lives I could see for myself. With the internet at our fingertips, millennials like me are probably the first generation to have access to the experiences and information needed to make an informed decision about permanently avoiding pregnancy.
In 2021, when I was 32 years old, I brought up the idea of a bilateral salpingectomy to my family doctor. Without hesitation, he told me to ask my partner to get a vasectomy instead because it’s less invasive and has a quicker recovery time. Of course I’d considered this, but I didn’t want to tell my partner what to do with his body.
When I kept insisting on the surgery, my family doctor finally agreed. He gave me a referral, and I was added to the waitlist for the consultation with a gynaecological surgeon. Because this was elective surgery, I’d be waiting a year or more just for the initial phone call.
My doctor was blasé about the whole thing. He told me I’d have plenty of time to think about my decision and reassured me that it would be “perfectly fine” if I decided to cancel the procedure. Even though I didn’t doubt that I wanted it, I’ll be honest, it comforted me that I could change my mind.
More than a year later, in the summer of 2022, the call came in. I was given a date for my initial in-person consultation for 2023. When I finally met with the surgeon in a sterile grey room for all of five minutes, he told me he wasn’t in the business of telling women what to do with their bodies, and if I wanted the procedure, he’d make it happen. “Are there any risks involved? Do women usually regret it?” I asked him. He said the biggest risk is getting pregnant while waiting for the procedure, since the wait could be another year or more because of its elective nature. I imagined he was smirking behind his mask with that deadpan humour that comes so easily to doctors. I realized that yes, that is one hell of a risk.
As for regret, the surgeon told me that it does happen: anecdotally, he said sterilized women over 30 without children regret the procedure the least, and there are higher rates of regret among women who already have a child and realize they want more children after they’re sterilized.
But on the other side of the coin, it’s also possible to regret having children. In her book Regretting Motherhood, sociologist Orna Donath interviewed and wrote about women who wished they’d never become parents. There was a lonely mother who reflected on the loss of her identity, a wife who got pregnant to appease her husband, a new mother who realized too late that having children wasn’t for her. The one constant was that while these women regretted becoming mothers, they loved their children.
In late 2024, about three years after I first talked to my doctor about it, the day of my surgery finally came. I waited for hours under a heated blanket until they rolled me into the operating room. In the short, half-lucid moments before I fell asleep, I asked the nurse, “What should I do if I wake up in the middle of the surgery?” She told me that only happens in movies. It was anticlimactic, as all surgeries should be. I woke up warm but dizzy, lying under itchy hospital sheets. I dry heaved into a small vomit bag. Disoriented, but calm and relieved, I knew I had made the right choice.
I was mostly bedridden for the next two days. My friend sent me a beautiful bouquet of flowers with a note that read, “Congratulations on making the choice that was right for you.” I was happy I could protect myself from an unwanted pregnancy, and there was also a part of me that felt like I got myself back. In bed through a cloud of painkillers, I ordered a small gift for myself—a gold watch that I had engraved with “no more ticking,” a little joke to remind myself that my biological clock had hit midnight.
Don’t get me wrong: I love kids. They’re sweet and fun, and I appreciate their vivid imaginations before the strangleholds of adulthood take over. But that doesn’t mean I need to have one myself. People’s faces get sad when they ask me if I have kids and I reply no; one woman I used to work with took it a step further and said, “It’s okay, it’ll happen soon,” assuming I was trying to conceive.
If we look south, the current political climate in the U.S. makes it easy to understand why more women are choosing permanent sterilization: if they do get pregnant, they might not have the choice to terminate. In the two months since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, tubal sterilizations increased by 70 per cent among women 19 to 26 years old, with the rise greater in states that were likely to ban abortion. I’m grateful to be Canadian: my decision was never quite so dire. Birth control is never 100 per cent effective, and for American women who don’t want children, and who are not willing to risk their lives to end a pregnancy, sterilization might be the only option.
The generational approach to shifting ideas about birth control is nothing new: my grandmother’s generation fought for the birth control pill. My mother’s generation fought for safe abortion access. And, in Canada, my generation has the ability to permanently avoid a pregnancy. I’m lucky I didn’t have to fight.