To pursue, to postpone, or to forego? Motherhood decision-making and reproductive technology use among professional-class women

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TO PURSUE, TO POSTPONE, OR TO FOREGO? MOTHERHOOD DECISION-MAKING
AND REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY USE AMONG PROFESSIONAL-CLASS WOMEN

Kit Myers

A Dissertation Presented to
the Faculty of the USC Graduate School
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEGREE
(SOCIOLOGY)

May 2018
TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTIONS...................................................................................1
CHAPTER 2: SETTING THE STAGE..........................................................................30
CHAPTER 3: TAKING ACTION..................................................................................75
CHAPTER 4: MANAGING STIGMA ........................................................................114
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS...................................................................................151
APPENDIX...................................................................................................................162
BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................................173

Myers Dissertation 1
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTIONS

Much has been made in recent decades of demographic trends towards delayed
childbearing, older motherhood, and rising rates of childlessness and non-marital childbearing in
the United States. However, these trends are generally studied at the population level, yielding
valuable information about large-scale fertility trends, but offering little qualitative insight into
the experiences, motivations, and decision-making processes of contemporary American women.
Further, much of the research on the age of first birth and non-marital childbearing has tended to
focus on the “problematic” fertility of young, poor, single mothers. However, the emergence of
commercially available elective egg freezing for the postponement of fertility reignited moral
panics over the declining fertility of affluent, college educated White women (e.g. Kalb 2001;
Stein 2007). In this dissertation, I take a “studying up” (Aguiar and Schneider 2016; Mills 2000)
approach to these demographic trends. Engaging in in-depth qualitative research with
professional-class women who have elected to freeze eggs to postpone fertility, opted to pursue
single-motherhood-by-choice, or cultivated an intentionally childfree lifestyle, I provide a
nuanced perspective on the fertility desires, intentions, and behaviors of these privileged women.
Each of these populations offers insights into demographic trends toward delayed fertility, non-
marital childbearing, and lifelong childlessness at the individual level, as well as the roles that
medical technologies play in shaping fertility trajectories. Their life histories and fertility
decision-making illuminate the current state of play of the moral order of motherhood, the social
life of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), and the uneven progress of gender liberation
and family diversity in the United States.

Fertility Trends and Determinants
Education, Occupation, and Fertility
The growth of elective egg freezing has clear ties to the shifting demographic landscape
of American motherhood and family formation. Birth rates have fallen substantially since the
post-war highs of the Baby Boom. Demographers attribute these fertility declines to the second
demographic transition, which is characterized by delays in childbearing and marriage and
increasing rates of divorce, cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, and maternal employment
(Lesthaeghe 2010; Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988). Beginning in the 1960s, this transition was
Myers Dissertation 2
initially most pronounced in northern European nations, but it has since spread to the rest of
Europe, North America, and industrialized East Asia and Oceania, with some variation between
and within national populations (Lesthaeghe 2010; Lesthaeghe and Neidert 2006; Raley 2001).
In the U.S. in particular, the effects of the second demographic transitions tend to bifurcate along
class lines with early, nonmarital childbearing becoming increasingly common among low-
income women with low educational attainment while high-income, highly educated women are
more likely to postpone childbearing and to bear children within the context of marriage (Edin
and Kefalas 2005; Ellwood and Jencks 2004). This divergence is exacerbated by the growing
trend of educational assortative mating, with children born into the context of marriage
increasingly benefiting from the rise of dual-earner families while children born to single,
predominantly low-income, mothers fall further behind (Ellwood and Jencks 2004; Mare 1991;
Mare and Schwartz 2006; McLanahan 2004, 2009).
The costs of early and non-marital childbearing are not exclusive to the children of these
unions; women also experience socioeconomic costs of motherhood—often referred to as the
motherhood penalty—in the form of lower educational attainments, lower earnings, and
“mommy tracked” career paths with limited opportunities for advancement (Benard and Correll
2010; Budig and England 2001; Correll, Benard, and Paik 2007). While low-income women face
the greatest barriers to upward mobility, which limits their economic opportunities, seemingly
paradoxically, these limitations may decrease the opportunity costs of early and nonmarital
childbearing for low-income women and increase the appeal of motherhood as a means of
personal fulfillment and self-realization (Budig and Hodges 2010; Edin and Kefalas 2005). As
Kathryn Edin points out, few of these low-income women would be meaningfully better off if
they hadn’t had children. Conversely, middle- and high-income women have more to gain by
postponing childbearing to pursue educational and career goals and more to lose by failing to do
so (Brand and Davis 2011). This higher burden of opportunity cost is believed to be a major
contributing factor in trends toward postponed childbearing among women with higher
educational attainment (Koropeckyj-Cox and Pendell 2007a; Koropeckyj-Cox and Pendell
2007b; Martin 2000).
While producing many valuable insights into the complex relationships between
education, employment, socioeconomic status, and fertility, large demographic studies are ill
suited to providing nuanced data on within-group variation. While it is certainly the case that
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young, professional-class women are delaying childbearing until later ages, the majority (65%)
of college-educated women do give birth to their first child before 30 years of age and birth rates
have remained highest and stable among women 25-29 years of age (CDC/NCHS 2015). This
suggests that the many college-educated, professional-class women do begin childbearing before
reaching “advanced maternal age” (typically medically defined as 35 years of age or older).
Large demographic studies can tell us little about what tracks some college-educated
professional class women into “normatively timed” motherhood while tracking others into
extended delays in childbearing and high rates of lifelong childlessness. My research with
women who have undergone elective egg freezing or opted into single-motherhood-by-choice
sheds light on the pathways of some professional class women into delayed childbearing. While
educational and occupational commitments do contribute to a higher age of first birth among
college-educated, professional-class women as compared to women with lower levels of income
and education, I find that relationship instability, rather than higher than average career-focus, is
the primary force behind within-group variation and extended postponement of motherhood in
these groups. To the extent that career-related factors played a role in fertility postponement in
my sample, it appears to be high contingency—rather than high-powered—employment, that
make participants less likely to achieve desired fertility.
Maternal Orientation and Fertility Desires, Intentions, and Behaviors
Popular wisdom holds that the maternal drive is a biological and innate characteristic
shared by all—or at least most—women. Further, maternal orientation, that is the sum of an
individual’s fertility desires, intentions, and expectations, has also generally been assumed to be
stable across the life course. However, in recent years demographers have demonstrated that
fertility desires, intentions, and expectations are variable across the life course (Gray, Evans, and
Reimondos 2013; Hayford 2009; Heiland, Prskawetz, and Sanderson 2008; Liefbroer 2008).
Additionally, there is some evidence that certainty about fertility intentions varies widely and
that the degree of certainty about fertility intentions is predictive of (mis)matching between
expressed intentions and outcomes, with uncertainty—characterized by ambivalence,
indifference, and contingency of maternal attitudes—often linked to postponement of fertility
and mismatches between fertility intentions and outcomes (McQuillan, Greil, and Shreffler 2010;
Miller, Jones, and Pasta 2016; Schoen et al. 1999). Bachrach and Morgan (2013) suggest that
people do not necessarily hold a priori fertility intentions, rather they generate intentions only
Myers Dissertation 4
when prompted and, in doing so, they draw on contextual and ideological factors. Among these
contextual factors, anticipated costs to career and level of individual autonomy impact the timing
of entry into motherhood (Liefbroer 2005). Ideologically, commitment to intensive mothering
negatively affects orientation toward motherhood among childless women (Baldwin 2017;
Maher and Saugeres 2007; Myers 2017).
Attending to social structures within which fertility decision-making takes place yields
valuable insights into the effects of public policy, institutional norms, social values and beliefs,
and parenting ideologies on fertility. Several demographers have studied the relationship
between gender inequality and low and lowest-fertility. One of the most consistent findings is
that, within European cross-national comparison, fertility is higher in national contexts where
social policy makes work and family life compatible and lower in contexts where work and
motherhood are still largely mutually exclusive, forcing women to choose between career and
family (Aassve, Mencarini, and Sironi 2015; Brodmann, Esping-Andersen, and Guell 2007;
Dorbritz 2008; Koeppen 2006). While material constraints are certainly at play here,
psychological constraints also contribute: where policy fails to accommodate shifting gender
roles and family preferences, the subjective well-being associated with childbearing is
diminished, leading to lower levels of fertility (Aassve et al. 2015). Higher paternal involvement
in childcare and stronger familial and social network supports for parenting also increase chances
of having (additional) children (Brodmann et al. 2007; Fiori 2011; Lois 2016). Conversely,
perceptions of marital instability or partner undesirability decrease the likelihood of having
(additional) childbearing (Lillard and Waite 1993; Zabin et al. 2000).

Intensive Motherhood Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood
In the United States, the widespread movement of middle-class women into the labor
force set the stage for the emergence of intensive mothering ideologies (Hays 1996). This
movement of women into paid labor has not been mirrored by an equivalent movement of men
into domestic labor, leaving working mothers to cover double or triple shifts of paid, domestic,
and childrearing labor (Bianchi 2011; Bianchi et al. 2012; England 2010; Hochschild 1989).
When combined with workplaces designed for the unencumbered male worker, this uneven
progress produces “the stalled revolution,” which intensifies work-family conflict, particularly
for mothers (England 2010; Hochschild 1989). Despite mounting time pressures, studies of
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family life find an increase in the amount of time working mothers spend on childcare beginning
in the 1980s (Bianchi et al. 2012). This paradox is part of a larger conflict between the
expectation that women continue to demonstrate high family devotion and the increasing
expectation that they demonstrate high work devotion; this creates an insurmountable gap
between “good” mother ideals and the realities of working motherhood (Acker 1990; Guendouzi
2006; Hays 1996; Williams 2000). While studies of the effects of parenting ideologies on
fertility decision-making are very scarce, Maher and Saugeres (2007) do find that dominant
images of the “good mother” influence fertility decision-making, particularly for childless
women, who are more likely than mothers to understand mothering as totalizing and
overwhelming. My own research with women with electively frozen eggs also demonstrates that
commitment to intensive mothering ideologies can increase maternal ambivalence and contribute
to delayed childbearing (Myers 2017).
Despite this gap, most middle-class mothers remain invested in intensive mothering
ideologies (Bianchi 2011; Hays 1996; Nelson 2010). Drawing on best-selling childrearing
manuals and in-depth interviews with mothers, Hays (1996) identifies three primary
characteristics of intensive mothering: first, “that child care is primarily the responsibility of the
individual mother;” second, that the recommended methods are “child-centered, expert-guided,
emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive;” and third, that childrearing
decisions should be entirely separated from “market valuation … efficiency or financial
profitability” (54). Subsequent research has expanded on the study of classed and gendered
parenting ideologies. Lareau (2003) identifies the middle-class strategy of “concerted
cultivation,” which involves extensive extracurricular enrichment, while Nelson (2010) identifies
a professional-class strategy she terms “parenting out of control,” which includes constant
monitoring, risk management, and high levels of emotional intimacy. Common to all of these
modes of parenting is the assignment of primary childrearing responsibility to mothers,
increasing the challenges of work-family reconciliation and generating psychological costs,
including stress and exhaustion as well as feelings of anxiety, guilt, and failure for working
mothers (Guendouzi 2006; Rizzo et al. 2013; Villalobos 2014).

Myers Dissertation 6
The Social Life of Assisted Reproductive Technologies
My work with egg freezing, as well as the medical technologies that enable single-
motherhood-by-choice, extend the literature on the social life of ARTs, particularly in relation to
gender, kinship, and the affective components of decision-making. Offering some of the earliest
accounts of infertility patients’ experience and meaning making around the use of technologies
like in vitro fertilization (IVF) and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), Sarah Franklin has
dubbed reproductive technologies “hope technologies” (Franklin 1997, 1998; Franklin and
McKinnon 2001; Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Franklin and Roberts 2006). Scholars in this school
of the social life of ARTs argue that the availability of reproductive technologies compels
women to “have a try,” even in the face of very high failure rates, and that the psychosocial
dynamics of the “economies of hope” embedded in IVF keep these patients’ hope alive through a
succession of failed treatments (Becker 2000b; Franklin 1997, 1998; Franklin and Roberts 2006).
Responding to schools of feminist thought that decry the “objectifying” nature of
reproductive technologies, Charis Thompson (neé Cussins) has further expanded the literature on
the social life of ARTs. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork in fertility clinics, she
proposes a nuanced dialectic approach to women’s experience of ARTs, which she terms
“ontological choreography” (Cussins 1996; Thompson 2005). In essence Thompson (2005)
argues for the non-oppositionality of objectification and agency, contended that, while ARTs are
generally objectifying, they are not necessarily experienced as dehumanizing. Because the
patient is an active participant in her own objectification through the technologies, she will not
necessarily experience the objectification as a loss of agency. Specifically, when the technologies
successfully enable the patient’s self-fashioning as a mother, then they are experienced as in
accord with, rather than opposed to, her agency. These nuanced approaches allow for productive
analysis of the complicated and often contradictory narrative threads that arise from women’s
lived experience of ARTs.
Much of the scholarship on ARTs deals with potential these technologies hold to both
challenge and reproduce dominant cultural norms of family and kinship. Building on
Thompson’s (2005) work on “ontological choreography,” as well as Becker’s (2000b) work on
the commercialization of ARTs and the work of Adele Clarke and her collaborators on
biomedicalization (Clarke et al. 2003, 2010), Laura Mamo (2007) provides an ethnographic view
of lesbian reproduction. Mamo’s work addresses a well-established debate over whether family
Myers Dissertation 7
building (understood as childrearing) by non-heterosexuals subverts the heterosexist norms of
the nuclear family and genetic kinship (Dunne 2000; Peletz 1995; Weston 1991) or contributes to
the normalization and mainstreaming of non-heterosexuals (Lewin 1993, 2009; Warner 1999).
Mamo (2007) steers a middle course, arguing that lesbian bio-reproduction is both subversive
and normalizing, but that most of all it is pragmatic, rather than ideological. Mamo (2007) is also
centrally concerned with lesbian experience of biomedicalized reproduction. Like Thompson
(2005), she rejects neat dichotomies between agency and objectification, arguing, “One must be
cautious not to reproduce a colonial interpretation that characterizes the world as two
dimensional: control versus resistance, oppositional consciousness versus hegemonic structure,
agentic actors versus those constrained by social forces” (232). Instead she argues that new
choices and freedoms offered by technological innovation not only enable and constrain action in
novel ways but also contribute to the production of new subjectivities and forms of citizenship
(Mamo 2007, 2010).
Egg freezing is emblematic of this neoliberal linkage between choice, subjectivity, and
citizenship. Rottenberg (2016) identifies elective egg freezing as an outgrowth of a novel form of
neoliberal feminism, which demands that middle-class women embrace the principles of
governmentality, including careful planning and self-investment to realize optimal futures. She
argues that the inclusion of egg freezing in corporate benefits packages not only encourages
middle-class women to prioritize career development over fertility, but also interpellates these
women as human capital. The terms of neoliberal citizenship divide women into the “properly
responsibilized” few—charged with capital-enhancement—and the “disavowed rest”—charged
with the reproductive labor and carework incompatible with middle-class human capital
development—generating intensified structures of race and class stratified reproduction
(Rottenberg 2016). Egg freezing exemplifies neoliberal norms of risk management, self-
investment, and optimization. Martin (2010) documents the prevailing “fertility preservation”
narrative of egg freezing, through which patients take action to protect themselves against future
infertility, ensure their access to biogenetic reproduction, and optimize their future offspring by
avoiding the increased chances of fetal chromosomal abnormality associated with maternal age
(but most critically with the age of the eggs). Further, egg freezing is preferred to both donor
eggs and adoption precisely because it allows women to use their own genetic materials, which is
viewed as less risky (Martin 2010). The language of egg freezing is strongly prudential, despite
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the prevalence of “fertility preservation” as a descriptor for egg freezing, it is the potential for
genetic parenthood, rather than fertility, that is putatively preserved by egg freezing (Martin
2010). In this way egg freezing both reifies genetic motherhood as the “gold standard” and also
enables risk management through genetic continuity.

The Moral Order of Motherhood: Hierarchies of Maternal Worthiness and Stratified
Reproduction
The neoliberal separation of women into the responsible few—whose fertility must be
encouraged and supported—and the irresponsible many—whose fertility must be discouraged—
is firmly rooted in the pre-existing hierarchies of maternal worthiness. Since the colonial era, the
moral order of motherhood in the United States has resulted in the censure of women who fail to
meet the standards of “good” motherhood. Consequences include heightened surveillance,
stigmatization, social exclusion, and in some cases criminal charges and severance of parental
rights (Hays 1996, 2003; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998). These hierarchies of maternal
worthiness are shaped by a number of factors including family scripts that privilege biogenetic
kinship and childrearing within the married heterosexual dyad, maternal age norms that
marginalized both young mothers (generally teen mothers) and “older mothers” (generally
women having first births over the age of 35), intersectional expectations that marginalize
working motherhood among affluent White women and “dependent” (non-working) motherhood
among poor women of color, as well as wider social structures of privilege and marginalization
on the basis of race, class, and sexuality (Darisi 2007; Duncan et al. 2003; Hays 1996, 2003;
Irigaray 1993; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998; Lechot and Glaveanu 2013; May 2008; Silva
1996; Srnajdor 2011; Stokoe 2003; Zartler 2014). The moral order of motherhood is also
reflected in biopolitical systems of stratified reproduction in which the fertility of affluent White
women is marked out for preservation and promotion while the fertility of poor women of color
is marked our for prevention (Davis 2009; Martin 2010; Rapp 2001; Roberts 2009). The
biopolitical logics—in which certain people are “made to live” (or to be born) and others are “let
die” (or never born)—inform both the refusal of sterilization of affluent White childfree women
and the coercive and even non-consensual sterilization of poor women of color (Callan and Hee
1984; Edwards 2001; Foucault 1997; Price and Darity 2010; Richie 2013; Schoen 2005;
Shreffler et al. 2015; Stern 2005; Torpy 2000). These systems of stratified reproduction relegate
Myers Dissertation 9
poor women of color to support roles enabling White women’s reproduction through paid care
work and surrogacy while punishing these same women for having “more children than they can
afford” (Colen 1995; Davis 2009; Harrison 2016; Morgan 1985; Roberts 1997). These systems
also place pressure on affluent White women to ensure their own access biogenetic reproduction
while creating non-financial cultural barriers for women of color attempting to access ARTs
(Bell 2009, 2010; Martin 2010; Rottenberg 2016). These hierarchies of maternal worthiness are
heavily implicated in the stigma management strategies of all three study populations, but
particularly among the single-mothers-by-choice.

The Stigma of Childlessness and Single Motherhood
Childrearing within a married heterosexual nuclear family still represents the dominant
cultural model of adulthood and both childlessness and single parenthood are stigmatized in
mainstream American culture. All three of these groups of study participants occupy
“discreditable” identity categories and their strategies for stigma management require both
internal labor of accepting the stigmatized identity and repairing self-concept and the external
labor of managing interactions with (potentially) disapproving others (Goffman 1963). While
techniques of information control—avoiding disclosure of “spoiled” identities—can help deflect
social judgment in many situations, when fertility status and family structure are known these
women are often called to account for their “non-normative” fertility trajectories. Accounting
plays a role in both dramaturgical stigma management—in the form of justifications and
excuses—and in “doing gender” (Goffman 1959, 1963; Scott and S. M. Lyman 1968; West and
Zimmerman 1987). In “justifying” or “excusing” their behavior, stigmatized individuals must
provide an account of their behavior that affirms dominant narratives (Scott and S. M. Lyman
1968). Accountability is particularly relevant to the performance of gender. West and
Zimmerman (1987) argue that, given the near omnirelevance gender, individual behavior is
always “at risk of gender assessment” (136) and, therefore, doing gender requires producing
social performances that are legible as contextually gender-appropriate or accountable to gender
norms.
The Stigma of Childlessness
Because women’s bodies are so closely linked to reproduction and cultural ideals of
femininity are so closely linked to motherhood, childlessness is particularly stigmatizing for
Myers Dissertation 10
women (Firestone 1970; Greil, Leitko, and Porter 1988; Lorber 1994; Mcquillan et al. 2008;
Mueller and Yoder 1997, 1999; Rich 1986). Egg freezing itself is deeply rooted in the stigma of
childlessness and the technology responds to this stigma in two primary ways: as medical means
of countering age-related infertility and as an interactive resource for accounting for
childlessness and performing normative maternal femininity. As a medical technology, egg
freezing is based on the belief that involuntary childlessness is an untenable position (Letherby
1999; Lisle 1996; Martin 2010; Miall 1985, 1986, 1994; Remennick 2000; Slade et al. 2007).
Becker (2000b) argues that an inability to have children is more disruptive to women’s gender
identities than to those of men. Because infertility is experienced as a “gender role failure,”
ARTs can provide a means of performing gender, reproducing cultural ideologies and repairing
spoiled gender identities (Becker 2000b; Clarke, Martin-Matthews, and Matthews 2006;
Rothman 1989).Voluntarily childfree women face particularly strong cultural stigmas, as their
rejection of pronatalist norms are generally held to be incompatible with normative femininity
(Gillespie 2000, 2003; Morell 1994; Park 2002; Peterson 2011; Riessman 2000; Veevers 1975).
Voluntarily childfree women frequently account for their childlessness by emphasizing their own
lack of biological urges to reproduce, a strategy that can confer greater legitimacy but also reifies
dominant beliefs that most women experience a natural “maternal instinct” (Park 2002; Peterson
and Engwall 2013).
The Stigma of Single Motherhood
Single-mothers-by-choice face a different set of interactional challenges. While their
normatively maternal femininity is not in question, their family forms are vulnerable to being
discredited. The broader category of single motherhood has been widely vilified, with many
social and political actors attributing the “breakdown” of family values, poor childhood
outcomes, rising poverty rates, and social welfare dependency to single mothers’ failure to
constrain childbearing to the confines of marriage (Carabine 2001; Ellison 2003; Gordon 1994;
Hyde 2000; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998; Silva 1996). Consequently, single mothers find
themselves in a double bind with regard to paid labor. While working motherhood (particularly
during the children’s preschool years) is stigmatizing among affluent and middle-class women,
poor and working-class women are subject to social and governmental pressure to engage in full-
time paid labor and experience social censure for being “welfare queens” if they don’t work
(Gordon 1994; Hays 2003; Jarrett 1996; Pulkingham, Fuller, and Kershaw 2010; Silva 1996).
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Consequently, professional-class, single, working mothers must negotiate carefully between the
stigmas and material constraints of working motherhood and dependent motherhood (Duncan
and Strell 2004; Hertz 1999; Hertz and Ferguson 1997; James 2009; Meier et al. 2016; Nelson
2014; Ng and Ng 2013; Simorangkir 2015; Wiegers and Chunn 2015).
Single mothers must also contend with dominant cultural beliefs about the importance of
fathers and the deleterious effects of “father absence.” Single parent families are socially
constructed as deficient in comparison to the heterosexual nuclear family, which is held up as the
stable and desirable norm, placing pressure on single parents and their children to respond to
negative perceptions (Ben-Daniel et al. 2007; Ifcher and Zarghamee 2014; May 2008; Nelson
2014; Wiegers and Chunn 2015; Zartler 2014). Central to the hegemony of the heterosexual
nuclear family is the belief that children benefit from the complementarity of the heterosexual
dyad and from the presence of both male and female role models in the home, which motivates
concerns—on the part of both outsiders and single mothers themselves—about the “absence” of
a male role model in single mother households (Jadva et al. 2009; Mazor 2004; Zartler 2014).
Fathers’ involvement is often represented as a critical component of children’s academic
achievement, well-being, “risk behaviors,” and development of gender and sexual identity
(Amato and Rivera 1999; Anderson 2015; Coley 2003; DeBell 2008; Haskins 2016; Jeynes
2015; Johnson 2013; Mandara, Murray, and Joyner 2005; Mandara, Rogers, and Zinbarg 2011;
Markowitz and Ryan 2016; McLanahan, Tach, and Schneider 2013; Nelson 2004; Suizzo et al.
2017; Thomas, Farrell, and Barnes 1996). These dominant cultural norms place pressure on
single parents—as well as same-sex couples—to account for the adequacy of their parenting and
role modeling.

“Alternative” Fertility Trajectories: Elective Egg Freezing, Single-Motherhood-by-Choice,
and the Voluntarily Childfree
Elective Egg Freezing
Egg freezing involves the hormonal stimulation of the ovaries to over-produce mature
eggs, the surgical retrieval of those eggs, and their frozen storage (Chen 1986). Should the
patient become infertile, she can have the frozen eggs thawed, fertilized, and implanted
following standard IVF procedures. Originally pioneered to “preserve” the fertility of single
female cancer patients—who risked infertility and sterility due to cancer treatment—use of the
Myers Dissertation 12
technology expanded to included “elective” egg freezing for healthy women to “preserve” their
fertility against the risk of age-related infertility while they postponed childbearing (Chen 1986;
Cobo et al. 2016; Treves et al. 2014). As Martin (2010) points out, this language of “fertility
preservation” is a misnomer as frozen eggs are generally only used if and when the patient
experiences infertility. Rather than preserving fertility, egg freezing preserves the possibility of
biogenetic reproduction with a future (currently absent) male partner. This is because, unlike
embryo freezing—a better established and more reliable technology—egg freezing does not
require the presence of a male partner or selection of a sperm donor at the time of freezing,
instead a future partner’s sperm can be used when the eggs are thawed. Consequently, egg
freezing is primarily marketed to and used by heterosexual women. Egg freezing also
accommodates religious proscriptions against the destruction of embryos by allowing couples to
bank gametes separately. These religious debates over embryonic life led to the improvement of
egg freezing techniques: In 2003, Italian legislation severely restricted the use of ARTs,
including banning the freezing of embryos, pushing Italian embryologists to pursue egg freezing
as an alternative means of banking reproductive materials, contributing to procedural changes
that improved outcomes and generated increased uptake of egg freezing in the early 2000s
(Fineschi, Neri, and Turillazzi 2005; Grifo and Noyes 2010).
Although the first live birth from previously frozen eggs occurred in 1986, egg freezing
remained relatively uncommon until the early 2000s, when the shift from slow freezing to rapid
vitrification techniques improved outcomes and generated increased up-take, (Chen 1986; Grifo
and Noyes 2010; Setti et al. 2014). Although no registries exist to track egg freezing cycles or
outcomes, by 2008 at least 936 babies had been born worldwide using previously frozen eggs
(Noyes, Porcu, and Borini 2009). Given the lack of national registries, the exact demographic
composition of egg freezers is unknown. However, surveys of egg freezing programs suggest
that, like ARTs more generally, egg freezing populations skew toward affluent White women
(Hodes-Wertz et al. 2013). While the high price of egg freezing—estimated out of pocket costs
range from $10,000 to $20,000 per retrieval cycle in addition to annual storage fees—
undoubtedly contribute to this demographic skew, Bell (2009, 2010, 2014) shows that disparities
in ART use persist even in states mandating comprehensive insurance coverage for infertility
treatments. She argues that these disparities stem less from financial barriers and more from
stratified systems of reproduction exercised through medicalization, which institutionalize raced
Myers Dissertation 13
and classed presumptions about the hyper-fecundity of poor women and women of color. The
unequal distribution of access to ARTs is indicative of broader systems of stratified reproduction
that differentially mark out the fertility of certain populations as worthy of preservation and
others as in need of prevention (Colen 1995; Roberts 2009).
Given the relative novelty of egg freezing, particularly as an elective technology, the
social sciences literature on the subject is still fairly limited. Lauren Martin (2010) and Lucy van
de Wiel (2014, 2015) have addressed representations of egg freezing through textual analysis.
Grounding her textual analysis of journalistic, medical, and promotional egg freezing materials
in the literature on (bio)medicalization and infertility, Martin (2010) argues for the introduction
of “anticipated infertility” as ontological category that extends the medicalization of fertility to
all women, eliminating a “normal” stage for childless women and replacing it with two
pathological options: anticipated infertility and infertility. While Martin (2010) focuses on egg
freezing texts produced in the US context, van de Wiel (2014) analyzes reporting on egg freezing
in Dutch and British newspapers. Both Martin and van de Wiel identify similar discursive
patterns including normative links between femininity and motherhood, the reification of cultural
fears about ageing through alarmist narratives about reproductive ageing, and a hierarchical
ranking of women on the basis of their motivation for egg freezing. Martin (2010) establishes the
hierarchical distinction between the worthy cancer patient—whose engagement with medically-
indicated egg freezing signals socially-appropriate commitment to motherhood—and the healthy
young women—whose engagement with elective egg freezing is presumed to signal socially-
inappropriate prioritization of career ahead of motherhood. Van de Wiel (2014) identifies this
same hierarchy but expands it further by identifying a division of the elective egg freezing
category into single women—who are victims of circumstance—and lifestyle freezers—who
want to “have it all”—a distinction that appears to be largely missing in the American context.
Catherine Rottenberg (2016) also engages with representations of egg freezing in American news
media, as I discuss above. Focusing on popular press coverage of the decision by Silicone Valley
giants Apple and Facebook to include elective egg freezing as part of their benefits packages,
Rottenberg (2016) argues that “neoliberalism is increasingly interpellating women—particularly
middle-class women—as human capital,” attenuating “the link between these women and
reproduction and care work” (332). Through the outsourcing of carework labor to more
Myers Dissertation 14
marginalized women, the neoliberal feminist embrace of egg freezing “produces new forms of
racialized and class-stratified gender exploitation” (Rottenberg 2016:332).
Working directly with clinicians and patients in British fertility clinics, Catherine Waldby
(Waldby 2015a, 2015b) engages with questions of capital and futurity in elective egg freezing.
She argues that human eggs have tended to be resistant to the gift systems that regulate most
donation-based tissue economies and that gradual replacement of egg “donation” by private egg
banking represents a shift from a scarcity economy to an economy of singularities (Waldby
2015b). The unique genetic makeup of reproductive materials—and cultural preferences for
genetic kinship and continuity—renders eggs non-commensurable, leading to a form of
autologous donation—that is donation to one’s future self—in which value is realized through
preservation and retention, rather than market-based exchange (Waldby 2015b). Waldby (2015a)
expands upon the role of futurity in elective egg freezing to argue that this technology also offers
a technical solution through which women seek to reconcile different forms of time. As the
extension of education and career establishment, the rising cost of establishing a household, and
the iterative and unstable nature of relationship formation all elongate the transition to adulthood,
professional-class women increasingly experience disjuncture between the biological timeline of
age-related fertility decline and their educational, occupational, and romantic timelines. Fallon
and Stockstill (2018) refer to the increasingly narrow window between the conclusion of
educational and occupation self-development and the natural decline of fertility as the
“condensed courtship clock.” By removing eggs from the biological timeline and placing them in
stasis, Waldby (2015a) finds that patients engage in egg freezing to harmonize these disjointed
timelines.
Finally, researchers have considered the role that intensive mothering ideologies play in
shaping professional-class women’s trajectories into elective egg freezing. Drawing on the
interviews with Los Angeles elective egg freezers presented in this study, I demonstrate that
commitment to intensive mothering ideologies affect fertility decision making among these
childless women (Myers 2017). I find that concerns about the heavy burdens of intensive
motherhood, coupled with unsupportive partners and workplaces, produce ambivalence towards
childbearing and a strategy of fertility postponement. I identify egg freezing as an expression of
the gendering of fertility risk and as a means of “doing security.” Participants view egg freezing
as a means of managing risk in two primary ways: as a means of securing access to biogenetic
Myers Dissertation 15
motherhood by managing biological risks of infertility and fetal genetic abnormality, and as a
means of enabling intensive parenting by managing temporal risks inherent in coordinating
careers, relationships, and childbearing. Similarly Kylie Baldwin (2017) finds that British
women reject popular narratives that they have delayed childbearing for selfish reasons, arguing
instead that their fertility has been contextually delayed by their struggles to establish the
financial and romantic stability they deem necessary for accomplishing “good motherhood,”
which they define in terms of heteronormative family ideals and intensive mothering ideologies.
These studies demonstrate the dynamic interaction of cultural ideologies, structural constraints,
and interpersonal relationships in shaping the fertility trajectories of elective egg freezers.
Single-Motherhood-by-Choice
The fertility trajectories of single-mothers-by-choice are similarly shaped by the
opportunities and constraints presented by cultural, structural, and ideological factors. Although
the practice of women choosing to raise children as single mothers is not new, this family form
only entered the research literature relatively recently, emerging first in the mid-1990s and
intensifying in the 21
st
century. Much of this literature has been produced in the fields of
psychology and social work, where researchers are primarily concerned with the characteristics
and psychological well being of elective single mothers and their children. Generally speaking,
this literature finds that the children of single-mothers-by-choice have positive psychological and
emotional outcomes, that single-mothers-by-choice tend to be socioeconomically privileged, and
that single-mothers-by-choice are more open to disclosing use of donor insemination and to
meeting with donor siblings—that is children conceived by other women using the same sperm
donor—if they formed their families through donor insemination (Freeman et al. 2016;
Golombok 2004, 2017; Golombok et al. 2016; Kelly and Dempsey 2016; Landau and
Weissenberg 2010; Mazor 2004; Murray and Golombok 2005b, 2005a; Salomon et al. 2015;
Shechner et al. 2010; Weissenberg and Landau 2012; Weissenberg, Landau, and Madgar 2007;
Zadeh et al. 2017; Zadeh, Freeman, and Golombok 2013). Most notably this psychological
literature has generated the insight that—despite the term “single-mothers-by-choice”—most
elective single mothers would have preferred to pursue motherhood within the context of
marriage. These women’s family formation trajectories are shaped the by absence of suitable
partners and the decision to pursue elective sole parenting is experienced simultaneously as an
Myers Dissertation 16
expression of personal empowerment and a result of interpersonal constraint (Ben-Ari and
Weinberg-Kurnik 2007; Davies and Rains 1995; Jadva et al. 2009).
Another major strain within the literature on single-mothers-by-choice focuses on the
family formation strategies of elective sole mothers. Drawing from disciplines of psychology,
sociology, anthropology, law, and medicine these researchers document the various routes into
elective sole parenting, which include use of ARTs and donor gametes, adoption, and sexual
intercourse (Chaudhury and Albinsson 2016; Jociles 2013; Jociles et al. 2010; Jociles-Rubio and
Villaamil Perez 2012; Landau, Weissenberg, and Madgar 2008; Layne 2013; Mazor 2004; Siegel
1998; Zadeh et al. 2013). Family formation through donor insemination—with or without
additional medical intervention—is generally preferred because it optimizes individual control,
preserves genetic kinship (when the mother can use her own eggs), includes the pregnancy
experiences (for mothers who do not require the assistance of a surrogate), ensures legal rights to
the child, and can give the single mother and her child(ren) access to an extended family through
donor sibling registries (Goldberg and Scheib 2015; Hertz and Mattes 2011; Kelly and Dempsey
2016; Mazor 2004; Siegel 1998). All studies of elective sole mothers find that adoption is
generally not preferred and rarely used; however, in the Spanish context at least, adoptive
mothers present this as the most ethical route into single parenthood (Goldberg and Scheib 2015;
Jociles 2013; Jociles et al. 2010; Siegel 1998). Finally, some do become single-mothers-by-
choice through sexual intercourse. In some cases this follows a “known donor” narrative in
which a friend acts as an “in person sperm donor,” in other cases single-mothers-by-choice either
experience an unintended pregnancy but chose to proceed as elective sole mothers or seek out
intentionally unprotected intercourse with the intention of conceiving, but without disclosing this
to their sexual partners (Jociles et al. 2010; Jociles-Rubio and Villaamil Perez 2012; Siegel
1998). All routes into single motherhood that involve sexual intercourse—but particularly those
that involve “deceit”—occupy the lowest position in the moral hierarchy of family formation
strategies, as defined by single-mothers-by-choice themselves (Jociles et al. 2010; Jociles-Rubio
and Villaamil Perez 2012). Additionally, while most single-mothers-by-choice make a positive
adjustment to pregnancy and motherhood, women who conceived through unintended
pregnancies and made the choice to become sole parents after conception are the most likely to
experience psychological distress relating to pregnancy and parenting (Siegel 1998).
Myers Dissertation 17
The more limited sociological and anthropological literature on single-motherhood-by-
choice focuses on the practical, kinship, and stigma management strategies of elective sole
mothers. The vast majority of this work comes from Rosanna Hertz’s (Hertz 2006, 2002, Hertz
and Ferguson 1997, 1998) interviews with 65 single-mothers-by-choice in eastern
Massachusetts, Jane Bock’s (Bock 2000, 2012) interviews and participant observation with 26
single-mothers-by-choice primarily based in southern California, and a multi-site ethnographic
study of Spanish single-mothers-by-choice conducted by research collective headed up by Maria
Isabel Jociles-Rubio (Jociles 2013; Jociles et al. 2010; Jociles-Rubio, Rivas, and Poveda-
Bicknell 2014; Jociles-Rubio and Villaamil Perez 2012; Poveda, Jociles, and Rivas 2014; Rivas,
Jociles, and Monco 2011). These studies all reflect many of the findings from the psychological
literature discussed above, including the family formation strategies employed, the shared
preference for married motherhood among single-mothers-by-choice, their relatively advanced
age at transition to motherhood (most being in their mid-30s to 40s), and the privileged socio-
economic, educational, and racial status of most single-mothers-by-choice. To this they add the
importance of a watershed moment, which Hertz (2006) terms “catalytic events,” Bock (2012)
terms “triggers,” and I term “traumatic catalysts.” These events can include benchmark
birthdays, breakups, loss of a loved one, medical interventions or conditions, the pregnancies of
close friends or relatives, experiences with other women pursuing single-motherhood-by-choice,
or disruptions to normal life, particularly job layoffs that increase time or job promotions that
increase resources (Bock 2012; Hertz 2006). These women pass through periods of “thinking”
(prospective single-mothers-by-choice are termed “thinkers” in the community), coming to terms
with single parenthood, testing out the idea on close friends and family, and ultimately pursuing
elective sole parenting (Bock 2012; Hertz 2006). Having entered into single parenthood these
women must engage their social networks and their resources to forge new kinship structures and
accomplish economic self-sufficiency and work-family balance (Hertz 2006; Hertz and Ferguson
1998, 1997; Layne 2015).
Additionally, given their non-normative family structures, single-mothers-by-choice
struggle to legitimize their families and defend themselves and their children against stigma
(Bock 2000; Hertz 2006; Rivas et al. 2011; Wiegers and Chunn 2015). Among single mothers,
single-mothers-by-choice are held the most accountable for the “absence” of a “father figure” in
their children’s lives and, along with poor and “unwed” single mothers, are vulnerable to
Myers Dissertation 18
experiencing some of the strongest social stigma for their family structure (Ben-Ari and
Weinberg-Kurnik 2007; Hertz 2006; Wiegers and Chunn 2015). While single-mother-by-choice
families have the potential to challenge the hegemony of biogenetic kinship and the heterosexual
nuclear family, their approaches to the figure of the absent father more often reaffirm normative
narratives of family (Hertz 2002, 2006). Given widespread disapprobation of “out of wedlock”
motherhood, single-mothers-by-choice engage in accountability work and respectability politics
to differentiate themselves from young, poor, welfare-dependent, and otherwise “irresponsible”
single mothers, assert their moral standing as “good” mothers, and manage stigma (Bock 2000;
Hertz 2006).
The Voluntarily Childfree
Unlike elective egg freezing and single-motherhood-by-choice, childlessness and the
voluntarily childfree have been the subject of extensive research since the 1970s when
“population bomb” fears first prompted public advocacy for voluntary childlessness as a
responsible life choice (e.g. Silverman 1971). In that same period, certain segments of the
second-wave feminist movement began advocating for voluntary childlessness as a way for
empowered women to avoid “the baby trap” (e.g. Peck 1976). Much of this early research on
voluntary childlessness came out of the social biology literature and focused on the trends,
determinants, and correlates of voluntary childlessness, which generally concluded that, while
there was heterogeneity among childless families, voluntary childlessness appeared to be most
common among affluent and highly-educated people (Gustavus and Henley 1971; Kunz,
Brinkerhoff, and Hundley 1973; Nason and Poloma 1976; Poston 1976, 1974; Poston and Gotard
1977; Ritchey and Stokes 1974; Veevers 1973, 1971; Waller, Rao, and Li 1973). Scholars have
continued to profile trends, determinants, and characteristics of childlessness and childfree
people, documenting the growth of lifelong childlessness and producing similar findings
regarding characteristics of childless people (Gobbi 2013; Heaton, Jacobson, and Holland 1999;
Jacobson and Heaton 1991; Jacobson, Heaton, and Taylor 1988; McAllister and Clarke 2001).
By the 1980s scholars in the fields of family studies and psychology entered the literature on
childlessness, echoing many of the findings regarding the determinants of voluntary childless
from the sociobiological literature but also contributing findings about social isolation and regret
among the (not necessarily voluntarily) childless elderly (Bachrach 1980; Rempel 1985) and the
effects of voluntary and involuntary childlessness on marital adjustment (Callan 1987;
Myers Dissertation 19
Houseknecht 1979; Wineberg 1990). While involuntarily childless people often experience
regret in old age, more recent studies have documented that voluntarily childfree people do not
experience regret at mid-life or in old age (DeLyser 2012; Doyle, Pooley, and Breen 2013).
Additionally, more recent scholarship has challenged early presumptions that childfree
preference is a fixed, pre-cultural personal orientation, a negative inverse to the “natural”
maternal instinct. These scholars have considered the decision-making process by which
individuals arrive at childfree identity, demonstrating that it is a process rather than orientation,
that the process is conscious and intentional, and often occurs dyadically within couples
(Blackstone and Stewart 2016; Doyle et al. 2013; Lee and Zvonkovic 2014). Park (2005)
identifies gendered differences in motivations to remain childfree, with women more likely to
claim a lack of “maternal instinct,” respond to the parenting models of significant others, or
express concerns about conflicts between parenthood and career and leisure pursuits, while men
were more likely to explicitly reject parenthood due its perceived sacrifices. Additionally,
childfree women frequently appeal to the freedom that childlessness confers and construct
mothers as “trapped” (Peterson 2015). However, some feminists have argued that narratives of
“freedom” and “choice” in relation to voluntary childlessness obscure the structural factors that
constrain mothers and fail to engage with state and workplace interventions that could result in
more egalitarian inclusion of caregivers in workplaces and the public sphere (Taylor 2003).
Beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, gender scholars began to consider
voluntarily childfree women’s relationship to womanhood and femininity, their gender identities,
and embodied experiences (Gillespie 2003, 2000, Morell 1994, 2000; Peterson and Engwall
2013). These women experience complicated relationships between their own non-maternal
womanhood and dominant scripts of maternal femininity and pronatalist cultural norms that find
them deficient when measured against an idealized standard of motherhood (Gillespie 2000,
2003, Morell 1994, 2000). Many pursue “otherhood” or non-maternal forms of nurturing
(Laurent-Simpson 2017b, 2017a; Morell 1994; Notkin 2015). Additionally many of these women
celebrate their childfree lives as freeing and cultivate happy childfree marriages (Gillespie 2000;
Morell 2000). Despite the satisfaction of the voluntarily childfree with their choices and
lifestyles, stigma management remains a persistent problem for the childfree. Researchers find
that the childfree, particularly childfree women and childfree people of color, are subject to
social disapprobation (Peterson 2011; Rijken and Merz 2014; Vinson, Mollen, and Smith 2010).
Myers Dissertation 20
Voluntarily childfree women face particularly strong cultural stigmas, as their rejection of
pronatalist norms are generally held to be incompatible with normative femininity (Gillespie
2003, 2000; Morell 1994; Park 2002; Peterson 2011; Riessman 2000; Veevers 1975). Voluntarily
childfree women frequently account for their childlessness by emphasizing their own lack of
biological urges to reproduce (Park 2002; Peterson and Engwall 2013). While this appeal to
biology naturalizes these women’s non-maternal feminine identity—thereby conferring greater
legitimacy and reducing stigma—it also reifies pronatalist beliefs that most women experience a
natural and innate maternal drive (Peterson and Engwall 2013).

Data and Methods
Theoretical Sampling
This project began with egg freezing. A technology of fertility postponement seemed the
perfect point of entry into the question of delayed childbearing. The technology was expensive—
costing upwards of $10,000 per retrieval cycle—and, as an elective procedure, most expenses
were out of pocket, which has generally limited the distribution of the technology to affluent,
professional-class women. When I began this research in late 2013 the American Society of
Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) had only lifted the “experimental” label from egg freezing the
previous year and relatively little was known about the social aspects of the technology. The
dominant narrative in the popular press suggested that most of the women who were freezing
their eggs for “social” reasons were doing so to “push pause on the biological clock” while they
focused on building their careers (Dana 2012; Stein 2007). The technology seemed to present a
sample perfectly selected for addressing issues of work-family conflict and the effects of the
stalled revolution on professional class women’s family formation.
I began interviewing women with electively frozen eggs in July 2014 and it quickly
became apparent that several of my expectations about these women’s motivations for freezing
their eggs would require re-evaluation. Where the popular press emphasized the work-family
conflict narrative, participants placed much more emphasis on relationship challenges, while
acknowledging the role that careers had played in their family formation trajectories. Where I
had expected to hear about pushing for promotions, I instead heard endless complaints about the
grind of online dating. Many of the participants expressed frustration with the popular press
narrative and explained that they hadn’t been “climbing the corporate ladder” and that they
Myers Dissertation 21
would have happily had children years ago, if only they could have found the right person to
have those children with. I was also surprised by their attitudes toward motherhood. I had
entered the field with the assumption that anyone willing to spend upwards of $10,000 to take
daily shots to induce weeks of “PMS on steroids” before undergoing surgery to retrieve their
eggs must be driven by a very strong desire to have children. While a few of the women did
express strong and unwavering maternal desires and viewed egg freezing as one means among
many for achieving motherhood, most of the participants expressed a great deal of ambivalence
about motherhood. Rather than being motivated by a desperate desire to have children, they were
motivated by a fear of regret and a desire to “keep their options open.”
This unexpected maternal ambivalence among the egg freezers directed the selection of
the two comparison groups: single-mothers-by-choice (SMBC) and the voluntarily childfree
(VCF). These two groups represent the poles of greater certainty that bracket the wide-ranging
ambivalence of the egg freezing (EF) sample. Both the SMBC and the VCF were secure enough
in their desire for motherhood or the childfree lifestyle, respectively, to take on the social stigma
and practical and romantic challenges of their “alternative” fertility trajectories. Furthermore,
these groups represented possible futures that the EF imagined for themselves. While the women
with frozen eggs generally hoped that a “traditional” family was still in their future, many had
weighed the relative merits of pursuing single-motherhood-by-choice and remaining childfree.
The three groups are demographically similar, comprised primarily of highly educated,
professional-class women, most of them White. Taken together, these three groups represent the
expression of major demographic trends toward increasing delayed childbearing, lifelong
childlessness, and extramarital childbearing among professional-class women. They also
represent the range of fertility options open to women for whom “traditional” family formation is
either undesired or unavailable. Finally, each group also represents a unique intersection of
gender, family, and reproductive medicine, broadly defined. While egg freezing enables the
postponement of fertility for the EF, many of the SMBC drew on ARTs—including donor sperm,
IUI, and IVF—to achieve motherhood, while all of the VCF used some form of contraceptive
medical technology—including birth control and medical sterilization—to enable their childfree
lifestyles. Taken together, these three groups expose novel terrains of fertility being forged at the
intersection of changing gender norms, expanding family forms, and technologies of
reproductive medicine.
Myers Dissertation 22
Participant Recruitment
Recruitment began with a meeting with a leading fertility specialist who had been
conducting egg freezing at his Los Angeles fertility clinic since 2007. He told me that fertility
practitioners knew relatively little about what brought women to egg freezing but, he told me,
they were even more baffled by why so many frozen eggs were still sitting in storage, unused.
He explained that at his clinic, roughly 95% of all of the eggs retrieved were still in storage and
that he had heard similar estimates from colleagues at others clinics. A survey of patients at
NYU’s Fertility Center, which had conducted egg freezing for 478 women between 2005 and
2011 bore this out, finding that 93% of the 183 patients surveyed had not returned to use their
frozen eggs (Hodes-Wertz et al. 2013). What, this fertility specialist asked me, was happening?
Why were these women freezing their eggs if they didn’t mean to use them? That, he said, was
the real question and that was where we began.
Each year the fertility clinic mails out an annual storage contract to every patient with
eggs still in storage. In addition to paying the storage fee—several hundred dollars annually—the
contract required patients to update their contact information and to indicate either a disposal
method or a responsible party, should they die with their eggs still in storage. In June 2014, we
included a survey and a call for interview volunteers with this annual storage agreement. This
method limited the sample to women with eggs still in storage, although it allowed for the
inclusion of women who had used some, but not all, of their frozen eggs. To target elective egg
freezers, the study was limited to women without a cancer diagnosis, which is the primary
medical indication for egg freezing (Grifo and Noyes 2010; Treves et al. 2014). To address
reasons for non-utilization, the sample was further limited to women who had frozen their eggs
at least two years prior to the date of survey. In total 232 women had undergone at least one
elective egg freezing cycle at this clinic between 2007 and 2012. At the time of the survey, 220
(95%) of these women still had frozen eggs in storage. A total of 47 (21%) of patients completed
the survey, which included questions about patient demographics, relationship status,
childrearing status, reasons for pursuing treatment, reasons for non-utilization of frozen eggs,
and attitudes about parenthood. In addition to providing descriptive statistics, survey responses
directed refinement of the interview protocol. Survey respondents were given the opportunity to
volunteer for in-depth interviews as part of the second phase of this study. Interviewees were
recruited through multiple waves of email outreach to survey participants who returned the
Myers Dissertation 23
Interview Volunteer form, yielding 23 interview participants. The interviews were conducted
between July 2014 and June 2016.
By July 2015 I had conducted 18 interviews with egg freezers and it had become clear
that single-mothers-by-choice and voluntarily childfree women would provide valuable
comparison groups. Beginning in the fall of 2015 and continuing through to the spring of 2016, I
reached out to national representatives and local chapters of SMBC organizations Single Mothers
By Choice and Choice Moms, as well as online social network groups for single mothers and
childfree people and couples in the Southern California area. I contacted group organizers to
explain my study and ask them to distribute my call for interview participants to their group. I
explained that the study was currently limited to women and that their fertility status should be
elective, that is the result of conscious choice, rather than circumstance. This outreach yielded 13
single-mothers-by-choice, whom I interviewed between October 2015 and June 2016, and 15
voluntarily childfree women, whom I interviewed between January 2016 and July 2016.
Data Collection and Analysis
Interviews ranged from one to three and half hours in length and averaged two hours.
Semi-structured and in-depth, the interviews were directed by a protocol that addressed
participants’ fertility trajectories, attitudes about motherhood and family, and educational,
occupational, and romantic histories. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed
verbatim. Identifying information has been anonymized and psuedonyms are used throughout to
protect participant confidentiality. To allow for direct demographic comparison of the EF,
SMBC, and VCF samples, I distributed a short demographic survey to SMBC and VCF
participants after they had completed interview, preferring not to prime interviewees with these
categorical questions.
In conducting this study, I followed grounded theory methods, relying on theoretical
sampling and analyzing interview transcripts through a series of iterative coding waves, in which
key patterns and themes were identified and analyzed. Through the constant comparative
method, each new wave of data was compared to previous waves producing saturation (Corbin
and Strauss 2008; Glaser and Strauss 1967). Coding was conducted by hand, a codebook was
used to maintain an inventory of codes, and analytical insights were written up and developed in
memos and strengthened through focused coding (Charmaz 2006). To strengthen validity,
member checks were integrated into later interviews. In these cases, once I had elicited the
Myers Dissertation 24
participant’s responses to the relevant questions, I would describe emerging findings to the
interviewee and inquire whether and to what extent this corresponded with her own experience.
Limitations
The homogeneity of the sample is, in some ways, one of its primary advantages, as it
allows within-group variation to emerge more clearly. However, it also limits conclusions that
can be drawn. While acknowledging the ways in which the fertility of privileged women is
socially embedded within intersectional hierarchies of fertility, this study speaks to the fertility
trajectories and decision-making of college-educated, professional-class women, the vast
majority of whom identify as White. Furthermore, all of these women are cisgendered and most
of them have primarily heterosexual relationship histories. Consequently, most of these women
occupy positions of relative privilege, which shapes the constraints and opportunities they
encounter, the reproductive options open to them, and the social consequences of pursuing these
alternative trajectories. Additional research with women of color, less educationally- and class-
privileged women, men, and trans folks who have frozen their eggs, pursued elective sole
parenting, or opted for a voluntarily childfree lifestyle would likely reveal greater variation.
Furthermore, this study is profoundly shaped by the uniquely American policy context within
which participants are making decisions about family formation and fertility. The US provides
some of the least support for work-family reconciliation and childcare of any developed nation.
Comparison with other national contexts with different family support structures would likely
produce valuable insight into the effect of policy context on fertility decision-making. Finally,
much of the interview data regarding fertility decision-making is retrospective in nature. For
each of these women, the decision to freeze their eggs, become a single mother, or remain
childfree was made in the past and, as a researcher, I must rely on their retrospective accounts of
their concerns and decision-making. While accounts of the past are always read through the lens
of the intervening life experience and further shaped by the interviewee’s concerns about identity
and impression management, the way in which participants narrativize their accounts provides
useful data in its own right. This study does not claim to be generalizable, rather, through
analysis of these women’s understandings of their own fertility trajectories, I contribute a
nuanced view of the current state of play of the gender, family, and motherhood from the
perspective of contemporary professional-class women and the role that reproductive
Myers Dissertation 25
technologies play in enabling their alternative fertility trajectories and shaping their reproductive
autonomy.

The Research Population
Demographically, the participants occupied positions of relative privilege: participants
were generally White, college-educated, and high earning. The majority (84%) of the interview
sample identified as White and additional 10% identified as Asian-American, one participant
identified as Latina and two additional participants identified as multi-racial, one marking both
White and Asian-American and the other both White and Latina. There was little difference in
the racial composition of the three sub-samples. Out of the entire sample only three participants
had less than a college degree, comprised of one SMBC and one VCF with Associates degrees
and one VCF with “some college.” Nearly half of each group held a Bachelors degree and
roughly half of each group held a graduate degree of some kind, including four EF and three
VCF who held doctorates. Most participants reported individual incomes between $75,000 and
$250,00. The SMBC, unsurprisingly, had the highest individual incomes with seven participants
reporting individual incomes in the $100,000 - $249,999 bracket. Considering combined
household income closed this gap, with the majority of all three groups falling in this income
bracket. Employment status was also fairly consistent across groups, with a bit over half of each
group being employed full-time and an additional quarter to third of each group working on a
freelance or self-employed basis.
1

As would be expected, family composition varied far more widely across the groups.
Overall, roughly half (52%) of the sample was single, 25% were unmarried but in a relationship
(“dating”), and 22% were married; however, there was considerably variation among the three
sub-samples with regard to relationship status. The SMBC were all single while the VCF were
the most likely to be married (60%) and the least likely to be single (20%). The EF were the most
likely to be dating (43%) and an additional 48% of them were single. Necessarily, none of the
VCF had or wanted children and all of the SMBC already had children. Among the egg freezers,
five had children at the time of our interview, one was pregnant, one trying to conceive, and one
had concluded that she no longer wanted children, but the majority (65%) reported that they were

1
Additional information about participant demographics and characteristics can be found in the
Appendix
Myers Dissertation 26
“not trying” to have children, but had not ruled out the possibility. At an average of two years of
age, the children of the EF sample were younger than those of the SMBC, whose children
averaged five years of age and ranged from four months up to fourteen years old. While most of
the mothers among the EF had conceived their children without medical assistance, most of the
SMBC had conceived their children through the use of donor sperm and either IUI or IVF. Only
two of the SMBC had pursued adoption.
Participants were generally already on the downhill slope of the fertility curve. Nearly
two-thirds (59%) of the sample were in their 40s at the time of the interview and an additional
22% of the sample were between the ages of 35 and 39. The EF were the youngest sample, with
a median age of 40 and the youngest participant, at 25 years of age. The SMBC were the oldest
sample, with a median age of 45 and the oldest participant, at 63 years of age. The VCF split the
difference, with a median age of 43. These age differences make a great deal of sense when
fertility is considered in a lifecourse perspective. The EF are still young enough that they
continue to feel comfortable postponing fertility while the SMBC have already reached ages at
which they have decided that motherhood is a “now or never” proposition.

Organization of the Dissertation
In Chapter 2 I develop the concept of the maternal orientation spectrum to account for the
wide range of attitudes towards motherhood evidenced by the study population and to draw
greater attention to the roles that ambivalence, indifference, and contingency play in shaping
fertility desires, intentions, and behaviors. I draw on the maternal orientations of the single-
mothers-by-choice (SMBC) and voluntarily childfree (VCF) to establish the poles of certainty
about motherhood, both for and against, to provide context for the uncertainty that distinguishes
many of the elective egg freezers (EF). I argue that ambivalence towards motherhood is not only
exceedingly common among women with frozen eggs, but that this ambivalence plays a central
role in the selection of these women into egg freezing, rather than single-motherhood-by-choice
or intentional childlessness. Further, the contingency of maternal desire varies among these three
sub-populations. I demonstrate that motherhood is not a monolithic proposition for these women,
rather each “parenting scenario” is evaluated independently. I illustrate the socio-cultural,
ideological, interpersonal, and structural factors that shape these parenting scenarios and lead to
variation in maternal orientation over the lifecourse. I pay particular attention to the roles that
Myers Dissertation 27
romantic relationships and adherence to intensive mothering ideologies play in shaping
participants’ fertility trajectories. While all three of these groups are demographically similar, I
demonstrate that the degree of individual uncertainty and contingency of their maternal
orientations are the central distinguishing features among them, particularly when they encounter
relationship instability or otherwise lack a committed partner. These professional-class women
have similar opportunities, resources, and constraints. Few of the study participants set out to
lead “unconventional” lives, yet all three groups have pursued “alternative” or “non-traditional”
approaches to family formation. In this chapter I demonstrate how the combination of
contingency of maternal orientation and challenges to romantic relationship formation “sets the
stage” for the pursuit of these family formation trajectories.
In Chapter 3 I discuss the decision-making processes by which each of these groups of
women arrive at their fertility intentions and the action they take to realize them. While
demographers often treat fertility decision-making as a rational process, I pay particular attention
to the affective components of fertility behavior, as well as the interpersonal context and the
interplay between maternal orientation and romantic relationships. The vast majority of study
participants believe that married motherhood is the ideal scenario for childrearing, leading the EF
and SMBC to postpone having children until they can secure a romantic partner with whom they
can co-parent. Despite challenges and delays, most of the EF and SMBC remained hopeful and
optimistic well into their 30s that ideal—or at least acceptable—parenting scenarios would
materialize soon. Only when traumatic catalysts sufficiently undermine their hopes, replacing
optimism with pessimism, anxiety, and fear about future infertility and regret, do these women
pursue alternative means of securing access to biogenetic reproduction. While romantic
relationships shape fertility trajectories for the EF and SMBC, for the VCF fertility intentions
shape romantic relationship formation. The VCF see parental desire as a romantic “deal breaker”
and most pursue strategies of “having the conversation up front” and periodically “checking in”
with their partners about parental orientation to ensure alignment of fertility desires and
intentions. The VCF also pursued contraception to enable their childfree lifestyle. Several
attempted to pursue permanent forms of birth control, but many of these childless women found
that doctors refused to grant them access to sterilization procedures, leading them to seek “proxy
sterilization” through their husband’s vasectomies. The gendered asymmetries of access to
sterilization highlight the continued limits to women’s reproductive autonomy. I conclude by
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discussing the biopolitical systems of stratified reproduction that produce the heavy emphasis on
preserving access to biogenetic reproduction among the EF and SMBC and blocked access to
sterilization among the VCF.
In Chapter 4 I engage with the various stigma management strategies that participants
employ. Single and childless into their 30s and 40s, the EF violate gender norms and traditional
family formation scripts that hold that women should prioritize marriage and motherhood above
all else. Having pursued elective sole parenting, the SMBC violate social mores that prescribe
that reproduction should take place within the bonds of marriage. Conversely, the VCF—
particularly those in stable, long-term heterosexual marriages—reject definitions of family,
marriage, and femininity that center childrearing. While gender norms and family formation
scripts are increasingly inclusive and flexible, particularly for highly educated professional-class
women, I draw on the stigma experiences of participants to demonstrate that cultural norms of
maternal femininity and marital childbearing are still in effect, even among affluent, White,
college-educated, professional-class women living in a progressive cosmopolitan city. In
managing stigma, all three groups engage in both reproductive and resistant agency. I
demonstrate how the EF draw on their frozen eggs as interactional resources for gender
performance, mobilizing them as evidence of their “properly” maternal femininity, thereby
reproducing hegemonic linkages between femininity and motherhood. Unable to offer an account
of their maternal femininity, the VCF make naturalizing appeals to their own biological
difference in lacking a maternal drive, thereby reproducing dominant cultural narratives of the
“maternal instinct.” In countering the stigma of single motherhood, the SMBC draw distinctions
between themselves and other more stigmatized single mothers, thereby reproducing hierarchies
of maternal worthiness that marginalize poor women. The stigma management strategies of these
three groups illuminates the current state of play of gender and family politics in the United
States, demonstrating that—despite increasing acceptance of family diversity and increasingly
flexible gender norms—childlessness and single motherhood are still stigmatizing for women,
even in a progressive and diverse cultural setting like Southern California. However, the fertility
and stigma management strategies of these three groups also demonstrate the ways in which
contemporary women are resisting and rewriting gender and family norms. The complex
combinations of resistant agency and reproductive agency that these women enact illuminate the
current state of play and the uneven progress of gender liberation and family diversity in the US.
Myers Dissertation 29
In Chapter 5 I discuss the conclusions that can be drawn from this research. I highlight
my contributions to the research literatures on elective egg freezing, single-motherhood-by-
choice, the voluntarily childfree, determinants of fertility intentions and behavior, the social life
of assisted reproductive technologies, stratified reproduction, the stigma of childlessness and
single motherhood, gender performance, feminist ethics of care, and the moral order of
motherhood. I engage with the insights that this research and my proposed maternal orientation
spectrum contribute to the denaturalization of the maternal instinct and fertility desires. I
illustrate the moral order of motherhood as it appears in the lives and narratives of the egg
freezers, single-mothers-by-choice, and the voluntarily childfree. I conclude with a discussion of
the uneasy compromises these women enact between reproductive agency and resistant agency
in their fertility trajectories and their stigma management strategies and the insight this offers
into the uneven progress of the gender revolution and family change in the United States.

Myers Dissertation 30
CHAPTER 2: SETTING THE STAGE

Maternal Orientation and Fertility Desires
Popular wisdom holds that the maternal drive is a biological and innate characteristic
shared by all—or at least most—women. Further, maternal orientation—that is the sum of an
individual’s fertility desire, intentions, and expectations—has also generally been assumed to be
stable across the life course. However, in recent years demographers have demonstrated that
fertility desires, intentions, and expectations are variable across the life course (Gray et al. 2013;
Hayford 2009; Heiland et al. 2008; Liefbroer 2008). Generally, as they age, most people adjust
their fertility intentions, with women being most likely to scale back fertility intentions if they
are pursuing careers or do not find “suitable” partners (Gray et al. 2013; Liefbroer 2008).
Additionally, there is some evidence that certainty about fertility intentions varies widely and
that the degree of certainty about fertility intentions is predictive of (mis)matching between
expressed intentions and outcomes, with uncertainty—characterized by ambivalence,
indifference, and contingency of maternal attitudes—often linked to postponement of fertility
and mismatches between fertility intentions and outcomes (McQuillan et al. 2010; Miller et al.
2016; Schoen et al. 1999). Bachrach and Morgan (2013) suggest that people do not necessarily
hold a priori fertility intentions, rather they generate intentions only when prompted and, in
doing so, they draw on contextual and ideological factors. Among these contextual factors,
anticipated costs to career and level of individual autonomy impact the timing of entry into
motherhood (Liefbroer 2005). Ideologically, commitment to intensive mothering ideologies
negatively affects attitudes toward motherhood among childless women (Baldwin 2017; Maher
and Saugeres 2007; Myers 2017).
Despite this evidence regarding the variability, contingency, and the effects of
(un)certainty on fertility intentions, researchers have given little consideration to the role that
ambivalence plays in fertility trajectories. Yet I find that periods of indifference towards and
ambivalence about motherhood are common among study participants and that, for women with
frozen eggs in particular, maternal desires are often highly contingent on external factors. To
better contextualize the fertility desires and behavior of the three groups, I have developed a
maternal orientation spectrum, which incorporates intermediate positions, rather than treating
maternal orientation as a dichotomous variable.
Myers Dissertation 31

Chapter Overview
In this chapter, I expand on this concept of the maternal orientation spectrum, paying
particular attention to the roles that ambivalence, indifference, and contingency play in shaping
maternal orientation. I draw on the fertility trajectories of single-mothers-by-choice (SMBC),
women with electively frozen eggs (EF), and voluntarily childfree women (VCF) to illustrate the
range of maternal orientations. I begin by examining the maternal orientations of the SMCB and
VCF to establish the poles of certainty about motherhood, both for and against, to provide
context for the uncertainty that distinguishes many of the EF. I demonstrate how societal norms
of maternal femininity establish youthful expectations of marriage and motherhood for most
women. Most of the SMBC sustain a strong orientation toward motherhood from childhood into
adulthood, although some experience periods of indifference or ambivalence. Conversely,
rejection of these norms occurs early for some VCF, leading to strong life-long childfree
orientations, while many other VCF experience periods of indifference or ambivalence toward
motherhood that give way to gradual emergence of childfree orientation in early adulthood. The
SMBC and the VCF provide context for the open-ended fertility trajectories of the EF. I argue
that ambivalence towards motherhood is not only exceedingly common among women with
frozen eggs, but that this ambivalence plays a central role in the selection of these women into
egg freezing, rather than single-motherhood-by-choice or intentional childlessness.
Further, the contingency of maternal desire varies among these three sub-populations.
Motherhood is not a monolithic proposition for these women, rather each “parenting scenario” is
evaluated independently. The presence (or absence) of a committed co-parent is one of the most
central features of “parenting scenarios.” While the VCF are unwilling to take on parenting
under almost all circumstances, the SMCB and EF consider the merits of various parenting
scenarios very seriously. While both the EF and the SMBC express a strong preference for
partnered parenthood, ultimately the maternal orientations of the EF are more strongly
contingent on the presence of a co-parent than those of the SMBC. Intensive mothering
ideologies play a role in participants’ evaluation of the suitability of different parenting
scenarios. All three groups agreed that intensive motherhood was the best approach. For the
VCF, the burdens of intensive mothering contributed to their disinterest in parenthood, while for
the EF a commitment to meeting the demands of intensive motherhood shaped the scenarios
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under which they were willing to take on parenting. Only the SMBC were both willing to take on
the demands of intensive motherhood without a co-parent and confident that they could meet
them with the resources already at their command.
While all three of these groups are demographically similar, I demonstrate that the degree
of individual uncertainty and contingency of their maternal orientations are the central
distinguishing features among them, particularly when they encounter relationship instability or
otherwise lack a committed partner. These professional-class women have similar opportunities,
resources, and constraints. Few of the study participants set out to lead “unconventional” lives,
yet all three groups have pursued “alternative” or “non-traditional” approaches to family
formation. In this chapter I demonstrate how the combination of contingency of maternal
orientation and challenges to romantic relationship formation “sets the stage” for the pursuit of
these “alternative” family formation trajectories.

Ambivalence, Contingency, and Maternal Orientation
Between the poles of strong maternal orientation and strong childfree orientation lie vast
stretches of maternal ambivalence, indifference, and contingency. Ambivalence and indifference
are both forms of uncertainty and are often combined under the rubric of ambivalence or, as
other researchers have characterized it, “ok either way” (McQuillan et al. 2010). However, these
two categories are conceptually distinct (Miller et al. 2016). Genuinely ambivalent women
experience strong pulls toward motherhood and the childfree lifestyle simultaneously, while
indifferent women do not feel a strong pull toward either motherhood or childlessness.
Ambivalent were more likely to have given motherhood a lot of thought, while indifferent
women were more likely to say that they hadn’t given it much thought at all. Ambivalent
women’s maternal orientations were often best summed up as, “I have to be a mother or I’ll be
eternally unfulfilled, but I can’t have a child because it will ruin my life!” In contrast, indifferent
women took more of an “If I have kids, fine. If I don’t have kids, fine.” attitude. Where
ambivalent women often focused on the negative effects of both motherhood and childlessness,
indifferent women more often focused on the “up sides” of both motherhood and childlessness.
Additionally, contingency of maternal desires also defined intermediate maternal
orientations. For many participants, motherhood was not a single, monolithic proposition.
Rather, for many of these women, orientation toward motherhood was contingent upon the
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“mothering scenario” being proposed, which ranged from ideal scenarios to unacceptable
scenarios. For the EF, in particular, fertility intentions were highly contingent on their romantic
and occupational circumstances and their maternal orientation was predicated on meeting certain
criteria. If all of their criteria were met, these women felt that they would be strongly maternally
oriented, but in their current circumstances, in which few if any of their criteria were met, they
ranged from ambivalent to strongly childfree.
Given that circumstances and experiences vary over the lifecourse, there is also a
temporal component to maternal orientation. Many participants report that they held
uncomplicated presumptions of future motherhood in their youth, as might be expected in a
pronatalist culture where femininity and motherhood are strongly linked. For many of the
participants, maternal ambivalence and childfree orientations emerged in adolescence or early
adulthood as experiences with caregiving, observation of the challenges and demands of
motherhood, and socialization into intensive mothering ideologies intensified their concerns
about the burdens of motherhood, while experiences of self-actualization through education,
occupation, and leisure pursuits contributed to non-maternal sources of fulfillment and identity
and intensified the perceived opportunity costs of motherhood. While some women were
concerned with practical criteria for motherhood—including a co-parent and a job that supports
work-family balance—others were more concerned with the impacts of motherhood on their
opportunities for growth and self-development. Life changes that affect practical criteria, like
relationship formation or dissolution, often prompted shifts in maternal orientation for
ambivalent women. As these women aged they also accumulated life experience and pursued
opportunities for self-development, leading some to shift toward a more maternal orientation as
they aged.
Single-Mothers-by-Choice: Unwavering Maternal Orientation
Unsurprisingly, most of the SMBC described a life-long orientation toward motherhood.
Most echoed Rebecca’s sentiments, “I always wanted to be a mom. It was never a question. I just
always thought it would happen.” As I will discuss below, most of these women explained that
they had always imagined they would have “traditional” families but, for a variety of reasons, the
marriage side of things never quite worked out. A few had been married or engaged and had seen
these relationships end over disagreements about parenthood, but most had dated without ever
finding a serious significant other. Most remained attached to the idea of “traditional” family
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formation and resistant to the idea of single motherhood until their late 30s and early 40s, at
which point they realized, as Rebecca put it, "Oh my God. I'm still single. It's now or never. I'm
already going to be an old mom. If I don't do this now, I'm never going to do it." Like many of
the SMBC, Rebecca went on to explain, “Here's the thing. I knew that I would regret it if I didn't
become a mom. I knew that I would never regret being a mom.” This clarity about future regret
is one of the primary distinguishing factors between the SMCB and the EF. These two groups of
women are demographically similar, they share a long-standing preference for partnered
parenthood, and they experience similar challenges to relationship formation, but the confidence
that the SMBC feel that they would regret childlessness more than motherhood pushes them to
pursue sole motherhood while the uncertainty and ambivalence that the EF feel about both
motherhood and childlessness prompts them to freeze their eggs to postpone the decision until
they feel more certain.
While most of the SMBC described strong, stable maternal orientation, a few (Tina, Beth,
Michelle, and Pamela) described periods of indifference or ambivalence about motherhood
earlier in their lives. For Tina working extensively with children postponed maternal desires, “I
was around children all the time so it wasn't as if I had a strong yearning to have my own.
Certainly not in my 20s and 30s, [when] I was a nanny.” For Beth, experiencing her parents’
conflict and multiple divorces left her unsure about her own future family formation. Even as she
found herself more open to the idea of marriage and children she explains, “I'm not even sure I
would say I decided so much as it was the expectation” that her future would involve traditional
family formation. Similarly, Michelle explains, “I really didn't know if I wanted to have children.
I always assumed I would get married and have children. Kind of following what my mother
did.” It wasn’t until much later in her life that Michelle began to think “it would be great to share
[my life] with a child so that's when I felt very strongly that my life isn't going to be that
complete unless I have a child.” Pamela was the most surprised by the onset of her maternal
desires. She explains, “For most of my 20s and 30s, I was not interested in having children at all.
In fact, I wasn't aware of any maternal urges, and it was the furthest thing from my mind.” It
wasn’t until she was in her late 30s that Pamela started to think seriously about motherhood:
I was about 36, and I was walking down the street one day, and I saw a young dad
holding a baby. I burst into tears, which was not like me, and I had to go around the
corner and lean on a wall, and start crying. I began having a series of dreams about
Myers Dissertation 35
babies. I hadn't thought consciously, intellectually, about babies. "Oh, I want to have a
baby." It just came upon me. I suppose it was hormones, or just that clock ticking, where
you know, ‘Well, gee. You don't have a lot of time left.’ … I was ambivalent about
having a child, until 35, 36, 37, and that's really what even started me on the course of
even thinking that I would get married and do this.
Although she did eventually marry, Pamela was unable to conceive with her husband who could
not accept her life-long desire to adopt a child. They separated amicably and Pamela began the
adoption process soon after their divorce.
Taken together, the strong preference for “traditional” family formation among the
majority of the SMBC and the late emergence of maternal desire for a few outliers contribute to
the age of this sample. Most of these women became mothers in their 40s and Pamela was 55-
years-old when she adopted her daughter. While maternal orientation emerged early for most of
these women, it was not until much later in life that they accepted that an “alternative” approach
would be necessary if they ever wanted to have children.

Voluntarily Childfree: Early Emergence of Childfree Orientation
In contrast, the VCF were generally aware relatively early in life that they were not
interested in pursuing “traditional” family formation. Roughly half of the VCF reported
experiencing clear opposition to having children (and often to marriage as well) by the time they
were in high school, some as early as kindergarten and elementary school, while the other half
explained that they were simply indifferent toward motherhood until college, at which point
observing the strong maternal desires of peers prompted them to examine their own lack of
maternal desire. Regardless of the age at which they began to formalize their childfree identity,
several themes were common to the emergence of childfree orientation, including a feeling of
lacking any maternal “urge,” early rejection of “traditional” gender roles, some degree of
feminist concern with the status of women, a personal orientation toward freedom, and early care
work experiences that contributed to their disinterest in having their own children.
Age of emergence of childfree orientation. Unlike most of the women in the study, six
of the VCF (Dana, Chelsea, Robin, Naima, Irene, and Frances) reported that they had never had
youthful expectations of marriage and motherhood. For Dana, Chelsea, and Robin this
contributed to very early realization of childfree orientations, with all three stating that disinterest
Myers Dissertation 36
in motherhood had emerged around the age of 5- or 6-years-old. Dana explained, “I've never
wanted to have kids. It's just ever since I was a little kid, I've never saw that in my future. I never
had any interest in it. I babysat when I was growing up so I had experience with children. … It's
not that I haven't had exposure, I just have no interest at all.” As I will discuss below, experience
caring for children only strengthened Dana’s disinterest in having children, which informed her
romantic life as well. One of the few lesbians in the study, Dana had been in two serious, long-
term relationships (10-years and 7-years, respectively), both of which had ended when her
partners realized they wanted children and Dana chose to leave those relationships, rather than
follow her partners into parenthood.
When I asked Robin when she had realized she didn’t want kids, she related the
following story:
When I was in kindergarten, I remember standing outside the door to the music room and
I was thinking to myself, would I rather have been born a boy or a girl? I thought that as a
boy, I would have to go kill people. … Then I thought as a girl, I would have to have kids
and I thought, hmm, well, they're both equally bad. I might as well just stick with what I
am. I feel that I equated killing people with having kids. Again, in junior high, we had
this assignment in English class [to write] what would be an ideal scenario for you as an
adult? I wrote that … I had all these adopted children who played all these instruments.
Even then, I was like, I don't want kids. The closest I could get was like, adopted.
Like many of the VCF, Robin relates her childfree orientation to early resistance to “traditional”
gender norms. Raised in a military family, Robin explains, she understood masculinity in terms
of violence and femininity in terms of nurturance, yet she found both options equally
unappealing. As she entered adolescence, Robin still couldn’t imagine “traditional” motherhood
in her future. Robin also demonstrates a common tendency among the VCF to imagine or prefer
fostering or adoption as a route into parenthood, were they to pursue childrearing, as I will
discuss further below.
For Naima, early emergence of childfree leanings was also linked to rejection of
restrictive gender roles, which—as they were for many of the VCF—were influenced by the
religious views of her family of origin. Where many of the VCF describe coming from
conservative or highly religious Christian—particularly Catholic—households, Naima
experienced many of the same challenges being raised in a Muslim household:
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I came from an Islamic household … I saw it when I was 10. ... I saw it when I couldn't
figure out why I was “bad” because I was born a girl … When I was about 12 I fell into
the category of a suicidal teen … I needed something to help me get through what was
becoming a very untenable position at home given that I, the vision of what girls do at a
household was very different than what I see, what made sense to me … [I was this]
lonely little girl in the city wondering why she was being persecuted for being a girl … I
wish I could tell every woman to think deeply about giving up their earning power … I
decided when I was 10 that I was not going to be a victim of my father, and not being a
victim is a defining part of my personality. You give up your earning power, and you
become a victim. You have the potential to become a victim. You become vulnerable.
Naima, who had immigrated to the US from the Indian sub-continent with her family at a very
early age, explained that her feminist ethics were linked much more to exposure to the conditions
of women in many developing nations, rather than concerns about White Western women. Like
many of the VCF, Naima’s childfree orientations were linked to her rejection of “traditional”
gender norms, her strong desire to avoid the restrictions and loss of freedom she associated with
motherhood, and an ideological commitment to working toward the common good, rather than
focusing narrowly on her own immediate family. I discuss these shared ideological commitments
in greater depth in Chapter 4.
While several of the VCF rejected maternal futures early in life, many of the VCF
described uncritical acceptance of marriage and motherhood in their youth. Joy explained, “I
think I was around 18 or 19 [when I realized I didn’t want kids]. I found it pretty early because
up until that point, I feel like I wanted kids because I didn’t know there was a choice. People just
assume you’re female, you’re going to have kids.” Many of the VCF discussed the socialization
of young girls into motherhood in relation to baby dolls and the rehearsal of mothering. When I
asked Bonnie how she had imagined her adult life when she was a child, she explained, “I think
when I was really young, I think I thought [having kids is] what you’re supposed to do because
you had baby dolls. You had dolls that you took care of. You fed them the bottle and you dressed
them.” Even participants who recalled not playing with dolls were still susceptible to societal
definitions of adulthood. Sue recalls,
When I was younger I never played with dolls. I found them annoying. [I preferred] little
cars and matchbox toys. I remember [in] junior high even, that game where you ... it's
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like this little paper thing [“cootie catcher fortune teller”] … I distinctly remember
thinking, it has to say a husband and 2 and a half kids. Thinking back on that now, I'm
like wow. Even back then it's just so societally built to do the white picket fence. I
must've been 11 or 12… some of my friends, I remember when they played that, I think
they were genuinely excited to think about kids even at that age. I never had a feeling one
way or the other, I just thought, “2 and a half, that's perfect.”
Like Sue, women in this second group generally describe a feeling of indifference towards
motherhood in their youth. They expected that adulthood would involve marriage and children
because that was just “what you did.” As these women entered college, their own childfree
orientations gained clarity through comparison with the maternal desires of their peers. Some
described a gradual realization that they simply didn’t feel “the urge” to have kids the way other
women did.
I mean I never really was like obsessed with [having kids]. I even remember when I was
in college I had friends who, like they definitely knew they wanted to be moms and they
are moms now. I had no problem with that but I knew I wasn't really so interested in that.
At that time, I had absolutely no desire to have children. … I don't have any regrets. I've
never, I think there was one time maybe in my early 30s or mid 30s when I had a lot of
friends who were starting to have children and I started to think like this is how I felt not
“Oh my gosh I want children” it was more “Should I want children now because
everybody else seems to be having them?” (Brenda)
I didn't really think about [marriage and kids] a lot. … Then when I was in college, I sort
of rejected the idea. I thought marriage was an outdated institution. … I have no maternal
instincts. I value my free time, autonomy and independence and whatnot. … One of my
friends in college she had a baby …. It was this specific moment when we all went out to
celebrate her having a baby or whatever, and she's like “Would you like to hold her?”
And I held the baby and the baby started crying because I was so uncomfortable.
Everybody was like “Ha ha! Kristina!” I'm like “here you go [mimes handing baby
back].”… I'd say it's been pretty clear-cut since I was in college. (Kristina)
Brenda and Kristina demonstrate a maternal trajectory marked by indifference in adolescence
giving way to the gradual emergence of childfree orientations common among women who
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began to identify as VCF in college. As motherhood moved from a hazy hypothetical to a real
and immediate future, their lack of maternal desire became more evident, setting them on the
path of voluntary childlessness.
Others began to develop a stronger childfree identity as part of a broader feminist
rejection of traditional gender roles and restrictive societal expectations of women. Sue, who
described her own youthful expectations of white picket fences and “2 and a half” kids above,
explains that she started to “figure out” her childfree orientation in college:
Some of my friends were starting to talk about children, especially later in college, a
couple of them were close to getting married and that's when, I suppose, I even thought
about children. Again, I never thought no or yes. I was very ambivalent. … I've never
really enjoyed being around kids. I'm actually great with kids, but inside, I'm dying a
little. … I think just as I grew older, people started to ask. I think it's almost because I
have real stubborn streak. I think the more people ask, the more I went the other
direction. I just realized how much, social expectations, and whole thought of
motherhood, and “Are you a real woman if you don't have [kids]?” and all of that just
really annoyed me. Sometimes I have to pull back from being too militant about it. …
The big thing for me is really the desire … I realized that I don't have a desire, and it's
such a huge life-changing event.
Unsurprisingly, given the cultural dominance of pronatalism and the cult of motherhood in the
US, most of the VCF self-describe as non-conformists. Yet, like Sue, while recognizing their
own resentment and rejection of restrictive gender norms, all of these women were clear that
they were not childfree out of “stubbornness” or “rebelliousness,” rather the absence of maternal
desires was the single most common explanation offered for their childlessness.
“Lacking the urge to mother.” While their attitudes toward other people’s children
ranged from enjoyment—for example, Britta countered the “anti-child” stereotype, saying, "I
like kids. I get a lot of joy out of watching [them, but it’s] nice to deal with it part-time”—to
Kristina who admitted to leaning toward the “anti-child bubble” end of the spectrum, there was
widespread agreement among the VCF that they lacked some fundamental desire to have their
own children. Only Irene and Naomi suggested that they had experienced anything akin to the
maternal “drive.” Naomi explained that she did feel the biological urge to procreate but that she
been “able to overcome it,” which she felt was the best since she was sure she would have
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regretted the decision to have children. For Irene a traumatic childhood had turned her off
marriage and motherhood. As she gained more stability in her own life she began to feel that she
might have some interest in having children, but this was still counterbalanced by a great deal of
fear. However, Irene was a notable outlier in many regards. Most of the VCF described their
childhoods are happy, positive, or normal, some of them even brought up the “traumatic
childhood explanation” of voluntary childlessness to point out that this was not their experience
and that they did not have what some might consider “pathological” reasons for not having
children. Instead, the lack of any kind of maternal “urge,” “drive,” or “desire” was the most
common refrain among the VCF.
When I asked Chelsea about her motivations for remaining childfree she responded
simply, “I just honestly never had that desire to have children. … Honestly, my desire to be
childfree, it was completely motivated by the fact that I've never had any inclination to have
children. If someone tries to pass the baby, I'm just like, ‘No, thank you.’” Most of the VCF
expressed a belief that their lack of maternal urges must be biological in some way. Frances
explained:
There are people who, especially women, who when they approach a certain age have
this uncontrollable biological drive to have children. I watched my sister go through it.
People in the childfree community call that “baby rabies” … it's entirely biological. I just
think that it's just the way it happens and thankfully I never went through that. … Maybe
there's something missing in my biological drive or something. Maybe there's something
off genetically.
Robin drew on the “born gay” cultural narrative to explain her childfree orientation:
For a lot of the people in my [childfree] group, we always knew. After that, there's all the
rationales on top of it. Actually, it's just a lack of desire. I think it's just a thing that
happens. You might be born gay, you might be born never wanting kids. It's just
something that happens, it's just part of the panoply of being a human. I ended up being
that way. … I think there's just a straight biological desire. People just want them, they
see kids and they want to have them… This is something I don't have. Again this goes
back to people just don't have this desire.
Many of the VCF compared their own negative or indifferent responses to babies and small
children to the powerfully positive responses of other women to underline this biological
Myers Dissertation 41
differences argument. For example, Dana, who had ended two long-term relationships with
women who wanted to have children, contrasts her own indifference to children with her ex-
partner and mother’s “baby crazy”:
I feel that in order to take that path [of motherhood], you have to really desire it. I've
never, it's just never been interesting to me. It's never been something that I've been
drawn to. How do you know you want to have a child? It's just, no interest in it. Kids just
really don't do anything for me. … I have no trouble holding a child. It doesn't elicit any
sort of biological responses in me. It doesn't, it's fun to hold a little tiny thing for a little
bit, but it doesn't bring up any desires or anything like that. I have just no physiological
response to a child, where I know my ex would just go “goo goo ga ga!” if she saw a
baby and practically lactate. … I think I maybe genetically have that predisposition to
just not be drawn, where my mom is kid crazy. She doesn't understand it at all why I
don't want a child.
For many of the childfree women, this lack of maternal desire left them feeling a bit like
outsiders looking in on mainstream culture. While some of the VCF—particularly those like
Robin and Chelsea, who had recognized their own childfree leanings early in life—accepted their
own difference with little trouble, other childfree women had spent a great deal of time and
energy on self-reflection. Naima describes how, “when I was 37 I went through an entire year,
my goodness. An entire melodramatic year where I ask myself over and over, why I was
different from 3 billion other women on the planet and why, and after that 37th year and after
self-examination I was done. I didn't, it wasn't an open issue for me.” Ultimately, Naima
reaffirmed her own ideological commitments to dedicating her resources to the common good
and her personal disinterest in taking on the burdens and limitations of motherhood. While many
of the VCF didn’t see their childfree-ness as a central identity category, they did see their lack of
maternal desire as a fundamental personality trait, one that was revealed by difference between
their own reactions to children and those of other women. Experiences with childcare also
frequently highlighted this lack of maternal desire.
Early care work cements childfree orientation. The VCF were acutely aware of the
many biases, stigmas, and negative stereotypes of childfree people, particularly childfree women.
They often independently brought up these stereotypes about childfree people to point out how
their own experience differs. While roughly half of the VCF openly admitted that they did not
Myers Dissertation 42
like children, the other half were at pains to point out that they didn’t hate children at all, that
they in fact enjoyed being “aunties” to the children of friends and family. An even greater
proportion of the VCF brought up their own experiences with childcare, both to counter the
misperception that childfree people simply have no experience with children and to strengthen
their claims to certainty about their childfree orientation.
Most of the VCF brought up experiences babysitting, caring for siblings or nieces and
nephews, or working in childcare during their teens and early twenties. They generally discussed
how much they disliked performing childcare and how these experiences had informed their
decisions to remain childfree. For example, Dana was quick to clarify that her decisions to
remain childfree was fully informed: “I babysat when I was growing up so I had experience with
children … It's not that I haven't had exposure, I just have no interest at all. I never have, just
never have.” Similarly, Bonnie found that experiences with babysitting turned her off of
motherhood, “I’m just thinking about the times when I was in high school and even in college
where I babysat to make some extra money and absolutely hated it. … It was these experiences
with children that made me go, ‘I don't think kids are my thing.’” Even Naomi, who babysat
extensively during high school and college, and Alexi, who spent four years as an nanny for a
family with three “tween” boys, both felt that these experiences had motivated their
childlessness, even though they had enjoyed caring for these children and felt that they were
good at it:
I babysat for years as a teenager and then in my early twenties. I babysat all the time. It
was a very informed decision. I knew that wasn't what I wanted for my life, but I spent a
lot of time observing and realizing that's not what I wanted. … I enjoyed it. I enjoy kids. I
like having them around. … I just don't want them in my home. (Naomi)
I was a nanny for three boys and that is when the whole “do I want to have kids?” started.
… They were awesome kids, but it was kind of, they were 9, 11, and 13 so it wasn't the
easiest of ages. … I think just seeing how hard it is to raise kids, just from like 4 years in
the family, and was just something I'm like, “do I want to do this or not?” … Nobody
should be a nanny that wants to have kids. (Alexi)
While babysitting was the most commonly shared childcare experience among the VCF, sibling
care proved an even more powerful motivation to remain childfree for some. As the oldest girls
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in large Catholic families, Britta, Brenda, and Frances had been responsible for extensive care of
their younger siblings. These three women felt that giving up so much of their own adolescence
to care for their siblings left them feeling like they had done enough childcare for a lifetime.
Because I was the oldest of 5, I was always taking care of kids. Always. The thing was,
too, because I knew how to take care of infants at 12, everybody wanted me as a
babysitter, so I was constantly taking care of kids. A lot of times I couldn't do what I
wanted to do as a teenager because I had to take care of kids. It wasn't conscious, but
every time I was in a long-term relationship where they wanted to get married, I wasn't
ever like, “I really want this.” It was more like, “Shit, I don't want to have that childhood
over again.” (Britta)
The [not having] children part really I think originated from the fact that I had three
younger sisters I was taking care of all the time. … There was a lot of responsibility that
fell on my shoulders [because] both my parents worked. I had to take care of my sisters
and make sure they did their chores and did their homework. I think that played a big role
in not wanting to have to do that again. I really felt like by the time I was twenty, in my
late twenties I would say, that I was done raising kids. I felt like I'd already done it. ... I
felt like I was free finally. … I think that it was mostly I just didn't feel like when I was
younger that I had a whole lot of freedom to do the things that I wanted to do because I
was very concerned about my sisters and I was taking care of them and driving them to
and from sports stuff. I started viewing parenthood as something that doesn't enabled you
to live your life how you want to live it. (Frances)
Whether it was babysitting for other people’s children or their own siblings, experiences with
childcare during their teens and twenties were often crucial turning points on these women’s
trajectories into being childfree. For some, childcare experience prompted them to seriously
consider whether or not they wanted children. For others, caring for other people’s children
confirmed their feeling that they never wanted to have their own. While some of these women do
enjoy spending time with children, they find that their nurturing desires are fully fulfilled
through “otherhood” roles, including teaching, mentoring, and acting as an “auntie” to the
children of friends and relatives. Others work hard to cultivate a genuinely child-free lifestyle.
Myers Dissertation 44
Whatever their attitudes towards other people’s children, all of these women were quite certain
that they didn’t want to raise their own.

Egg Freezers: Contingent and Ambivalent Maternal Orientation
Ambivalence. In contrast to both the SMBC and the VCF, the EF’s stories are
characterized by uncertainty. Participants with frozen eggs frequently described periods of
ambivalence toward motherhood, while expressions of indifference were less common but also
present. For some, ambivalence was present before and often precipitated egg freezing. For
others the experience of freezing eggs encouraged them to be more reflexive about their maternal
desires, often contributing to increased maternal ambivalence. Roughly half of the EF described
holding ambivalent/indifferent feelings toward motherhood at the time of our interview, while
others had experienced a shift toward motherhood by the time of the interview. This ambivalence
was fueled by competing anxieties about future regret. The cultural ubiquity of pronatalism and
linked narratives that motherhood is the greatest joy a woman can experience and the source of
her fulfillment as a “true” woman pull these women toward motherhood and fuel their anxieties
about future regret, should they forego fertility. At the same time their observation of the burdens
of parenthood, the challenges of combining motherhood with other modes of self-fulfillment
(including careers and leisure pursuits), and the difficult compromises mothers often make to
enhance their children’s well-being pull these women toward the childfree pole and fuel their
anxieties about future regret, should they become mothers.
Many of the participants described being ambivalent about or indifferent to motherhood
at the time that they froze their eggs. They saw egg freezing as a means of achieving a
compromise position between their disinterest in pursuing motherhood under the immediate
circumstances and their anxieties about future infertility and regret. Ericka explains:
My biological clock isn't exactly ticking. I don't feel like ‘I want to have a baby right
now, I need a family right now,’ like I'm still enjoying life and I see how hard it is raising
kids. I'm really in – my insides are not rushing but I know that in my age – and so it's
kind of this conflict of … I still would like to have the option of having kids but I'm not
necessarily running, ‘I got to have one right now.’ … [Egg freezing] really has provided a
real safety net in a sense to be like yeah, ‘I don't have a huge urge to have kids right now
Myers Dissertation 45
but the possibility is there,’ … even at the time [when I was freezing my eggs] I still
wasn't like, ‘Oh, yeah, I want to have kids right now,’ but I just wanted the option.
Similarly, when she froze her eggs, Sandra described her maternal orientation as, “I don't know
if I want to be a parent, but I would like certainly to not lose my opportunity.” When I
interviewed her, she was engaged to be married soon and was thinking seriously about when
she’ll start trying to get pregnant with her husband yet she still felt strongly ambivalent about
motherhood. She explained, “My feeling on motherhood is I think I'll be a good mom, I'm
looking forward to it, but I'm also scared to death … sometimes feel a little bit like, are we sure
we want to do this?” Kelsi found herself in a place of even more profound ambivalence in her
early 20s when a series of ovarian cysts and a benign ovarian tumor resulted in extensive medical
treatment, culminating in the removal of one of her ovaries. At the time the doctors
recommended that she think about having children as soon she could, as the possibility that her
other ovary might have be removed remained. She seriously considered trying to get pregnant,
but she was still completing her education and had only just started dating her boyfriend.
Ultimately she decided to freeze her eggs rather than trying to get pregnant. She explained:
As long as I can remember there was never a time, when I was like, “meh, no kids,” until
like later when I met children. … [Having kids is] something I definitely am looking
forward to, but this is not the time. It's just so not the time. … I have a career, like I can't
just be home. … I don't want to have to be a shitty mom. I refuse to be a shitty mom and I
just felt like I would have to give up so much. I never wanted to be the stay at home mom
just because that would be too awful. … There was a time when it's like, I always wanted
kids so badly, but it's like oh gosh, it's almost like I was now dreading, oh god I need to
do this because I know that I want to do this, but I was so terrified of what it would do to
me at the time.
Although Kelsi’s was one of the more extreme cases, many of the EF shared her feelings that she
could not see motherhood fitting into her current life but worrying about future infertility and the
possibility of losing their option of biogenetic motherhood. Freezing eggs helped many of these
women to address these anxieties by allowing them to postpone motherhood in the short term,
while holding the promise of enabling future childbearing.
Contingency. The EF sample was also distinguished by the greatest contingency of
maternal orientation and they were the most likely to discuss their fertility desires within the
Myers Dissertation 46
context of childbearing scenarios. For example, Theresa—who was single and 37-years-old at
the time of our interview—explained:
Right now, I think I'm not even sure that I want kids. It would really depend on the
situation. I don't want to say it would only be if I could stay home with them, although it
kind of would, at least the first five years or so, just because that's how I want to do it. I
don't know. If I do it, then I want to do it the way that I want to.
For most ambivalent egg freezers, ideal scenarios usually involving a stable romantic
relationship with a partner committed to egalitarian co-parenting and secure, high-earning
employment in a position with a flexible schedule in a family-friendly company, at the very
least, and sometimes also included homeownership, relocation closer to family, or the ability to
pay for full-time childcare. Conversely, many ambivalent egg freezers saw single motherhood,
particularly in their current occupation, as an unacceptable scenario. Amanda summed up this
perspective:
I like two parents, for me. I know it's not for everybody. Some people can do one parent.
I spend a lot of time taking care of a lot of other people. I want help, I don't want to do it
alone. That's one of the reasons why I froze my eggs, because I don't want to do it alone.
I want to wait for the right partner. I don't want to do it alone. It's hard, I've seen people
do it alone.
However, marriage was no guarantee that these women would feel that they had achieved an
ideal parenting scenario, as Lori explains:
I never wanted to do it by myself. Even when I was married, I felt—he was an investment
banker who spent a lot of time at work—and I was like, “If we have kids, I'm going to be
having this child by myself. I'm going to be solo in the parenting.” And I didn't like that.
So that has been always my struggle. … I really wanted to find a partner … where we
would be a team before we did something like [have kids]. He was fully in and fully
going to – so that I could work potentially and he could take – there was a completely
50/50 kind of [childcare] arrangement. … Quite frankly it's the number one reason why I
haven't had kids and why I'm still hesitant about having kids, is I want that solid
foundation of a relationship first.
While many of these women were concerned with the burdens that primary childcare
responsibility would place on them, they were also concerned with parenting in a scenario that
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would allow them to successfully enact intensive mothering practices. As Kimberly explained,
“the choice becomes: Am I in a position to give a kid what they deserve to have? … Am I going
to be able to set the kid up to have a good life?” All of these women froze their eggs because
they didn’t feel that they were in a position to be the mothers they wanted to be. Freezing their
eggs allows them to postpone motherhood until they feel that they have an ideal, or at least
acceptable, parenting scenario.
Regret. While the majority of the EF described periods of ambivalence, three women
with frozen eggs (Anita, Aidan, and Nicole) described strong, life-long maternal orientations. For
these women egg freezing merely represents one means among many that they have employed in
their pursuit of motherhood. At the time of our interview, Aidan was raising her four-year-old as
a single-mother-by-choice, Anita was actively trying to get pregnant with her boyfriend, and
Nicole was single but actively looking for a partner with an eye toward marriage and children.
Additionally three women with frozen eggs (Angela, Lori, and Paula) expressed strongly
childfree attitudes and preferences that had emerged before they froze their eggs, although none
of them claimed a voluntarily childfree identity. Like most of the EF, these three women had
been motivated to freeze their eggs out of fear of future regret: they worried how they might feel
if they changed their minds about kids later in life but couldn’t conceive and they also worried
about the fertility desires of imagined future partners. Their concerns about future partners were
two-fold, first they wanted to keep their dating prospects open to paternally oriented men and
second they wanted to avoid foreclosing genetic reproduction with a future partner. As Angela
explains, “I always thought I would hate if I met the man with brains and I chose not to freeze
my eggs because I didn't want to spend $15,000. They go, ‘No. You can't get pregnant. Nope.
Your eggs are too old.’ I'd be like, ‘God damn it! I knew I should have done that!’” These
anxieties about romantic prospects and future regret were widely shared among women with
frozen eggs.
The vast majority of egg freezers stated that they had always imagined pursuing
normative family formation and they continued to see this as the ideal path to parenthood, even
when their efforts to do so were frustrated by circumstances beyond their control. For them
normative family formation indexed partnered parenthood, timing of marriage in their mid- to
late 20s, conceiving naturally, and completing childbearing by their mid 30s. Despite challenges
to achieving their idealized family formation, most participants reported being very hesitant
Myers Dissertation 48
about considering alternative approaches. To many participants planning to use ARTs or
contemplating alternative modes of family formation like platonic co-parenting or single-
motherhood-by-choice felt forced and several reported freezing their eggs to buy time to pursue a
more “organic” approach to family formation.

Romantic Relationships and the Interpersonal Context of Maternal Orientation
Most participants, across all three groups, agreed that partnered parenthood is the ideal
scenario. While many of the VCF were married, their childfree orientation precluded
motherhood. As I will discuss further below, relationship formation challenges were very
common for both the EF and the SMBC and the relative importance assigned to partnered
parenthood was one of the primary distinguishing factors between these two groups. For the
SMBC, a co-parent was preferred but not required and, ultimately, their desire to have a child
won out over their preference to wait until they had secured a co-parent. Conversely, for the EF a
co-parent was often, though not always, a non-negotiable.
Preference for Partnered Parenthood
Single-mothers-by-choice and the preference for partnered parenthood. Most of the
SMBC explained that they had always imagined following a “traditional” pathway into family
formation. Single motherhood was not a first choice for these women. So much so that Marlena
took issue with the very terminology “single-mother-by-choice.” She explains,
I don't like that ‘by choice’ thing. To me, for people who aren't familiar, it sounds like
we're single by choice. We have children by choice, even though we're single. We'd all
rather be in a relationship. We'd all rather be a traditional family. It was because we
didn't have any choices that we decided to go along this route.
Marlena went on to explain that she’d always planned on conventional family formation:
I just assumed, that I'd be married by the time I was in my late twenties. It's weird
because I've ended up being kind of unconventional in my life, but I never wanted to be
unconventional. I never thought I'd be unconventional. I always wanted the conventional
thing. I always thought I'm going to marry somebody. We'll have a house. We'll have a
few kids. I always wanted three kids [and] a dog.
Marlena’s vision of the “white picket fence” life was widely shared by other SMBCs, like
Joanne, who explained, “I thought that I would get married after college because a lot of my
Myers Dissertation 49
friends did. I would be married in my 20s. We would buy a nice house. I would be a stay-at-
home mom. We would have a couple of kids and a dog.” The draw of this traditional family
script was strong for most of these women and many of them describe waiting well into their late
30s and early 40s for “Mr. Right” to come along.
Given this attachment to “traditional” family models, many of the SMBC explain that
they were initially resistant to the idea of single motherhood. Rebecca explained, “I never set out
to be a single mom. … I remember one of my girlfriends asking me in my mid-thirties, ‘Well,
would you ever become a single mom?’ I was like, ‘No! No.’” Family of origin often influenced
this disinterest in single motherhood. For some, coming from very traditional families set this up
as the clear goal. For example, Joanne explained, “I have a very traditional background family,
an awesome family. … I have always wanted a family. I always thought that I would do it the
traditional way, get married and have a husband, have kids and all that.” For others, experiences
with parental divorce and being raised by single mothers initially turned them off the SMBC
route. This was the case for Tina who recalled that, “for a long time, probably through my 30s, I
said, ‘I do not want to be a single mother.’ I said, ‘I was raised by a single mother, I do not want
to be a single mother. I'm not going to have children until I'm in a committed relationship
because I do not want to be a single mother.’” Eventually though, as these women found
themselves still (or in some cases, newly) single in their late 30s or early 40s, they began to reach
the conclusion that single-motherhood-by-choice was their best, perhaps their only, option for
motherhood.
This was not an easy decision for most of the SMBC. Envisioning themselves in “non-
traditional” or “alternative” families took some getting used to. Getting from accepting that a
partner was unlikely to materialize in the near future to moving forward with single motherhood
often required months, even years, of soul searching, research, and even therapy. As Beth
explained:
You know, my ideal world would have been to marry my high school sweetheart and
start young, have kids and sort of grow up together. At that point, I did want to have kids,
but I wanted to do it in sort of the traditional way. … Then I just never met anyone that I
wanted to marry. At all. … Then by my mid 30s, I was thinking about having a kid on my
own but it felt very foreign and like kind of radical… Those are the two things I had to
figure out, which was, you have to come to terms with the fact that you're not going to
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have that thing you always thought you were going to have … and then you have to
figure out how you're going to do it.
However, a few of the SMBC (Danielle, Alma, and Holly) had been open to the single
motherhood from an earlier age. For Danielle, this was merely an idle speculation about the
future, “I always said if I didn't meet somebody I would have a child alone. I always said that but
I don't think my biological clock was ticking until … I was probably 37 or 38.” This greater
openness led these three women to the earliest transitions to motherhood among the SMBC
sample. By 40, Danielle had conceived her son through IVF. Alma, who had her daughter at 38-
years-old explained:
I also never really questioned whether I was going to have a child only if I found myself
in a relationship. That was really never something that was that important to me. To me it
was really more important that I was given the opportunity to try to become a mom
whether that was with a partner or not… when I got into my 30s it was really more
important than finding a partner.
Holly made the earliest transition to motherhood by far, having adopted her daughter at the age
of 29 and, at 14-years-old her daughter was the oldest child in the entire sample. Holly
explained:
I was also one of those people that said, “I want to have my first child by the time I'm 30
or before I hit 30.” I had those deadlines. Starting college late went to that. … If you're 27
when you graduate from college and you want to have kids by the time you're 30, partner
goes out the window with that. I started looking at foster care and I did respite care for a
while… doing all these things that are gearing me towards being a parent.
Given their early openness to SMBC, Alma and Holly had put effort into preparing their friends
and family for the possibility. Alma explained:
I had always told like friends and family that. Jokingly I said, “By 35 if I am still by
myself, I am going to really explore becoming a single mom, and whether it's meeting a
random guy in a bar and making it happen or going through the donor route.” I would
kind of just joke about it just to kind of break the ice with people that I cared about, just
so they knew this was something that I was thinking about. That it wasn't just really
crazy, weird thing. I had really spent a lot of time exploring what my options were.
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For Holly, the effort she put into preparing her mother for this eventuality lead directly to her
family formation. A year after she graduated college, her mother called her up with the news that
a family friend’s daughter was seven months pregnant and the family that was set to adopt her
child had backed out. Knowing that Holly was interested in fostering or adopting soon, she put
the birth mother in touch and Holly was able to work out a non-agency private adoption before
the baby arrived. However, these three women were very much the exception, not the rule. For
most of the SMBC, partnered parenthood had always been the preferred approach to family
formation.
Egg freezers and the preference for partnered parenthood. Despite the availability of
alternative methods of family formation, marriage or a “marriage-like” committed relationship
was a central criteria for motherhood for women with frozen eggs and singlehood emerged as the
single most important motivator for freezing eggs and for the continued postponement of
childbearing after egg freezing. While acknowledging that single-motherhood-by-choice was a
possibility, most EF participants were hesitant about taking on sole responsibility as both the
financial provider and caregiver. Many of the EF emphasized the difficulties of single
motherhood. Although Melissa acknowledged that she might decide to pursue single-
motherhood-by-choice at some point in the future, she was clear that her strong preference was
for partnered parenthood: “I think that there's no appeal to going the single mother route. I think
it's sort of a plan B … I saw how hard it is and I realized what I was craving wasn't children, it
was family. … For me, I grew up with a very stable family and I wanted that.” Here Melissa
defines family in terms of partnered parenthood, implicitly contrasting the unappealing “single
mother scenario,” which only includes children, with “ideal scenario,” in which childbearing
occurs within the context of a stable romantic relationship.
Shannon was similarly disinterested in single motherhood by choice: “I think for me, I
just hear how hard it is. I can imagine that it would be much harder to do on your own. Just
going back to all the things I would say I'd worry about, finances, time, and my back, and work
and then I think just for the kid having more supportive adults in their life [is better].” As
Shannon demonstrates, many of the EF attitudes toward single motherhood were motivated by
concerns for the children’s wellbeing. Across all three groups, the majority of participants agreed
that having two co-residing parents was best for children. Additionally, many of the EF held an
“if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right” attitude toward motherhood. They were only
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interested in pursuing childbearing if they felt that their chances of achieving “good”
motherhood were reasonably high. At the time of our interview, many of the EF felt that their
current financial and occupational circumstances were incompatible with achieving successful or
“good” single motherhood. When imaging the “single mother scenario,” their anxieties about
motherhood tended to outweigh their anxieties about childlessness, particularly given their belief
that their frozen eggs would allow them to have children later in life, if they found a partner or
experienced changes in desires or circumstances that shifted the balance in favor of the “single
mother scenario.”
Relationship Instability and Dissolution Delay Childbearing
Participants matched this commitment to partnered parenthood with action. Every
interviewee had an active—if often unsuccessful or unsatisfying—romantic life during her 20s
and 30s. Extensive relationship life histories taken during interviews show that the majority of
both EF and SMBC participants had spent the majority of their time since high school or college
graduation either in a relationship or actively seeking a partner. Time spent intentionally not
dating was identified and justified without any prompting. Their default state was “dating” or “in
a relationship.” However, many of these long-term committed relationships ended in broken
engagements or divorce. Many of these women had had a sense that they were “on track” for
normative family formation before relationship dissolution “derailed” their plans. As I discuss in
the next chapter, relationship dissolution often acted as a traumatic catalyst that opened these
women up to pursuing alternative fertility trajectories through egg freezing of single-
motherhood-by-choice.
For example, Lindsey, who froze her eggs at 28, experienced a broken engagement at 25
that opened up age-related concerns: “when we broke up, I realized a huge risk of walking away
from that relationship was—at 25—was like having to start over again.” Similarly Ericka, who
froze her eggs at 36, found her pursuit of normative family formation interrupted by a broken
engagement at 27:
I was dating a guy at age 26 … we were dating, we were talking marriage and even had
set kind of dates and everything … and then things kind of fell apart and we ended up
breaking up. I was like, “Okay, great, well that didn't work” and then ended up not dating
[seriously] for a number of years, just the right person didn’t come along.
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Both Lindsey and Ericka were on track to marry in their late 20s before a broken engagement
required them to start the process all over again, prompting age-related concerns.
While broken engagements were the most common form of relationship dissolution,
several of the participants had been divorced. Christine, who froze her eggs at 35, had been
engaged twice, married once, and divorced by the age of 29. Lori, who froze her eggs at 39, had
also experienced a divorce: “I was married thinking we would have kids, went through a divorce.
Completely new single life – it was still – it wasn't that new, but it was that I was getting old and
… you know how long it takes to get to that point of even considering kids. Even if I met
someone today, it could be four years before we're thinking about kids.” Lori’s remarks illustrate
a very common narrative performance that I call “doing the math,” wherein participants would
start by saying something along the lines of “even if you meet someone tomorrow…” and then
go on to enumerate how long one would have to spend dating, then engaged and wedding
planning, then (preferably) married without children, and then—finally—how long it could take
to get from “trying” to get pregnant to bringing a baby home, particularly if they encountered
age-related infertility. For all of these women relationship dissolution gave them a sense of
having been sent back to the starting line, frequently at ages at which they perceived their dating
options to have narrowed substantially and their biological clocks to be rapidly ticking down.
Amy, a lawyer who froze her eggs at 36, experienced some of the most serious romantic
challenges, going through the dissolution of three serious relationships by the time she froze her
eggs. Her story illustrates just how committed to family formation and actively engaged in dating
these women often are, even while pursuing graduate education and demanding careers. She met
her first serious partner in college:
I graduated college … and then I went straight to law school. I dated a guy for about
eight [years.] … We met in college and we were inseparable. It was a true first love for
both of us. … Then we both went to [graduate] school at the same time, law school and
med school. Then after that we came out to L.A. … He did a year here. We lived
together. [Then he was accepted to residency in the Southwest.] So, he moved there.
Then we were doing it long distance for a while, but honestly things had fallen apart
before that.
A little over a year after her relationship with her college boyfriend ended, Amy was in another
serious cohabiting relationship:
Myers Dissertation 54
I dated a guy for three years. I guess I was 28-31, three and a half years. We lived
together and stuff. He had a son, who was three. I became very close with his son.
Ultimately even though he told me that he wanted kids and all that kind of stuff, and we
were about to get married. We were on that track. He ultimately did not want to have
another kid. That was devastating. That was devastating.
Now in her 30s, “devastated” by her continued childlessness, and increasing anxious about her
age, Amy pursued family formation with increasing desperation. By her mid-30s she was
engaged to another man, but that relationship also ended poorly:
[W]e actually were engaged. Thank God I just came to my senses and I called off the
wedding. It was really hard. It was really embarrassing. … We already had the dress, the
venue. Then I just realized it was just not a good fit. I think I was doing it to have kids. I
really do. I don't think I ever would have agreed to get married to him if not for this clock
tick. … I felt like there were red flags, but I really wanted to get married and have kids. I
just knew time was wasting away. (emphasis added)
Amy felt that this experience of nearly marrying “Mr. Wrong” just to have kids was a real wake-
up call. After she broke off this engagement she began to seriously consider alternative modes of
pursuing motherhood, freezing her eggs and ultimately becoming a single-mother-by-choice.
It is clear that Amy, like many of the other interview participants, was pursuing romantic
relationships with a serious eye toward marriage and childbearing throughout her 20s and 30s.
Nevertheless, she found herself single and childless in her late 30s. Each time a relationship
ended, her feelings of time pressure increased while her commitment to having children
remained undiminished. These are not the stories of high-powered, career-focused women
relegating romance and family to the backburner. Rather than intentionally pursuing a career-
centric, non-familial track, many of these women pursued what they viewed as traditional family
formation culminating in relationship dissolution in their late 20s and early 30s. These setbacks
produced a sense of life course disjuncture from their birth cohort, and a profound sense of time
pressure, which motivated their use of egg freezing.
The SMBC generally followed a similar trajectory. Rebecca and Pamela had both been
previously married and divorced. As I mentioned previously, Pamela and her husband had
struggled with infertility and had split amicably when it became evident that medically assisted
conception would not be an option for them and he realized that he wasn’t interested in joining
Myers Dissertation 55
Pamela in her lifelong dream of adopting. Pamela initiated the adoption process as soon as the
divorce finalized and her ex-husband remains a close friend and a figure in her daughter’s life.
Similarly, Michelle attempted to conceive at the age of 40 with her boyfriend of two years, but
the emotional toll of fertility treatments proved too much for him and they broke up. After taking
a break, Michelle returned to fertility treatment as an SMBC and eventually conceived her
daughter with a donor egg and her brother’s sperm. Joanne was engaged at 40-years-old and
Sheila had dated a man that she loved deeply for five years, but both relationships ultimately
ended because their partners weren’t interested in having children with them. Like Pamela’s ex-
husband, Sheila’s ex-boyfriend remains a close friend and part of her daughter’s life. Most of the
other SMBCs had serious, committed, cohabitating relationships, but none of these relationships
had resulted in the traditional family formation they hoped for. Like the EF, relationship
dissolution left the SMBC feeling like their family formation plans had been derailed. As Joanne
explained:
I guess my vision was that I would definitely have a partner. Then I was at my 20s, and I
thought, okay, it's going to happen when I am in my 30s. I am going to meet someone.
After I did, in my early 30s, I met someone, and we moved to Brazil together, and I
thought that we were going to get married, and that didn't work out. It was all a blessing
in disguise, but then my clock was ticking a little bit louder. It was a progression, and
here it is.
Faced with new or continued singlehood in their 30s and early 40s, both the EF and the SMBC
weighed the costs of continuing to wait for “Mr. Right”—including the challenges of older
motherhood and the possibility of ending up permanently childless—against the challenges of
single-motherhood-by-choice. While most of the EF see their willingness to enter into
motherhood as fully contingent upon securing a stable romantic co-parenting relationship, the
SMBC ultimately concluded that being a single mother was preferable to remaining childfree.
For example, despite her strong initial opposition to single motherhood, over time Tina found
that her attitudes shifted in the face of continued singlehood:
I remember for a long time, probably through my 30s, I said, “I do not want to be a single
mother.” … Then somehow that morphed into: “Finding a husband is really difficult.
This might not happen. Does that mean I don't want to be a mother?” The answer to that
question was “No that doesn't mean that I don't want to be a mother.” … I think it just
Myers Dissertation 56
was a gradual shift in maturity. I don't know, just life just changes. You get to a certain
point where you're like, “I guess I'm going to be single for the rest of my life.” Then
you're reading articles about, “Being single's okay. Having children isn't for everybody.”
Then you're reading those articles going, “Yeah, okay. I mean I would be okay being a
single woman like my aunt and never having children. I would be okay with that.” Then
all of a sudden thinking, “No, I don't think I would be okay with that. I think because I
love children so much, I think I would actually like to have a child.” Then realizing I
don't have to wait for the guy. You know what, I can actually have a child and not be
married and not have a person in my life. Well, let's make that happen then.
As Tina’s story illustrates, part of the process of deciding to pursue elective sole parenting
involves exploring personal feelings about remaining childless versus having children without a
partner. Joanne highlighted this point: “This was probably the key to my process of deciding to
have kids [as a single mom]: At the end of the day, of whether to do it or not, I didn't think I
would ever regret having kids, but I could have regretted not having kids. That was the decision-
maker for me.” The other SMBC share Tina and Joanne’s certainty that they would regret
lifelong childlessness more than single motherhood. It is precisely this certainty that
distinguishes them from most of the EF and opens them up to pursuing single-motherhood-by-
choice rather than continued postponement in the wake of a break up.
In addition to these serious relationships, all of the SMBC and many of the EF described
frustrating and unsatisfying experiences on the dating market. They were particularly
disenchanted with the modern realities of online dating, which they saw as a waste of time.
Sheila explained, “I tried the online dating, but I find it just – I'm so impatient because it takes so
long to setup dates or whatever, and then you get there and immediately you're like, ‘Ugh.’ The
chemistry is not there. I get disappointed very easily and just bale pretty quickly.” Similarly
Michelle admitted, “I have gone through the online dating thing and dating stuff. It was not that
easy. I think people are so picky and I'm picky as well. Which is one of the issues why I'm single
too.” As I will discuss in greater depth in Chapter 4, the SMBC generally felt that it was better to
“go it alone” than settle for a less-than-ideal partner. They worried that settling romantically
might either leave them with an unhappy and dysfunctional married life or a messy divorce, both
of which, they pointed out, were bad for children. While a happy marriage was still their ideal
family form, the SMBC ultimately decided that no dad was better than a bad dad.
Myers Dissertation 57
Only three of the SMBC (Tina, Marlena, and Beth) felt that they had never had a serious
relationship prospect and all three wondered if their own orientations toward independence had
set them on the path to single motherhood. In explaining how she arrived at single-motherhood-
by-choice, Michelle pointed out: “I've done a lot of education, career, [a] lot of travel, all around
the world. … So I think that was part of the reason why having a relationship with a guy was
kind of just a low priority. I was trying to achieve all these things for myself.” She went on to
explain, that she wasn’t particularly interested in getting back on the dating market: “I don't feel
like it's that big of an issue. Although some people really want to have a relationship, I feel
comfortable without it. Maybe it's just I've been raised to be a strong women and I'm okay with
it. … I would prefer to be married. But I'm not ready to compromise so if it happens that's fine, if
it doesn't I'm still comfortable.” Similarly, Beth admitted:
I wasn't dating a ton. I would date some. Not a ton. … [I hated casual dating, I found
myself thinking,] “I know I'm not going to marry you so why would I just you know
[continue seeing you]? This is a waste of time. I have many, many things to do.” I'm not
interested in casual dating for fun. I don't find dating fun. I know in theory, people do, but
I don't think it's fun. I think it's horrible. … I didn't want to make my whole life about
dating. I didn't have the time or the inclination, I would say. … But I think it's also partly
my personality. … I wouldn't say that I have had—as an adult—any sort of life altering
romantic relationships. They've all been very uninteresting.
Nevertheless, while most of the SMBC did acknowledge that they were unwilling to “settle” for
a less-than-ideal man simply to achieve married motherhood, all had aspired to partnered
parenthood and, as was the case for the EF, relationship instability and dissolution was the
primary motivation behind their postponed fertility and their eventual decisions to pursue
elective sole parenting.

Intensive Mothering Ideologies and the Cultural Contexts of Maternal Orientation
Commitment to Intensive Motherhood
Widespread acceptance of intensive mothering practices also shaped participants’
attitudes toward motherhood. Interviewees consistently described expected or ideal approaches
to motherhood that conform to Hays’ (1996) definition of intensive motherhood as “child-
centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive” (54).
Myers Dissertation 58
Rather than being transmitted during the socialization of new mothers, I find that intensive
mothering norms are culturally diffuse, shaping the fertility desires and behaviors of these
childless women as powerfully as they shape mothers’ parenting practices. These ideologies
shape participants’ perception of motherhood as a high-stakes undertaking, contributing to
postponed childbearing among the SMBC and EF and foregone fertility among the VCF (see
also: Baldwin 2017; Maher and Saugeres 2007; Myers 2017). In addition to contributing to
disinterest in motherhood among the VCF and ambivalence and hesitance among the EF,
intensive mothering ideologies also presented practical challenges for the SMBC. While the VCF
had opted out and the EF were waiting until they felt ready to meet the challenges of intensive
motherhood, the SMBC often structured their work and social schedules around providing
intensive mothering. However, some of the single mothers also actively resisted intensive
mothering norms and pursued approaches to parenthood better suited to their resources.
When describing their expectations of motherhood, participants consistently invoked
child-centric intensive narratives of selflessness and the importance of putting children first. In
keeping with contemporary iterations of intensive mothering, participants emphasized concerted
cultivation through enrichment and educational resources, in addition to deep emotional bonding.
Most participants treated intensive mothering as the only acceptable mode of motherhood and
very few participants discussed how or when they came to adopt these parenting norms.
Similarly, participants rarely mentioned specific parenting role models. Rather than offering
explanations for their parenting approach, participants generally treated the superiority of
intensive mothering as self-evident. For example, when discussing how her life would change
were she to have children, Nicole [EF] stated, “Obviously the things I would be attracted to are
going to be family events and festivals. What am I going to do to nurture and create the
healthiest environment for this little baby?” For Nicole, it is “obvious” that her focus would shift
to events that would optimize her child’s environment.
All of the women believed that investing a great deal of “quality time” and cultivating
deep emotional bonds were central to good motherhood. Ericka [EF] worried about how she
would combine the time demands of intensive parenting with continued paid labor, particularly if
she were to pursue single motherhood:
How would I ever [long pause] raise a child, still teach, provide financially? And I
wouldn’t just, if I had a child, I wouldn’t just want to put them in daycare all day. That's
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not the point. … I want to spend time with this child and I don’t want to put them in
daycare all day.
Participants frequently indexed the resource-intensive nature of concerted cultivation. As
Amanda [EF] explained:
I’d want to give a child [everything,] how do you say no to certain things that they need,
and it's healthy for them? … Having money, it's not about, it doesn't have to be about
being selfish or greedy, or buying ten cars. It can be about giving your child what they
[need]: The best school. Help if they need it. Lessons in different things they'd like to do.
The time and resource demands of intensive motherhood posed distinct challenges for single
women. As Ericka mentioned above, the time demands of intensive motherhood were often
perceived to be in direct conflict with the resource demands. As single women, providing
sufficient financial resources on a single income usually required a serious commitment to paid
labor, but long hours diminished their time resources, generating anticipated challenges to
intensive emotional bonding and creating new financial demands for high-cost, high-quality
extended childcare. While the EF used egg freezing as a means of postponing motherhood until
they felt they had the resources—a co-parent, more flexible work schedules, higher incomes—to
meet both the temporal and materials demands of intensive motherhood, the SMBC often made
difficult choices about work and care networks to achieve an acceptable work-family balance, as
I discuss further in Chapter 3. For the VCF the absence of both the time and financial demands
of childrearing were frequently cited among the chief benefits of the childfree lifestyle.
Interviewees also consistently discussed the importance of child-focus and selflessness to
good motherhood. As Teresa [EF] explained, “the right way [to mother] is very selfless because
from that moment on they would have like everything.” Many of the EF and the SMBC agreed
that these demands of selflessness were central motivators for their decisions to delay
motherhood. Tina [SMBC] felt that being an older mother helped her to achieve this shift from
self-focus to other-focus:
For me what makes a good parent is somebody who's present and able to let go of their
own ego at this point. They're able to really focus on this child that they've decided to
have. It takes a lot of letting go of what you want and I think that's another reason why I
waited as long as I did. I was having fun and I was enjoying being able to get up and
travel at a moment's notice. … I wasn't ready to stop working hard on developing my
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own career goals. I think that that is a mature thing to do. I think if you are not ready to
do that then you probably should not have a child until you are ready to say at any point, I
could give this up.
While they frequently challenged the dominant cultural narrative that they had prioritized their
careers over family or remained childless for selfish reasons, both the EF and SMBC agreed that
the practicalities of career development and the gradual process of developing emotional
maturity contribute to the shift toward delayed childbearing in their own lives and among
professional-class women in general.
For the vast majority, participants’ commitment to intensive parenting was linked to their
understanding of motherhood as a civic duty. Anita [EF] illustrates the close linkages between
civic responsibility and intensive motherhood: “When I think about motherhood, it's not about
me at all. It's about what I can provide, instruct, guide, this individual to be a really good citizen,
and to make a difference in the world. The whole experience of motherhood to me is
selflessness.” While assigning great value to the fulfillment of these civic duties, participants
were nevertheless hesitant about taking on such a weighty responsibility. Their investment in
intensive motherhood shapes their perception of parenting as a high-stakes undertaking. In many
of their narratives, the perceived challenges of motherhood appear to significantly overshadow
the expected joys.
However, critiques of intensive mothering were rare, which further demonstrates the
broad acceptance of this ideology among participants. Unsurprisingly, critiques were most
common among the SMBC, who experienced the most direct challenges to meeting the demands
of intensive motherhood. Still the majority of the SMBC accepted intensive mothering
unchallenged. Only five of the SMBC (Beth, Victoria, Nancy, Marlena, and Sheila), three of the
EF (Aubrey, Teresa, and Paula), and four of the VCF (Kristina, Britta, Dana, and Naima) voiced
any concerns or opposition to intensive approaches. Most of these critiques are focused on
“helicopter parenting,” which represents one of the most extreme and widely debated forms of
intensive parenting. It is, however, notable that the critiques of helicopter parenting focused on
the perceived harms that it does to the children, rather than the demands that it makes on parents.
Many participants worried that the lack of boundaries and the failure to cultivate independence in
children subject to helicopter parenting could lead to poor emotional and personal development.
Additionally, a few participants worried that complete child-focus could put personal wellbeing
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and marital relationships at risk, resulting in unhealthy home environments for children. Notably,
all of these critiques of child-focused parenting are still oriented toward providing the best
nurturing environment for the children. None of these women is rejecting the central importance
of the child’s needs to good mothering, rather they are arguing that the extreme child-focus of
intensive mothering might not be in the child’s best interest.
Intensive Mothering and Fertility Trajectories
Intensive mothering contributes to ambivalence among egg freezers. Among women
with frozen eggs, the child-centric and time-intensive nature of intensive motherhood contributes
to participants’ expectations that motherhood would require fundamental losses of identity and
opportunity for self-actualization. Participants’ expectations about the burdens of intensive
motherhood emerged as powerful drivers behind many participants’ motivations to freeze their
eggs as a means of postponing childbearing until they feel better able to meet the demands of
intensive mothering.
Despite their acceptance of intensive mothering as the only appropriate approach,
participants expressed many anxieties about the perceived demands of intensive mothering and
their fear of failing to meet those demands. Angela summed this position up best when she
described her anxieties about motherhood:
You have to sacrifice your needs for their needs. I think if I'm going to do it, I'm going to
do it right. I'm going to put their needs in front of mine. … You have to hand your life
over to them. It's hard. [Kids are] mean and it's emotionally draining. It's financially
draining.
When coupled with their commitment to intensive mothering as the only mode of good
mothering, this “doing it right or not at all” approach contributed to ambivalence about
motherhood and linked to decisions to delay childbearing and freeze eggs. Definitions of
motherhood as selfless and child-focused were a pervasive source of anxiety and ambivalence
toward motherhood among the EF.
Exposure to intensive mothering norms and peers’ parenting practices and challenges
contributed to participants’ growing concerns about the burdens of motherhood. Meanwhile,
development of non-maternal modes of self-actualization—including careers, travel,
philanthropy, and spirituality—which participants expected to give up or scale back should they
have children, increased the anticipated sacrifices of motherhood. Several characteristics of
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intensive mothering contribute directly to participants’ perception of motherhood as a high-
stakes undertaking. While many participants voiced practical concerns about lacking a
supportive co-parent and holding jobs that were incompatible with childrearing, the heavy
emphasis that intensive mothering places on child-centrism and self-sacrifice also raised
concerns among participants about the loss of freedom, identity, and opportunities for self-
development that they expected motherhood to entail.
For these women, the perceived demands of intensive mothering created a negative
weight that counterbalanced the emotional satisfaction that they anticipated deriving from
motherhood. They spoke about childlessness in terms of freedom and motherhood in terms of
constraint. Participants reflected on this contrast between freedom and constraint most
commonly in relation to spontaneity, mobility, and their impressions of parents’ envy of their
childfree lifestyle. Jamie described the benefits of the childfree life in terms of: “Freedom. The
ability to pick up and do whatever you want at any moment. Not having a schedule, like being
able to sleep, … the ability to travel, to have the resources to do that.” Kimberly hit a similar
note when I asked about the benefits of the childfree lifestyle. She explained that the first things
that come to mind “always come from parents who are frustrated because they can't go anywhere
… They're like, ‘Your life must be awesome. You can pick up and leave.’ … I love being able to
pick up and go and travel.” Several other participants also reflected on parenthood and travel in
the life of friends and family. Teresa, for instance, related:
I don't know how people travel with their kids sometimes. I was just in Tokyo. One of my
friends from undergrad … brought his wife and his three-year-old and year-and-a-half-
year-old, and took a train to get there. It was all this stuff and everything is an ordeal if
you go anywhere … It's just you're not as mobile.
While travel might seem like a frivolous concern, for participants it was emblematic of the more
general constraints of parenthood—both the loss of the pleasures of spontaneity and the loss of
mobility and flexibility.
The loss of opportunities for self-development also came up frequently. As Paula, who
was 46-years-old at the time of the interview, explained:
I have girlfriends my own age who have kids who are grown up in college who look at
my life and go, “Oh my god, I wish I had done it that way.” They don't regret having
their kids and they love their kids but they're like only just now coming into their own
Myers Dissertation 63
selves in their 40s and they gave away their entire 20s and 30s to being moms. They're
like a little bit jealous of the total incredible freedom that I've always had and still have.
Many participants felt that motherhood would require a profound shift from self-focus to other-
focus and that this shift would foreclose opportunities for growth and self-development and
instigate a fundamental loss of identity.
The child-centric orientation of intensive mothering demands a great deal of self-sacrifice
of mothers. Most participants accepted the intensive tenet that children should “always come
first,” and thus they saw having children as the end of their autonomous life and the beginning of
a life lived entirely for others. They often characterized this by contrasting the “selfishness” (or
self-focus) of the childfree life with the “selflessness” (or other-focus) of motherhood. In fact,
selflessness emerged as the most dominant theme in participants’ beliefs about motherhood,
appearing in every interview with women with frozen eggs. For example, Anita explained,
“When I think about motherhood, it's not about me at all … The whole experience of
motherhood to me is selflessness.” Valeria also concluded that being a good mother requires
being “an unselfish person. I think you can't be a selfish person and be a good mom … It can't be
about you … Once you have a kid, you're never number one again.” These expectations of
constant self-sacrifice contribute to many participants’ ambivalence about motherhood.
While participants shared the expectation that mothers must always put the needs of
others before their own, several expressed concerns about the concomitant loss of identity that
they worried this would entail. Aubrey was the most resistant to expectations of absolute child-
centrism:
I want motherhood to be part of my identity but I don't want it to define me. I don't want
my children to define me … I feel like people do lose their identity in motherhood and
they completely let themselves go and stop taking care of themselves … I think so many
people put their children first and I completely realize why that seems like it should be
like that's what it should be: “Your children should always come first.” … People feel
like well if I'm prioritizing my own care, that somehow I love my children less or I'm not
taking care of them or I'm not a good mother if I'm doing that.
Several other participants expressed concerns about the costs of self-sacrifice. For instance,
Nicole had reservations about the self-effacement that she expected to come with motherhood,
despite describing her desire to mother as unwavering: “Your purpose changes. It's about this
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little being … Feeling so depleted and nothing is about you anymore. You have to put yourself
aside. … It's not necessarily about the things I enjoy anymore. It's going to be about what's going
to enhance this little being’s being.” Although most participants accepted that child-centric self-
sacrifice was a necessary and important, if difficult, part of motherhood, they worried that taking
on these burdens at too young an age could result in stunted personal growth and feelings of
resentment and regret.
Consequently, many participants felt that a period of childlessness was necessary for
growth and experience so that they could feel “complete” and “content” in themselves before
making the sacrifices of motherhood. Melissa, who was 37-years-old and pregnant at the time of
the interview, explained, “I waited as long as I could so I did not miss out on anything … to feel
like I got as much as I possibly could out of life … I would have actually wanted to travel even
more, but I'm at a point where it's okay. I've done everything I could. I've squeezed it in.” Jamie,
who was 41-years-old, single, and “not trying,” hit a similar note:
It's more like I feel like I'm actually at a place where I've had so much fun … I'd still feel
content. I actually feel that I'm finally ready and in the end, I've done so much of my
career and now I'm at a place where I'm like, “You know what? I don't need to go any
higher. I don't need to be a CEO. I'm good.”
Many participants felt that egg freezing, in particular, had enabled this necessary period of self-
development. Implicit in these narratives about completing personal growth—in addition to
travel and career development—before having children is the assumption that the shift to
focusing on nurturing the child’s growth would put an end to the participant’s own growth.
Karen, who was 47-years-old, single, “not trying,” reflected these themes of self-sacrifice
and arrested self-development as she explained her hesitation about motherhood: “I'm still
growing and doing … [Once you have kids] it's all about a little person who completely depends
on you. They become the priority. It’s not me and them equally, it's them and them and then
whatever I can carve out for myself after they go to sleep.” Similarly, Valeria described
motherhood as “a lot of giving, sacrifice in those at least 18 years, if not more. Not putting
yourself first, it takes a ton of energy. I don't know, I don't think you have time to work on
yourself when you have kids.” Consistently across the interviews, women echoed this
understanding of motherhood in which their needs, interests, and identity become secondary to
their children’s needs. Consequently, beliefs about the burdens of childrearing contributed to
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participants’ ambivalence toward motherhood, as well as their decisions to delay childbearing
and freeze eggs.
Intensive motherhood contributes to disinterest among the voluntarily childfree. The
VCF generally agreed that successful childrearing required a serious investment of time and
resources. They felt that these demands fell disproportionately on mothers and that it was very
difficult to have a high powered career and be a good mother. They often focused on how the
demands of motherhood were “unfair,” denying women their full freedom and holding them
back from success in other life spheres. While some of the VCF had taken the incompatibility of
work and motherhood into account when deciding not to have children, others were quick to
counter the stereotype that they were childless because they had put work ahead of family. All of
the VCF emphasized that their lack of maternal desire was the primary reason for their
childlessness, but the demands of intensive motherhood clearly contributed to their perceptions
of motherhood as restrictive and all-consuming.
Many of the VCF emphasized the self-sacrifice that motherhood requires. When I asked
Bonnie what she thought it was like to be a mother, she explained, “her attention is always on
something else other than herself. That’s a very selfless life in many ways … They’re having to
give attention, their attention to that child or children continuously to the point where they have
very limited attention for other things.” These “other things” that were often neglected in service
of motherhood came up frequently. Many of the VCF felt that mothers not only necessarily
relegated their careers, but also their marital relationships, friendships, personal development,
and self-care to the back burner. While some of the VCF where critical of helicopter parenting
and other extreme forms of intensive parenting, most accepted that these sacrifices were an
important part of motherhood. Sue, for example, communicated her own conflicted feelings
about the “right” approach to motherhood and the costs for mothers’ careers:
I do believe what a good mother should be someone who puts—at least for their
formative years—puts their child at the top of the list. They have to unfortunately
suppress their needs and desires, otherwise don't have children. I don't believe there's a
way, like they say, to “do it all,” and I don't really think it's fair. … I would say if you're
going to go through all the trouble of having children you do have to be there for their
formative years. I would say, I think you can definitely still have a career but I do think to
have successful career is, I don't know, I hate to say that because it sounds so – I just
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don't think you can have a super duper fantastic career and be a super duper fantastic
mother. It sounds so judge-y. It's the time. It's just the time, it's not there.
In addition to espousing a time-intensive mode of mothering and the expectation that
motherhood comes at the cost of women’s careers, Sue also demonstrates the “if you’re going to
do it, do it right” attitude toward motherhood that was widely shared among all study
participants. Like many of the VCF, she emphasized that anyone who “goes to the trouble” of
having children should be the best parent possible, “otherwise don’t have children” at all.
Many of the VCF worried that they would not fulfill their own expectations of good
motherhood, though they were quick to point out that this was not “the reason why” they had not
had children, coming back as always to their lack of maternal desire. However, many of the VCF
were clear that the demands of motherhood contributed to their own disinterest in having
children. Dana, for example, pointed out, “I see the work it takes. I see the dedication. I see the
time and money. I feel that in order to take that path, you have to really desire it. I've never, it's
just never been interesting to me. It's never been something that I've been drawn to.” Most of the
VCF also felt that their lack of maternal desire was fundamentally incompatible with the
intensive mothering demands of close emotional bonding. They generally felt that it was
incredibly important that children felt wanted, even if this means “faking it” as Naomi put it.
Similarly, Robin explained, “My mom always said, you were really wanted. I think that's
important to say, even if it were a lie.” Whether they thought they would be good mothers or bad
mothers, all of the VCF agreed that it was cruel to bring a child into the world only to make them
feel unwanted or resented. They generally felt that their own lack of maternal desire would
prevent them from providing the emotional security that they saw as so integral to good
parenting.
Intensive motherhood presents practical challenges for single-mothers-by-choice.
Many of the SMBC described both ideals of “good” motherhood and concrete parenting
practices that fit intensive mothering models of child-focused, expert-directed, and time- and
resource-intensive parenting. Their visions of good motherhood often centered selflessness, deep
emotional bonding, and concerted cultivation of their children. However, the SMBC all differed
from the childless participants’ discussions of “good” motherhood in several ways. As a group,
they were the most likely to tie intensive practices to their perceived benefits rather than
valorizing them in their own right, they were most likely to emphasize the importance of
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parenting based on the child you have rather than the child you want, they were much more
concerned with cultivating independence and resilience in their children, and they were the most
likely to push back against mainstream intensive parenting practices. Some of these differences
are likely due to the fact that the SMBC are actually engaged in parenting, while childless
participants’ discussions of their ideal parenting practices are purely hypothetical and likely to
diverge from their enacted parenting practices, should they have children. Additionally, some
differences are likely the product of the concrete challenges that intensive mothering presented
for these single mothers.
Many of the SMBC emphasized the importance of quality time and cultivating a secure
emotional attachment. Some of the SMBC were critical of parents who didn’t spend enough time
with their children. When I asked where what made a good mother, Beth responded:
I think time. I get judgey about people who have kids and then don't spend time with
them. I think just being there is a hugely important thing. Compassion, patience,
compassion. I think your kids have to know that you love them, whatever form that takes.
That's different for everyone. That might be the most important. Time and knowing you
love them.
Tina placed a similar emphasis on time:
I think [being a good mother requires] patience and the desire to be a parent. A lot of love
and patience. Because I see a lot of parents who maybe had children because everybody
else was doing it. Or parents that have children but work so hard on their own careers that
they feel guilty all the time they're not spending time with their children.
Narratives of unconditional love, patience, and emotional security also featured prominently, as
Beth demonstrates above. Rebecca emphasized the ways in which this secure emotional
attachment was crucial to healthy development:
I think what makes a good mother is when the child feels loved and supported and that
they can develop in a way which makes them the best person that they can be, whatever
that is. … I think a good mother is someone that the child just feels loved and happy and
supported. What better gift can you give your child than to enter into this world? To
create the foundation for them to be successful and happy in life.
Sheila also emphasized cultivating feelings of emotional security, though she expressed some
guilt about her struggles with patience:
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I think a good mothering is patience, is I mean being very loving to your child and
creating secure feeling of safety secure feeling. It’s lots of hugs and kisses and this
cuddling and just really ... Not overwhelming, not smothering anything. Just creating an
environment where the kids feel safe to try things, where kids feel safe to say things, to
explore and to develop. Patience is a huge thing, which is why I’m kicking myself over
the last little while.
As I will discuss below, many of the SMBC shared feelings of guilt about not living up to their
own expectations of “good” motherhood.
The SMBC stressed the importance not only of being child-centric, but also child-
directed, to successful motherhood. Several single mothers pointed out the importance of
empathizing with children to enable emotional bonding and effective communication,
particularly with very young children. For example, Nancy, whose child was only 6-months-old
at the time of our interview, explained, “I think the number one thing is… empathize with them,
[be] in tune with them, in tune with their feelings. I think that's the most important thing.”
Similarly Sheila, whose child was 3-years-old, emphasized, “I think also empathy for how
they’re feeling and how they’re thinking. … There is a lot of getting on her level and saying, ‘I
understand that you want this or this upsets you.’ Trying to not just talk at them and tell them
what to do but interactively communicate with them.” Cultivating this empathy for the child also
extended to the single moms’ emphasis on accepting their children as they are. Beth argued that
being a good mother meant “seeing your kids for who they are, not for something you project on
them” and Pamela took a similar view, “being a good parent, I feel that it's the most important is
letting your child be who they are, and not who you want them to be.” Rather than a “one size
fits all” approach, these mothers felt that effective parenting must be responsive to the unique
needs and personality of the child.
Concerted cultivation was also at the heart of many of the SMBCs’ visions of successful
parenthood. Many of the SMBC were concerned with bringing up well-rounded children with
broad and varied life experience. For many of the SMBC this meant a combination of
extracurricular activities and exposure to diversity:
You want to give them opportunity … ballet lessons, tap lessons, jazz lessons, piano
lessons. … I think that's what you do as a parent and you want to show your kid, you
want to travel with your child and you want to expose them to different foods and
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cultures. At least that's what I think a good parent does. That's how I was raised so that's
what I would want to provide my child as well. (Tina)
I try to expose them to a lot. They are in a school with a lot of different ethnicities, and I
love that. … I want to expose them to theater. … I am exposing them to different sports
and different activities and different music things, so when they grow up, I would like
them to have some sport. … I would like them to have some music … They don't have to
be good at it, and they can choose whatever it is, but I would like them to choose
something that's theirs. (Joanne)
Moving beyond discursive mobilization of concerted cultivation as a good in its own right,
Pamela, whose daughter was 8-years-old, explained that engagement in extracurricular activities
develops important life skills of diligence and delayed gratification:
I let [my daughter] make a lot of choices, that I show her that some of the things my mom
made me do, when I got older, I was really grateful. My mom started me in dance lessons
because I was shy, and I grew to love dance. … [My daughter] wanted to do music. She
doesn't like dance, but she's a good singer, and she loves music, so she wanted to do
music. When she would go to this program, you had to practice a lot and all that, and I
said, “This is part of, when you learn how to do something well, you need to practice and
work hard at it. It's not just, you're good at something. … And when you go to college,
you're gonna write papers, and do things, you're gonna have to work at. Maybe you'd
rather go out to the movies or hang out with your friends, cause that seems more fun, but
this is when you learn to postpone gratification.” The thing is, because you feel good
about yourself when you accomplish something, it builds self-esteem.
Like other professional-class parents, the SMBC generally accept that concerted cultivation is an
important part of “soft skills” development and educational preparation necessary to the
reproduction of middle-class values and social standing for their children.
However, concerted cultivation creates intensive scheduling demands that pose practical
challenges for single mothers. While many expected to rely on some combination of paid or
family help and flexible work schedules to manage complicated extracurricular schedules, Nancy
pushed back on what she described as the “soccer mom” approach to concerted cultivation:
The big thing it seems with a couple of my friends who have kids … [is that they] are
really into sports and shuffling their kids from sports teams all the time. … I may feel
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differently when [my daughter is] at that age, but I don't feel like the mom that's going to
be at all her soccer games or all her soccer practices. That's boring as shit to me. I don't
want to do that. It does seem like the good mothers do that. Go to the practices and sit
there and wait for them. If I have the money I'd rather just pay someone to take her. I
have other things to do with my time and I hope that she can be okay with that and
understand that I'm going to give her quality time in other ways. That's the soccer mom
thing, the mainstream thing. It seems like there's a lot of shuffling kids to and from
activities and things like that. … I'll probably be working and won't be able to be the
chauffeur. [It seems like there’s] just a push to be very well rounded, seems like a
mainstream thing. I think it's too much, too many activities it seems like. I hope she's
really good at something and she'll focus on that.
Here Nancy takes issue with concerted cultivation on several fronts. While a lack of personal
interest in athletics is among her concerns, she is primarily concerned with the time crunches
involved in transporting the “overscheduled” child and also worries about the possibly
deleterious effects of this over scheduling on the children themselves. She also demonstrates
several of the strategies that SMBCs anticipated using to manage the practical challenges of
intensive motherhood, including resisting some intensive norms, taking a strategic approach to
time use, and paying for help. I discuss SMBC care networks and scheduling strategies in greater
detail in Chapter 3.
One of the most distinctive parenting concerns among the SMBC was their focus on
cultivating independence and resilience in their children. While parents of many stripes are
concerned with raising resilient children, this focus has particularly close ties to life experiences
shared among the SMBC. Many described themselves as independent people and several
speculated on the role this independence played in their romantic lives, leading them to invest
less in romantic relationships. More concretely, whatever their orientation toward relationships,
all of the SMBC had experienced challenges and disappointments—even feelings of failure—in
their quest for family formation. They had all taken on the challenges of transitioning to
adulthood and parenthood without the support of a romantic partner and many had experienced
judgment from friends, family, and even total strangers with regard to their family structure.
Independence and resilience were crucial life skills that each of these women needed along her
path into motherhood, at the very least, and so it took on central importance in their parenting
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practices. Rebecca, who had overcome breast cancer and several failed fertility cycles before
finally having her son with a donor egg and the help of a surrogate, drove this point home:
One of the things that I've learned in life that I think makes me happy is resilience. I've
dealt with a lot. People have dealt with a lot more than I have, but that ability to bounce
back. I think it's really tempting as a parent to try to give your child everything to make
them happy. … [You have to be ok] letting them fail. Letting them get hurt because you
do your child no favor by making life easy. It's not about making life easy, [it’s about]
giving them the tools to deal with life.
Further, this emphasis on independence motivated most of the resistance to helicopter parenting
among the SMBC, who pointed out the importance of letting kids experience failure to help them
cultivate both independence and resilience. Victoria felt that being “not helicoptery … not overly
involved, encouraging but hands off in a way” were among her best traits as a parent. She felt
that a good parent “helps their kid be an independent thinker… encourage your kid to make good
decisions. Lets them fail. Lets them figure out how to do a better job.” Similarly Sheila
emphasized how important it is to give children the time and space to figure things out for
themselves:
I think giving your kid independence to figure out things on their own. Not jumping in,
jumping in and try to fix things … It’s giving her the tools to become independent and to
make her own decisions and understand the world. It’s not sheltering, absolutely not
sheltering … but there’s a lot of hovering and helicopter and a lot of parenting and a lot
of keep them safe. … You need to fail. You need to know what it means to fail.
Although these single mothers are taking issue with helicopter parenting, it is clear that none of
their concerns focus on the burdens that this extreme mode of intensive parenting places on
parents. As was the case with each opposition raised to intensive parenting norms, these critiques
are firmly centered on the harm that “over-involvement” does to the child. Resisting helicopter
parenting is still about providing the best possible care for their children, rather than managing
the demands of parenthood. All of these women see their rejection of helicopter parenting as part
of supporting the healthiest development possible for their children.
Nevertheless, the SMBC did experience internalized feelings of guilt and external
judgment for failing to fulfill idealized motherhood. As Nancy put it, “There's just a lot of
pressure out there. A lot of moms putting pressure on other moms and things like that.” Some of
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the mothers, particularly those with older children, discussed their own efforts to overcome these
feelings of guilt. Marlena, who had 8-year-old twins, struggled to overcome her own feelings of
inadequacy as a mother. When I asked her what “good” motherhood meant to her, she began by
saying:
I think [“good” motherhood] is a loaded term … It's not helpful because motherhood is so
hard, and everybody is trying, and they're trying their best. We all get down on our self so
much, because we're all trying so hard. There's just this whole thing out there about let
yourself off the hook. You're going to make mistakes, it's okay.
For several of the single moms, particularly those with lower incomes, overcoming this guilt
meant accepting that they couldn’t hold themselves to the standards of dual-earner couples or
SMBCs with higher incomes. Holly, who had struggled at times to make ends meet, explained,
“I think being a good parent is getting over some of that guilt stuff. … I don't think it has to be
tied to finances. I think that makes parenting easier, but I don't think it makes you a better
parent.” Victoria also spoke directly to finances, placing her own experience within the context
of the generally highly affluent single-mother-by-choice community, as well as her own
anxieties about not living up to what Nancy called the “Betty Crocker” standard:
A good mom, unlike me, would be making homemade, organic food all the time. It's
terrible, I should get rid of the microwave, but I'm like nuking stuff. I think a good mom
would have a warm and welcoming house, I feel like I don't. I think ideally, a good mom
would be earning tons of money. There's some poll on the single moms website, I think
over half of the people are making over a hundred thousand dollars. I'm like, “Fuck, no
wonder you're talking about horseback riding camps and like whatever the hundred and
five dollar Lego set.” It's like, okay wow. If I spent twenty dollars on your Hanukkah
present, that's a lot of money to me. Twenty dollars is a lot of money. I guess a good
single mom would be a good provider too.
Victoria’s comments get at some of the inherent challenges of being a single-parent-by-choice.
She feels intense pressure to fulfill both the traditionally feminine “homemaking” role—by
cooking homemade meals and keeping a welcoming home—and the traditionally masculine
“breadwinning” role—by earning a high income and being a good provider. Often, for the single
mothers filling both of these roles feels like an impossible balance.
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Many of the single moms were sensitive to public perceptions of their families and the
judgments that other parents made on them for making necessary compromises. Sheila explains:
I feel like there’s a lot of things that I do that are publicly different. I think sometimes
people think it’s like ... Not that I don’t care but it’s this a little less involved because I
didn’t do the “Mommy and Me” groups ... Probably because I don't have the time and I
never felt the need to but I don’t know. They do say that parents these days are just way
too involved in their kids’ lives and yet they forget about their own life. As a single mom,
I didn't have time for all of that but it's okay.
As elective sole parents, the SMBC were aware that their families and their parenting were
always potentially discreditable and that they might be called to account for the legitimacy of
their parenting choices at any time. Like the practical challenges of intensive parenting, stigma
management was a regular challenge for the SMBC, one to which they took a variety of
approaches, as I discuss in Chapter 4.

Chapter Conclusion
In this chapter I have illustrated the maternal orientation spectrum through the fertility
trajectories of women with electively frozen eggs, single-mothers-by-choice, and the voluntarily
childfree. As these women’s experiences demonstrate, maternal orientation is not dichotomously
divided into the resolutely maternal majority and the anomalously childfree minority. Rather,
experiences of ambivalence and indifference towards motherhood are common among both
mothers and childfree women. Further, individual attitudes towards motherhood are not
monolithic; instead fertility desires are often contingent on external factors including the
presence or absence of a co-parent, financial security, and resources for work-family
reconciliation, as well as cultural contexts, including the prevalence of intensive mothering
ideologies. When forming their attitudes toward motherhood, women evaluate ideal and non-
ideal “parenting scenarios” separately. While the voluntarily childfree generally only imagined
entering into motherhood under the highly non-ideal scenario of the death of a close friend or
relative leaving them with care of a “niece” or “nephew,” the elective egg freezers and single
mothers had a strong preference for parenting under the “ideal scenario” comprised of a loving
and stable marriage, financial security, homeownership, and good work-family balance.
Myers Dissertation 74
Few of these women set out to pursue “alternative” lifestyles. The single mothers and the
elective egg freezers generally affirm “traditional” family formation as their preferred approach
to motherhood. Most of them spent their early adulthood pursuing this traditional family
formation only to find their efforts frustrated by challenges establishing and sustaining romantic
relationships. For both the egg freezers and the single mothers, romantic challenges set them on
the path to their alternative family formation. For all three groups, their “non-traditional” fertility
trajectories also presented novel challenges to overcome in establishing new relationships. While
I have discussed the role that relationship instability and dissolution played in the fertility
trajectories of the egg freezers and single-mothers-by-choice above, I will discuss the role that
fertility intentions play in shaping romantic relationship among the voluntarily childfree in the
next chapter.

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CHAPTER 3: TAKING ACTION

In this chapter I discuss the decision-making processes by which each of these groups of
women arrive at their fertility intentions and the action they take to realize them. For the EF and
the SMBC, romantic relationships—in the form of relationship instability and dissolution—
shape their fertility intentions and behaviors. Upholding married motherhood as the ideal family
form, these women postpone having children while they search for a romantic partner with
whom they can co-parent. Only when a traumatic catalyst sufficiently undermines their hopes
that this ideal scenario will materialize do they begin to consider their alternatives. Both the EF
and the SMBC draw on personal and familial resources to engage in medical technologies to
ensure that they will have access to biogenetic reproduction. Additionally, many of the SMBC
harness their financial and class privilege to take time out of work to be with their children and to
hire full-time nannies as market-based “co-parents.”
Conversely, for the VCF fertility intentions shape romantic relationship formation. The
VCF see parental desire as a romantic “deal breaker” and most pursue strategies of “having the
conversation up front” and periodically “checking in” with their partners about parental
orientation to ensure alignment of fertility desires and intentions. The VCF also pursued
contraception to enable their childfree lifestyle. Several attempted to pursue permanent forms of
birth control, but many of these childless women found that doctors refused to grant them access
to sterilization procedures, leading them to seek “proxy sterilization” through their husband’s
vasectomies. The gendered asymmetries of access to sterilization procedures highlight the
continued limits to women’s reproductive autonomy. I conclude by discussing the biopolitical
systems of stratified reproduction that produce the heavy emphasis on preserving access to
biogenetic reproduction among the EF and SMBC and blocked access to sterilization among the
VCF.

Prolonging Postponement: Freezing Eggs
Planning, preparation, and partnership are central to the participants’ motherhood ideals.
As I discussed in Chapter 2, rather than having a master orientation to motherhood, participants
developed contextual fertility intentions based on a range of mothering scenarios. The women
with frozen eggs agree that childbearing is best pursued within the context of an emotionally and
Myers Dissertation 76
financially secure partnership. Contrary to popular media representations of egg freezers as “hard
charging career women,” interviewees assigned low salience to career-related factors while
highlighting their active commitment to and pursuit of partnered parenthood and normatively
timed family formation. Rather than focusing of career-related concerns, the dominant themes
emerging from the interviews were preference for partnered parenthood, problems with
relationship instability and dissolution, and commitment to intensive mothering. I discuss these
attitudes in depth in Chapter 2. In this chapter I illustrate how these attitudes translate into action.
The fertility behavior of the EF—including postponed childbearing, egg freezing, and
non-utilization of frozen eggs—was broadly shaped by two basic orientations: “holding out
hope” and “keeping options open.” Holding out hope that ideal mothering scenarios will
materialize soon drives participants’ initial postponement of fertility, as well as their ongoing
non-utilization of frozen eggs. However, all of these participants experience a moment in which
that hope is shaken and they begin to worry that aging and age-related infertility may foreclose
biogenetic motherhood before they establish an ideal—or even adequate—mothering scenario.
This anxiety leads them to freeze their eggs to “keep their options open.” While preferences for
partnered parenthood combined with difficulty establishing the desired stable co-parenting
relationship contribute to delayed childbearing, most of the participants waited until after the age
of 35 to freeze their eggs. They explained that egg freezing felt like an admission of failure or an
acknowledgement that family formation wouldn’t work out for them as they had hoped. Despite
challenges and delays, most remained optimistic until an event or benchmark—which I term
“traumatic catalysts”—triggered intensified fear, anxiety, and pessimism about the future,
leading them to freeze their eggs to assuage this anxiety and restore their feelings of reproductive
autonomy.
Not Climbing the Ladder: Resisting the “Career Woman” Narrative
The EF emphasized difficulties in establishing and sustaining committed long-term
relationships as the primary barriers to family formation, rather than challenges relating to
workplace or career trajectory. Survey responses prefigured this finding with 34 out of 47
respondents (72%) citing the absence of a committed co-parent as their primary reason both for
freezing their eggs and for not returning to use them. Survey respondents were also asked to rank
various pre-requisites to childbearing on a scale from [1] Not at all important to [5] Extremely
important. Establishing a “stable and committed relationship” received a median ranking of [5]
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Extremely important, while career related goals like achieving career milestones or holding a
secure or high-paying position only received median rankings of [2] Slightly important and
holding a prestigious position received a median ranking of [1] Not at all important. Only three
respondents in the entire survey sample marked that having a career or schedule that does not
accommodate parenthood was a contributing factor in their non-utilization of frozen eggs. The
only survey respondent to report that a need to advance further in her career was holding her
back from using her eggs was a general outlier: at 25 years of age Kelsi was the youngest
participant by far.
2

This trend was borne out in the interviews. Some of the participants did acknowledge that
workplace demands might have interfered with their family formation. Karen, Lori, and Jamie all
pointed out that having travel-heavy jobs was reasonably incompatible with both dating and
motherhood. Roughly a third of the EF (Ericka, Christine, Sandra, Shannon, Aubrey, Kelsi,
Kimberly, and Valeria) admitted that working long hours also interfered with relationship
formation and felt incompatible with motherhood. Many of the EF did acknowledge that
combining work and motherhood could be a challenge and that motherhood could harm
women’s careers, but none of the participants felt that they had intentionally prioritized their
careers ahead of family formation.
In fact, several participants actively identified and contested the dominant narrative that
women who freeze their eggs put their careers ahead of motherhood. Sandra, Amy, Theresa,
Melissa, and Nicole all emphasized their lack of strong career-focus. At 38, Sandra had already
made three major career transitions; she was self-employed as a freelance business consultant
and was in the process of launching her own company when we spoke. She contrasted the high
importance of relationship status with the low importance of career in her decision to freeze her
eggs:
I have to think it was much more [being] single [that caused me to freeze my eggs],
because I didn't look at it, in my mind at that time, it was not ‘I'm busy climbing this

2
Kelsi’s case demonstrates the gray areas between “medically indicated” and “elective” egg
freezing. Although Kelsi did not have a cancer diagnosis and her egg freezing did not meet the
technical definition of medically-indicated, her decision to freeze her eggs at 20 years of age was
the result of ongoing struggles with ovarian cysts and a benign ovarian tumor requiring the
removal of one of her ovaries. Perhaps, unsurprisingly all three of the participants who froze
their eggs before the age of 30 reported some degree of health-related concerns contributing to
their decision to do so.
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corporate ladder’ … I never thought that way. … To be honest, [my career] doesn't feel
as important to me. Finding the partner was super important to me, and then I think the
next thing will be having children.
Amy and Theresa also contested the dominant narrative that egg freezers delay childbearing to
pursue their careers. Theresa told me that she hadn’t identified with the narrative that the fertility
doctor presented:
Another thing [the doctor] said that isn't my case is that a lot of women are doing it
because they put relationships on hold for their career. That wasn't my case … Maybe it's
just a stereotype that we're focused on our career. Maybe nobody wants to admit that for
me it was definitely not because I was focused on a career.
Amy offered a similar counter-narrative:
I think it was much more, for whatever reason, I just could not find the right guy. … I
didn’t even really care that much about work. I could have left it. I say that with tongue
and cheek. I obviously need a job, but I wasn’t trying to climb a ladder. … My most
number one thing was, “Can I meet the right person and have a child?”
All of these women index a dominant narrative of egg freezers as career-focused women putting
family on the back burner while they “climb the ladder” and contrast it with their own feelings of
indifference towards career-based identities and desire for marriage and motherhood.
In a similar vein, Melissa, who was pregnant at the time of the interview, admitted, “I
don't want to go back to work, to be honest.” She went on to say that she had been relieved when
she began to hear that other women had been motivated to freeze their eggs by lack of a co-
parent, rather than due to high career devotion:
It made me feel reassured when I heard, like, oh, they just haven't met the right person.
Here I am, I haven't met the right person and I have no career to show for it, you know? It
was like, “What a loser.” … I would have been a stay-at-home mom ten years ago and
never had a career, you know what I mean?
She went on to reassert her relief at hearing that other women had frozen their eggs due to
singlehood, rather than career-focus, “It was definitely nice to hear that that might not be the
case. It made me feel like I'm just not a freak for not having either one of those things going on.”
Melissa and Theresa’s admissions of shame and relief suggest an interesting inversion of the
“selfish career woman” narrative. In their reckoning the career woman had less to be ashamed of
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because her trajectory into childlessness was marked by success in a competing life sphere, in
their own cases they felt that their trajectories were marked by failure—or at least limited
success—in both public and private spheres. In their reckoning, a successful career woman had a
good “excuse” for her childlessness, while they worried that their own childlessness might
suggest some personal failing.
In fact, the survey data suggests that—in addition to being linked to relationship
challenges—both the initial fertility delays leading up to egg freezing and subsequent ongoing
fertility postponement may be linked to occupational instability and unachieved financial goals.
While all respondents assigned uniformly low importance to career-related life goals and those
who had not had children since freezing their eggs—those “Holding Out Hope”—assigned the
lowest importance of all to career-related goals compared to those who had become pregnant
since egg freezing—those whose fertility was “Already Accomplished”—and those who had
decided to remain “Permanently Childfree” since freezing their eggs. However, those “Holding
Out Hope” were also the least likely to report having achieved career-related life goals.
Similarly, those “Holding Out Hope” also assigned the lowest importance to and had the lowest
rates of achievement of financial life goals including adequate savings, strong financial standing,
low debt burden, and home ownership.
These variations in accomplishment of financial goals may be linked to the variation in
terms of employment status. While roughly half of both the “Already Accomplished” (50%) and
“Holding Out Hope” (47%)—and 100% of the “Permanently Childfree”—reported being
employed full-time, women in the “Holding Out Hope” group were the most likely to report
being employed on a freelance basis, with 41% of the “Holding Out Hope” group reporting
freelance employment as compared to only 17% of the “Already Accomplished” and 0% of the
“Permanently Childfree” groups. This preponderance of freelance work among those “Holding
Out Hope” may indicate a career-related effect, but not the one presumed in much of the popular
reporting on egg freezing. Journalists, public figures, and fertility doctors alike tend to presume
that the typical elective egg freezer is a high-powered career woman, likely to be earning six
figures or more at the C-level. However, I was hard pressed to find evidence of these women in
the survey sample and I failed to find a single representative of this type among the interviewees.
I don’t discount the possibility that these women do exist and that they are simply too busy to
respond to my call for research participants. Nevertheless, the career effects that I find evidence
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for in my sample are not those of high-powered careers, but rather those of high-contingency
careers.
Though consistent in age with the sample as a whole, the freelancers were even more
disproportionately White, were much more likely to hold only a Bachelor’s degree—at 60% as
compared to 33% of those employed full-time and 0% of those working part-time or less—and
were lower-earning than their full-time or part-time peers, with only 33% reporting individual
incomes of $100,000 or more as compared to 58% of those working full-time and 63% of those
working part-time or less.
3
Although they assigned a similar degree of importance to most life
goals as did their full-time and part-time or unemployed peers, freelancers were less likely to
report having achieved goals including those relating to relationship status, career achievements,
proximity to family, paying off their debt burden, completing their education, having had time
for self-development, and readiness to fully devote themselves to needs of another person. These
unachieved life goals likely drive the fact that freelancers were the most likely to report that they
still were “not ready to have kids” (40%) and that they still needed to “achieve greater financial
stability” (20%) before they would be ready to have children.
4
Rather than experiencing high
levels of career success that preempts other life goals, the freelancers experience high levels of
career insecurity that preclude family formation. The over-representation of freelancers in the
“Holding Out Hope” group and their under-representation in the “Already Accomplished” group
suggest that, to the extent that career plays a role in postponed fertility, it is by virtue of the
increasingly unstable and contingent nature of work.
Holding Out Hope
The vast majority of the EF and SMBC stated that they had always imagined pursuing
normative family formation and they continued to see this as the ideal path to parenthood, even
when their efforts to do so were frustrated by circumstances beyond their control. Despite
challenges to achieving their idealized family formation, most of the EF reported being very

3
Women in the part-time or less category reported surprisingly high individual incomes. While
may data does not permit me to say so conclusively, I postulate that having a substantial
independent income or commanding very high hourly rates or consulting fees may be two factors
that allowed women in the sample to minimize their hours worked, resulting in high annual
incomes despite reduced labor force engagement.
4
Additional information about participants and their motivations for egg freezing and non-
utilization of frozen eggs can be found in the Appendix.
Myers Dissertation 81
hesitant about considering alternative approaches. The pattern of “holding out hope” explains
why so many of these women wait until relatively advanced ages to freeze their eggs. Among the
interviewees with frozen eggs (which includes two of the women recruited as single-mothers-by-
choice), all but five had frozen their eggs at or after 35 years of age, including four who froze
their eggs at or over 40 years of age. For some, this delay was simply a product of their lack of
awareness of egg freezing as an option, but those who had put off egg freezing after hearing
about it explained their hesitance in terms of optimism and a commitment to “organic” family
formation.
Most of the participants explained that they kept hoping that family formation would
come together soon and they wouldn’t need to freeze their eggs. Lindsey, who froze her eggs at
28, saw this relatively early egg freezing as a failure of optimism: “I do think there’s a little bit of
pessimism involved if you do it as early as I did because essentially what you’re putting out to
the universe is I’m 28 years old, I’m not going to meet anybody.” As I will discuss below,
Lindsey’s egg freezing was motivated by the death of her father and a broken engagement, which
acted as “traumatic catalysts,” shifting her general attitude from optimism to pessimism about the
future. Additionally, many of these women waited because freezing eggs felt like an admission
of failure. Aubrey explains that she didn’t tell anyone that she’d frozen her eggs because, “I
definitely felt like a failure. [Because] I hadn't been able to maintain a relationship that led to
something committed or that led to children or something at that point in my life.” Aidan
explained that freezing eggs felt like a very negative step to take: “It's supposed to be little balls
of hope but it’s kind of scary and depressing. You're saying your future may not look like what
you want it to look like. You should prepare for that. It's like Debbie Downer.” As Aidan’s
remarks highlight, egg freezing holds a complicated position in the broader “economies of hope”
of ARTs (see: Becker 2000a; Franklin 1997). While conceptive ARTs, like IVF, give patients
hope that a baby may soon be on the way, as a prudential technology, egg freezing is rooted in
the fear that a baby may not be in the foreseeable future.
When pessimism and anxiety about the future replace hope and optimism, these women
elect to freeze their eggs to ensure that they preserve the option of biogenetic reproduction. In
this way, the language of egg freezing is strongly prudential. Martin (2010) notes that despite the
prevalence of “fertility preservation” as a descriptor for egg freezing, it is the potential for
genetic parenthood, rather than fertility, that is putatively preserved by egg freezing, as frozen
Myers Dissertation 82
eggs are generally only used in the event of infertility. While participants rarely used the term
“fertility preservation,” they consistently represented egg freezing as a mode of “fertility
insurance,” a policy taken out against the possibility of future infertility and means of “keeping
their options open.” While their confidence in the technology ranged from a blithe belief that
their frozen eggs would allow them to have children whenever they were ready to a repeated
insistence that egg freezing is “not a guarantee” of future reproduction, all participants treated
frozen eggs as a back up plan. As Lindsey put it, “It was sort of a preventative measure but
mainly I almost never thought I’d actually use them.” Like most insurance policies, participants
hope never to need their frozen eggs.
Traumatic Catalysts
In fact, hope proved to be a dominant narrative across the interviews. Participants put off
freezing eggs at younger ages because they remained hopeful that they would meet the right
person and achieve conception naturally. Interview data reveals that it is generally only a
traumatic catalyst replacing hope and optimism with anxiety and pessimism that causes these
participants to engage with elective egg freezing. These traumatic catalysts included the loss of a
loved one (usually a parent), the dissolution of a serious relationship, second-hand experience of
peers’ struggles with infertility, a “milestone” birthday or other event setting off intense age-
related anxiety, or a medical crisis or condition resulting in anxiety about fertility. In many
cases—particularly those that involved relationship dissolution or a medical crisis—the traumatic
catalyst led to almost immediate engagement with egg freezing to quell anxiety and reassert a
sense of control. In other cases, the traumatic catalyst set off a period of soul searching that
eventually led to egg freezing, usually within five years. Sometimes participants could identify a
specific moment or event—like the death of a parent or getting divorced—that prompted them to
freeze their eggs, but others described a gradual build up of factors that compounded upon one
another.
When a serious relationship ended, a parent died, or a younger sibling got pregnant, many
participants began to feel increasing age-related anxiety, which eventually led them to freeze
their eggs. For Lindsey, her father’s death and a broken engagement at the end of a 5-year
relationship when she was 25 set off a period of increasing age-related anxiety and fear of
missing out on motherhood that culminated in her freezing her eggs three years later at the age of
28:
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My dad died when I was 25 … It was very traumatic time. I was left with a lot of money
so I could do it and I did it to quell my anxiety period. … In college, I didn’t even think I
wanted kids … It only became important to me when I was 24, 25, or 23. Then there
became this sense of urgency after my relationship fell apart and I realized, “Oh my God
I’m 25 and I just ducked out of a 5 year relationship.” … I was in such a dark [place] … I
was obsessed with the idea of being a mom and not being able to be one. … I realized I
took a huge risk of walking away from that relationship was—at 25—was like having to
start over again. … Then my dad died. I think that was the main trigger. … I wanted to
create another family member. I lost one, bring a new one into the world. So that became
very important, but I didn’t want to do it with my ex so that was the thing. Then I kept
meeting guys that I thought it was going to work with and then it didn’t. … It’s sort of
like a domino effect. … For me it was a building up of factors which increased levels of
anxiety which then triggered the, “I’m just gonna, you know I have the money, I’m just
going to do something about this. Just put your mind at ease.”
Lindsey also noted that she had been diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) at a
very young age and that the doctors had always warned her that her fertility could be
compromised. All of these factors combined to severely undermine Lindsey’s hope that she
would be able to have children at a time of her choosing in the future, leading her to freeze her
eggs to keep that option open. As fate would have it, Lindsey started dating a man seriously
about three years after freezing her eggs. Several months into their relationship, she got pregnant
and the couple decided to marry and go forward with the pregnancy. As of 2018, the two have
been married for four years and have two children together.
While roughly a quarter of the interviewees (Lindsey, Amanda, Melissa, Amy, and
Aubrey) had experienced loss of a loved one that contributed to their decisions to freeze eggs,
the dissolution of a serious relationship was a much more common catalyst for egg freezing, with
three-quarters of the interviewees citing a break up, broken engagement, or divorce as a major
contributing factor in their journey toward egg freezing. These 17 women were evenly divided
into those who froze their eggs within one year of relationship dissolution and those who, like
Lindsey, spent several years dating unsuccessfully before acknowledging that a co-parenting
relationship might not materialize soon and that freezing their eggs might buy them more time
and help them make better decisions about relationships. Teresa, for example, had two serious
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relationships in her twenties—her college boyfriend whom she dated between the ages of 18 and
24 and her second serious boyfriend whom she dated between the ages of 27 and 29—as well as
several less serious relationships between the two and since the latter. When she broke up with
her second serious boyfriend at 29, she thought seriously about freezing her eggs by her thirtieth
birthday, but at the time she was still optimistic that things would work out and she decided not
to go forward with egg freezing. By 35 she hadn’t found another serious partner and she decided
it was finally time to freeze eggs. On the other hand, when Angela experienced a bad break up
just before her thirty-sixth birthday, she explains:
I just started feeling like, “Oh, God. I'm never going to meet anybody.” I was
brokenhearted over this guy. I never thought I wanted to be a single parent or anything
like that. I just felt like, “Well, shit. It won't be years until I meet somebody.” … I
thought, being a Taurus, we don't want to let anybody to tell us we can't do something.
I've never been super stoked on kids but just the idea that somebody could say, "You
cannot have a child." I was like, “Oh, hell no. Ain't nobody going to tell me that.” I just
thought, here's what's in my control and then I just left the rest up to the universe”
Like Angela, Aubrey was driven to freeze her eggs by a desire to reassert her reproductive
autonomy in the wake of a break up in her late 20s: “I felt like I didn't have a lot of power and
freezing my eggs allowed me to take back some of my power and control of the situation that felt
really out of control to me at the time.” Several women discussed how they found themselves
engaged to men they didn’t love, or even like, simply out of a panicked desire to have children
before it was too late. Having broken off those engagements, these women froze their eggs to
help them avoid making the same mistake again. As Lori explained, egg freezing can “take away
that whole pressure of a relationship and finding that person just so you can have kids … it will
ease the pressure of the relationship, I think, and make you make the right choice and not settle
for someone just because you're trying to have kids.” Like Lori, many of the participants
emphasized that freezing their eggs enhanced their feelings of agency, which they felt helped
them make better decisions about relationships.
Relationship dissolution proved a particularly powerful motivator when it was combined
with second-hand experience of peer’s fertility struggles. Melissa froze her eggs shortly before
her thirty-seventh birthday after watching her cousins’ struggle with infertility:
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My cousin met someone I fixed him up with… and they were both in their 40s…. By the
time they courted and fell in love, they started to try to have kids and I saw a lot of
struggle. There was a lot of struggle. They did a lot of things and spent a lot of money
and ended up with a donated egg. They have a child and it's wonderful. They're happy
and there's a happy ending to the story, but it was years of struggle. That was where I
said, “Okay, I'm on that path because I'm single.” I had broken up with someone around
35. So, I was like, “Shit, now I've got to start over.” … I knew years would pass before I
would be ready to have a kid with someone… and I saw myself ending up where they
are. I said, “Wouldn't it have been great if they had her [younger] eggs frozen” … and so
I was like, “Well, maybe I should do that.” … It was more watching my cousins just
struggling. I was like, “Okay, let me take care of that before I get there.”
Similarly Karen was motivated to freeze her eggs after watching friends and coworkers struggle
with infertility in their late 30s and 40s. Valeria, who had struggled with depression and suicidal
thoughts for much of her life, decided to freeze her eggs at 36 almost immediately after meeting
a 43-year-old man who told her that his wife was on suicide watch after learning that she would
never be able to conceive with her own eggs. In a similar vein, the time that Nicole and Aubrey
spent working in neo-natal and pediatric intensive care units sensitized them to the health risks
associated with older motherhood, which they credited with motivating them to freeze their eggs
in the wake of serious break-ups.
For the majority of the interviewees, relationship instability and dissolution made them
feel as though their lives were off track and out of control. Break ups meant that they had to start
all over again while their friends and siblings were having first, second, even third children.
These break ups also highlighted how much their fertility depended on another person and on
circumstance, or the cruel “gods of Tindr” as Judy put it. Consequently, in about half of these
cases relationship dissolution triggered age-related anxieties and these two factors together—and
often in combination with other factors—motivated these women to freeze their eggs to ease
their anxieties and regain a sense of control. Having made the decision to freeze their eggs, all of
these women followed a similar trajectory of researching the technology, honing in on the best
clinics, scheduling consultations, undergoing hormonal stimulation, and finally having their eggs
retrieved. Once the decision was made, taking action rarely took very long.
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Once their eggs were frozen, most participants experienced a marked reduction in these
feelings of anxiety and time pressure and their optimism about the future returned. Participants
remained hopeful that family formation would happen naturally and that their frozen eggs would
remain unused, leading to high rates of non-utilization and low rates of single-motherhood-by-
choice, despite high levels of awareness of and reported openness to this option in the sample.
Some, like Paula, found that egg freezing provided a profound sense of relief and a feeling that
they could continue to delay and take time to “make up their minds” well into their 40s. Others,
like Lindsey, found that while egg freezing eased some anxiety, they still felt a fair amount of
temporal pressure. As Lindsey put it, “It wasn’t like oh goody, I can wait until I’m 42.” For
some, egg freezing opened up a wider range of reproductive and family formation options.
Christine explains:
[Egg freezing] has allowed me to entertain the thought of that alternate script … I have
the choice to get married, to not get married, to get married and have kids, to get married
and not have kids, to not get married and have kids, to not get married and not have kids.
I feel like the matrix has opened up on choices whereas before I felt like, “I have to get
married and I have to have kids,” and there was only one way and there was only one
script. Now I feel like – I'll spin the wheel, I can choose whatever I want. … I think
there's something liberating about it and freeing about it. … Before, I felt like I was a
victim of circumstance, divorce, law school, but now I feel like waiting and choosing to
wait is something I genuinely choose. It's not circumstantial or out of my choice. There's
a peace in that. There's a confidence in that. There's a comfort level in that.
As Christine’s comments demonstrate, the role that egg freezing plays in enhancing feelings of
reproductive autonomy and agency and intimately tied up with the way in which these women
feel that the technology allows them to “keep their options open.”
Keeping My Options Open
Every single participant described egg freezing primarily as an “insurance policy” that
allowed her to “keep her options open.” However, as I demonstrated in Chapter 2, maternal
orientation varied widely within this group. A few participants described feeling a strong desire
to mother that never wavered from childhood through to the time of the interview. For these
women, egg freezing was merely one tool among many for pursuing motherhood. Among the
strongly maternally oriented, some had made the decision to become single-mothers-by-choice
Myers Dissertation 87
after freezing their eggs, others had begun trying to conceive and become pregnant shortly after
settling into committed relationships or were actively searching for a committed partner in hopes
of pursuing motherhood as soon as possible. For these women, egg freezing operates as a
traditionally reproductive technology, oriented toward the conception of a genetically healthy
child in the face of age-related fertility barriers.
However, only three women reported unwavering maternal orientations. Most
participants described periods of ambivalence about motherhood and ten participants described
feelings of strong ambivalence at the time of the interview. Additionally, while characterizing
themselves as ambivalent, six of the participants described feelings of growing disinterest in or
even outright opposition to motherhood, which emerged before freezing their eggs, for some, and
since, for others. Regardless of their orientation to motherhood, many participants described
responding to the stigma of being a childless woman by mobilizing their frozen eggs to defend
their “properly” feminine maternal orientation, which I will discuss in greater depth in Chapter 4.
Additionally, for some of the women who were ambivalent or childfree in their maternal
orientation, egg freezing operates not only as a means of stigma management but also, I argue, as
a “non-reproductive” technology. For these women, freezing their eggs allows them to feel—and
to argue to others—that they have “done their part” in the service of motherhood, while not
relinquishing their childfree status. Rather than being oriented toward enabling reproduction, in
these cases, egg freezing is oriented toward enabling their ongoing non-reproduction. As
Christine noted above, freezing her eggs helped her stop worrying about missing out on
motherhood and she found that she was increasingly open to the possibility of remaining
voluntarily childfree. She explained that this was an unexpected side effect of egg freezing:
The other thing that it did which I didn’t really expect was it gave me the thought that,
well, I can do it myself … or I could just not [have kids]. … Life is good right now. I'm
enjoying my life. I don't feel like there's anything missing today but I don't know how I'll
feel about that tomorrow. Today, there's nothing missing. Today, I'm very content, very
happy. … I guess it's just kind of surprising because when I started, it was a safety net to
relieve the pressure to force a match and a relationship. It's worked out where now I'm
just really content. If I have kids, great. If I get married, great. If I don't, great. … .
Before, I felt like I was a victim of circumstance, divorce, law school, but now I feel like
waiting and choosing to wait is something I genuinely choose.
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By relieving her sense of temporal pressure and her anxiety that continued fertility delay would
foreclose her options, egg freezing has allowed Christine to remain comfortably ambivalent
about motherhood and shifted the possibility of future childlessness from “involuntary” to
“voluntary,” which enhances her feelings of reproductive autonomy and agency.
For many of the EF, their strong orientation toward control provided a stronger impetus
for egg freezing than maternal desire did. While many of these women admitted that they were
ambivalent or unsure about having children, they were very clear that did not like the idea of the
option being “taken away” from them. It is one thing to choose not to have children, it is another
thing to have childlessness forced upon you by infertility or circumstance. They also worried that
“losing out” on biogenetic motherhood might lead to future regret. Angela, for example, was
leaning strongly childfree at the time of our interview, going so far as stating, “I’ve never wanted
to be a mom,” and she repeatedly expressed her distaste for babies and small children and her
resentment of pronatalist cultural pressures. However, she explained, “I guess maybe in the back
of my mind, I thought, ‘Maybe I'll change my mind.’ Wouldn't that suck to not have an option?”
Similarly when I asked Lori, who also leaned strongly childfree, whom she had frozen her eggs
for, she responded:
I would say myself. Just because of my own sanity about ageing, about the time clock of
your body, and the ability not to do something. I don't like anyone to tell me no. “You're
going to be too old to have kids.” What? No! … It was more about my protection. If I
change my mind tomorrow and want to have kids and I can't, this gives me an option.
While they rejected the “hard-charging career woman” narrative, these women were generally
high achieving. In their public lives they pursued the expanding educational and occupational
opportunities for women and felt empowered to “chase life.” Most had pursued graduate
education and had fulfilling careers. Many of them self-described as “planners” and “Type A”
and they saw their lives as self-directed projects. When traumatic catalysts forced these women
to confront the possibility that the continued absence of a co-parent and ongoing fertility
postponement might lead to age-related infertility and contextual or involuntary childlessness,
they felt that a crucial component of their lives and identities had been placed beyond their
control. Freezing their eggs helped them reassert their sense of control over their fertility.
Given that so many of these women expressed doubt that they would ever be mothers,
one might reasonably ask why they would commit so much time, money, and energy to
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preserving their fertility. I contend that, rather than being exclusively indicative of strong
maternal orientation, elective egg freezing more frequently operates as a means of prolonging the
state of maternal ambivalence by “keeping options open.” In doing so, elective egg freezers use
the technology as a means of side-stepping the opportunity costs of delayed childbearing by
allowing them to simultaneously maintain their childfree status and their inclusion in the
personally and culturally valued identities of potentially reproductive women, by indefinitely
forestalling their transition into the culturally devalued category of post-reproductive women and
hedging their bets against future age-related infertility. Thus by “keeping their options open,”
egg freezing preserves social position and sense of self as much as—if not more than—it
preserves practical access to biogenetic reproduction.
Among elective egg freezers, when having frozen eggs allowed them to preserve valued
identities, mitigate stigma, keep their dating prospects open to men who want children, or even
simply to relieve their anxieties about future regrets regarding foregone fertility by giving them a
sense that they have “done their part,” then their goals are being accomplished. Feeling that they
had taken action to place some cache of reproductive potential beyond the effects of physical
decline allows these women to preserve their sense of agency and autonomy over their
reproductive futures, even though the majority of them never expect to use their frozen eggs to
conceive. The knowledge that the frozen eggs are there and that one could use them, if one were
so inclined, allows elective egg freezers to understand their ongoing childless of matter of
choice, enhances their feelings of agency, providing an alternative self-concept to that of the
involuntarily childless “victim of circumstance,” as Christine put it. It is precisely because egg
freezing can operate as both a reproductive and “non-reproductive” technology that it enhances
feelings of agency regardless of fertility outcomes. So long as frozen eggs produce a feeling of
keeping one’s options open, a sense of reproductive autonomy is sustained.

Putting Motherhood First: Becoming a Single Mother by Choice
As I discussed in the previous chapter, the single-mothers-by-choice had all aspired to
married motherhood as their ideal approach to family formation. This explains why the SMBC
uniformly transitioned into motherhood at relatively advanced ages. All but two of the SMBC
had their first child at or after the age of 40. All of the SMBC who conceived with medical
assistance had their children between ages of 38 (Alma) and 48 (Marlena). The two women who
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opted for adoption are also the two outliers with regard to age: Holly was the youngest mother in
the sample, having adopted through personal connections at the age of 29, and Pamela was the
oldest mother in the sample, having pursued international adoption at the age of 55. Like the EF,
the SMBC experience relationship instability and dissolution that interferes with their preferred
family formations strategies. As they were for the EF, these break ups often served as traumatic
catalysts, which prompted the SMBC to consider alternative approaches to family formation. In
her study of single-mothers-by-choice, Hertz (2006) documents the significance of unsuccessful
relationships in these women’s trajectories into elective sole parenting. She also identifies key
features of the status passage from aspiring to married motherhood to accepting single
motherhood in which these women must “imagine a child in a new context, test this idea on
friends, experience a catalytic event, and disclose their decision” (Hertz 2006:23). As she notes,
this process is neither neat nor linear, yet all of Hertz’s (2006) participants navigated each of
these stages as they overcame both internal and practical barriers to single motherhood. Like
Hertz’s (2006) participants, the SMBC in my study encountered catalytic events—most
commonly breakups, but also benchmark birthdays, interruptions to their normal life, loss of
loved ones, and medical challenges—that prompted them to consider or move forward with
single-motherhood-by-choice. I discuss their experiences testing the idea on friends and
disclosing their decision in greater depth in the next chapter. Here I consider how the SMBC
make up their minds to pursue single-motherhood-by-choice and how they go about
accomplishing it.
Making Up Your Mind
As was the case for Hertz’s (2006) participants, overcoming internal barriers to single-
motherhood-by-choice often involved periods of deep introspection, mourning the loss of the life
they imagined, therapy, or engagement with support groups, the later often also providing
valuable information for overcoming practical barriers to single motherhood. Beth offered a
succinct description of the journey to single-motherhood-by-choice, explaining, “there are two
things you have to work through … you have to come to terms with the fact that you're not going
to have that thing you always thought you were going to have … and then you have to figure out
how you're going to do it.” Beth explains that this process was very difficult for her. She went
through “a lot of therapy” and navigated her mourning process for the loss of her dream wedding
by buying herself everything on her imagined wedding registry. Although, Beth began by
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pursuing qualification as a foster parent and started down the path of international adoption, she
ultimately found that the qualification demands and emotional toll of the uncertain foster-
adoption process were too much for her and she opted for medically assisted conception instead.
Beth emphasized the emotional components of the journey to single motherhood: “I think what
you have to have in place is being good with it. You really have to work through all that stuff
and get there. … [It took me] many years trying to come to terms with having a kid without
being married and it took two years of fertility stuff.” For some of the women, like Beth, this
process was mostly about overcoming their own internal barriers to single motherhood, for
others spiritual, religious, and cultural beliefs and concerns about social stigma added additional
challenges to their journey to single motherhood.
Joanne describes how her lifelong expectation of traditional married motherhood was
disrupted by a failed engagement in her early 40s, leaving her struggling to overcome her own
cultural biases against single motherhood, her anxiety about being visibly non-normative, and
her feelings of failure for not having achieved her ideal:
I have always wanted a family. I always thought that I would do it the traditional way, get
married and have a husband, have kids and all that. A while ago, I was engaged, and we
were ready to do that, and he didn't want to have kids, and I did. … . That didn't work
out, so there was a loss, like what am I going to do now. I was maybe 42, so I bit the
bullet and decided to try to do this on my own. … . I had a very public job … so for me
to stand up in front of 800 people, pregnant, without a spouse was something for me to
overcome. … I had to overcome some of my own issues of feeling like a failure that it
hadn't happened the way that I thought it was going to, and letting go of that dream of
being married and being with a family. That was hard. … I had never thought about
doing this on my own. I never knew anybody that did it. It wouldn't have even crossed
my mind to do it. When I got a little bit older, I knew one person that did it, and I thought
that she was really weird. That was not me. I am conservative … and it was a lot for me
to let go, to do it.
Having opened up to the idea of single-motherhood-by-choice, Joanne went through a period of
spiritual introspection. Through meditation and spiritual counseling Joanne worked to reach
clarity on her family formation priorities—realizing that, for her, motherhood by any means was
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more important than holding out for married motherhood—and to overcome her own internal
barriers to single motherhood, including fears that it might preclude marriage in the future.
As she navigated this internal process, Joanne also considered her options for having
children—ultimately rejecting adoption in favor of medically-assisted conception—and opened
up to her friends and family about the possibility of becoming a single-mother-by-choice.
When I broke off my engagement, I don't know, I was 40 or 41, whenever that was. I did
a lot of meditating. I went to a spiritual counselor at my church and talked to her. … Then
I went to Sedona, and I walked in the mountains, and I meditated more, and then I called
my parents and was trying to figure out what to do, and realized that … I want to have
kids. I guess that another thought is that I didn't think that I would be eligible to adopt. …
I saw my friends adopt kids, and it was a long hard struggle. … It took a long time for me
to get there, probably a year of thinking about it. I have to say that I probably was
concerned about the image, what people would think, and could I do it alone. … I
thought in my head that it might be harder for me to find a potential mate down the road
because now I have kids. I let go of that belief. I am still letting go of that belief. … I
think that once I told my parents, they were so excited and so supportive. Once I told
them, I almost had to do it. My brothers were supportive, and my friends were
supportive. I had this whole community that was like, “Yeah, you have got to do it.”
Then, even when I got pregnant and I started telling people at my job, I wasn't quite sure
how they would handle it. Everybody was so supportive.
The strong support that Joanne received from friends and family helped her to move forward
with single-motherhood-by-choice and confirmed her decision when she found her workplace
more supportive than she’d feared. Although most of the SMBC had at least one negative
encounter, most reported that their social networks were generally supportive of their decisions
to become single-mothers-by-choice. Having made up their minds to do so, the women were
faced with the practical questions of how they would have children.
Having Kids
While many of the women reported considering adoption, like Beth and Joanne, most
ultimately rejected this option. Common reasons for deciding against adoption include personally
experiencing a failed adoption attempt that highlighted how drawn out, complex, and
emotionally exhausting the process could be, others had observed peers’ difficult or unsuccessful
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adoption attempts or “heard stories” about the struggles involved in adoption and decided against
it preemptively, and—given their relatively advanced ages and unmarried status—many worried
that they would not meet adoption agency requirements or simply wouldn’t be picked by birth
parents looking for “more traditional” adoptive families (see: Goldberg and Scheib 2015). While
Holly had her daughter through fortuitous private adoption and Pamela did successfully navigate
the international adoption process, the rest of the SMBC opted for medically assisted conception.
Medically assisted conception was preferred for several reasons: First, the process followed a
more predictable timeline and could be scheduled at the patient’s convenience, which gave the
women a greater sense of control at a moment in their lives when their fertility and family
formation felt as though they slipped beyond their control. Second, for many of the SMBC,
ARTs allowed them to achieve biogenetic motherhood, which was an important part of their
idealized family formation scripts and—given that they had to move forward without a
husband—something most were not prepared to give up. Finally, from a legal standpoint, using
anonymous donor gametes gave them uncontested parental rights to their children, which helped
them cultivate a sense of security and stability in their family formation.
All of the SMBC preferred to take the least medically invasive approach to conception,
which was generally less expensive, less painful, less risky, and provided the most “natural” and
“organic” feeling for their pregnancies. Alma, Nancy, Danielle, and Victoria—who all conceived
before the age of 45—were able to conceive through intra-uterine insemination (IUI) with donor
sperm, and Beth, Sheila, and Tina were all able to conceive through in vitro fertilization (IVF)
with their own eggs and donor sperm. However, four of the older mothers—Joanne (44 at
delivery), Michelle (46), Rebecca (46), and Marlena (48)—found that they could not conceive
with their own eggs, requiring the assistance of an egg donor as well as a sperm donor. To repair
the disruption to genetic continuity, Michelle and Marlena both opted to have their brothers
donate the sperm to fertilize the donor egg, which each of these women then gestated through
IVF. Although distinctly non-conventional, this approach allowed both of these women to
salvage a fairly close approximation of biogenetic motherhood, despite requiring the assistance
of an egg donor. The SMBC also considered having the pregnancy and birth experience an
important component of motherhood and maternal bonding. Only Rebecca, who had frozen
embryos before undergoing treatment for breast cancer, required the assistance of a surrogate. As
a cancer survivor, Rebecca simply couldn’t take the risk of the exogenous hormones required for
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IVF conception. Although she had frozen embryos before treatment, she was unable to conceive
with those embryos and she ultimately required the assistance of an egg donor, sperm donor, and
surrogate to have her son. Although she had not been able to achieve biogenetic motherhood, the
contractual structure of surrogacy and gamete donation still granted Rebecca uncontested
parental rights to her child. She pointed to the difficulty involved in his conception as evidence
of how strongly wanted he was and, like most of the SMBC, she selected gamete donors that
would replicate her physical appearance, which allows her to present the appearance of
biogenetic motherhood in daily life.
5
Having already let go of their preference for married
motherhood, the ability to stay as close as possible to privileged biogenetic family forms is one
of the primary appeals of medically assisted conception. Having navigated the process of
becoming single-mothers-by-choice, the women were faced with challenges of arranging care
networks and work schedules to accomplish work-family balance and accommodate their single
motherhood.
Balancing Work and Family
As single mothers, the SMBC were faced with challenging decisions about how to
arrange their work and care networks to provide for their children. As a single person tasked with
full responsibility for childcare and financial provision, the SMBC had to balance the costs of
paid childcare against their earnings. Although they were single mothers, none of these women
were truly “going it alone,” they all had care networks—some denser than others—that they
could draw on. This involved combinations of paid care—nannies, babysitters, and daycare—and
unpaid care provided by family, friends, and other parents. A few of the SMBC were lucky
enough to live close to other parents interested in engaging in childcare “swaps.” Beth, for
example, lived just down the street from a lesbian couple—Jen and Julie—whose twins were
donor siblings to her own daughter. These three women routinely provided childcare and other
forms of support to one another and Beth fantasized about the three of them buying houses next
door to one another, opening up the back yard, and achieving a communal parenting situation.
Marlena also had a neighbor with same-aged children with whom she routinely swapped
childcare. Other women had close friends who were central to their care networks. In particular,

5
Selecting a gamete donor based on resemblance to the intended parent is a common strategy
documented among elective sole parents, same-sex parents, and heterosexual couples (Becker,
Butler, and Nachtigall 2005; Mamo 2007; Nordqvist 2012, 2010).
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Sheila’s ex-boyfriend and Pamela’s ex-husband both remained close friends and important parts
of their children’s lives. However, most of the SMBC relied on their own parents (often their
mothers), a nanny, or some combination of the two to provide care to their children. While most
of the women did continue working, many of them made career shifts that granted them greater
scheduling flexibility and control or allowed them to work from home so that they could spend
more time with their children.
Arranging care. Roughly half of the SMBC have a full-time nanny or had done until
their children reached school age, at which point Marlena and Pamela—whose children were
now 8-years-old—had shifted to combinations of part-time nannies and babysitters with
preschool. Pamela’s daughter Matilda, who was 8-years-old at the time of the interview, was one
of the older children in the study. Over the years Pamela’s care networks had shifted according
to Matilda’s needs:
It was just me for the first three months, because she is adopted, and I wanted to really
bond, attach, connect, and not have other people holding her, and feeding her, and all that
stuff. After that, I started to need to work. I did have a full-time nanny, so from age 1 to
about 3, I had a full-time nanny, 5 days a week. By 3 and a half, I cut down to just a
couple days a week with the nanny, because she went to preschool right down the street.
After preschool, she was in kindergarten, and [now] I really don't have – just a babysitter
when I need to go out ... It's a dilemma … because the good nannies that you have, they
want a 40 hour week. … The nice thing about school, though, is … you start relying on
the other moms, [you’ve] got to make friends with the other moms for those emergencies,
like, “Can you take her after school for an hour today?” It's really working out pretty
well. … You have to have a community with the school moms, because you're going to
rely on them. … The childcare is money, a lot of money. Truthfully, if I wasn't a
freelance person, I don't think I would have attempted [single-motherhood-by-choice].
As Matilda entered formal schooling and established relationships with friends and classmates,
Pamela’s need for paid childcare declined and her ability to arrange informal care had increased.
However, she still credits her freelance job with giving her the flexibility to arrange her work
schedule around Matilda’s needs.
However, most of the SMBCs needed to work longer hours and were raising younger
children, meaning they still relied on full-time nannies. In addition to enabling their work
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schedules, having a full time nanny also allowed these women to maintain some degree of social
life and to accomplish errands outside of the home without either having to take an infant or
toddler along or arrange a babysitter. Rebecca explains, “I do have an arrangement that I highly
recommend for all single moms. My nanny sleeps over every Wednesday and Thursday night. I
go out two nights a week. It is built into her weekly salary, so it doesn't feel like I'm getting a
babysitter to go to dinner or go see a movie. It's just built in. I get out.” As I will discuss further
below, Rebecca’s nanny also allowed her to be more productive working from home: “I honestly
don't know what it feels like to be a single mom having to work in an [office], I can't even. I'm so
lucky. I thank my lucky stars every day that I have this situation. I'm working [from home]. I
have a full time nanny and I’m here working in my bedroom nine hours a day.” Nannies were an
integral feature of these women’s care networks, acting in many cases as a “co-parent,” as Tina
describes below. In the absence of a romantically committed co-parent the SMBC harness their
financial resources to secure a second primary caregiver through the market, highlighting the
salience of class privilege in this sample.
However not all of the SMBC could afford or wished to rely on a nanny for childcare.
Roughly half of the SMBC had received some childcare support from their parents and of the
women who had not employed a nanny, most had relied on this family-based care particularly in
the first few years of their children’s lives. Holly, Alma, and Victoria all lived close to their
parents (or had done when their children were young) and their parents provided childcare,
including regular babysitting. Michelle, Danielle, and Marlena all co-resided with their mothers
(or had done when their children were young) and, in Danielle and Marlena’s cases they
combined parental co-residence with a full-time nanny during the first few years.
While family-based care is often held up as the ideal form of childcare and it does relieve
the financial burden of paying for childcare, there can be trade offs involved. While Marlena and
Michelle had both had very positive experiences co-residing with their mothers when their
children were young, sometimes relying on family-based care also increased interpersonal
friction. Victoria moved back to Los Angeles to be closer to her parents when she found herself
pregnant, in a new city, without a job. Her parents babysit her daughter, Julia, two nights a week
and provide other support but she dislikes how this opens her up to their interference in her
family life: “My parents like to throw their two cents in many, many times, more often then I
would like. They do watch Julia a couple nights a week, and they have been very supportive of
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me so I listen, but I don't like it. My mom is not shy about sharing her opinions and neither is my
father, so it's irritating.” While Victoria sometimes struggled with her parents involvement, like
Marlena and Michelle, she acknowledged that having her parents around to look after her child
did allow her to maintain more of an adult social life and accomplish errands more easily that
other single mothers.
Arranging work. Only Sheila had neither a nanny nor family-based care. Because she did
not live close to family, Sheila had limited opportunities for family-based childcare, although she
did rely on a very close friend, Patrick, for a good deal of childcare support. Sheila and Patrick
had dated for many years and, although they had broken up several years ago, he and Sheila
remained close friends and he was a significant figure in Sheila’s daughter’s life. While Patrick
did provide valuable support, Sheila decided to put her child in daycare at six months of age so
that she could return to work. Sheila loved her job in the entertainment industry and her
department had been fairly family-friendly until restructuring had completely altered upper
management and introduced a more demanding schedule and more anxiety about her own job
security. She had been laid off and downsized several times over the years and recognized that
being the sole financial provider was one of the biggest challenges of single motherhood: “That’s
scary, being the sole provider and now all of a sudden I have someone else I have to look out for.
I feel like my safety net is decent, my parents will probably help out if they had to … I own a
house … I'm in a good position.” While financial provision was a primary reason that Sheila
remained committed to full-time work she also derived important personal fulfillment from her
work: “I think also just being a single mom it’s like I love spending time with [my daughter] but
at the same time it would be nice to have some more adult interaction on a more regular basis.”
Sheila was one of only five SMBCs still engaged in full-time, office-based work since the birth
of her child. Holly, Victoria, and Alma had neither the financial ability nor the family resources
to step back from work. Instead they all remained invested in full-time work and they relied on
networks of paid and unpaid care. All three lived close to their parents when their children were
young and their parents provided some babysitting, but they generally depended on daycare until
their children reached school age. In contrast, Danielle had both a full-time live-in nanny and she
co-resided with her parents who provided some childcare and financial support, which allowed
Danielle to focus on her full-time job in the entertainment industry, which came with demanding
work hours.
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While Sheila, Holly, Alma, Victoria, and Danielle had all focused on assembling care
networks that accommodated full-time, office-based work, most of the SMBCs chose to adjust
their occupational demands to give themselves more time with their children. Beth had elected to
move forward in her career as part of a writing team. Sharing her job with another person gave
her the flexibility to alter her work hours, take time off, and work from home when necessary.
Rebecca, Tina, and Joanne all made career transitions that allowed them work from home full-
time. All three of these women did employ nannies to ensure that their work hours could be
productive, but working from home gave them all much greater scheduling control and more
time with their children. Tina explained,
I made a conscious decision around the time that I froze the eggs to start a home business.
I knew that if I was going to have a baby I would not be able to [continue in my previous
line of work] because the hours are crazy and you're working on somebody else's
schedule and there's a lot of driving and traveling involved. I started another business…
that I could do that out of my home and I thought if I'm going to have a baby certainly as
a woman in her 40s, I want to spend time with my child. … I also enjoy working and I
enjoy my business and people rely on me. I didn't want to just drop everything and drop
everyone. …
I had an assistant but I had to let him go so I could afford the nanny. … On the one hand
having the nanny alleviates any guilt I might have for not being with my baby 24/7 but it
also added a little more stress business-wise because I don't have my helper now. … I
feel that for me the decision I made was to work from home so I can be around so if I
want to breastfeed her, I can. If I need to go pump, I can pump. I haven't really wanted to
go back to [my previous job] because the stress of pumping. I can't really get ahead of it.
…
I think it's a co-parenting thing [with the nanny]. … She is here every day, Monday
through Friday, 9 to 6. There are days where I do have busy days and I am out for many
hours at a time or days where I really need to just be here working. So she's like a co-
parent, I think.
Like Tina, many of the SMBCs saw their nannies as the bedrock of their care networks, even
viewing them as “co-parents” as Tina does here. Tina’s comments also highlight the role that the
child’s changing needs play in occupational decisions. At the time of the interview, Tina’s
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daughter was 4-months-old and breastfeeding posed a serious challenge to her work schedule. As
children are weaned, reach preschool age, and eventually enter primary school the time
constraints of motherhood relax a little and care is more easily coordinated. Most of the SMBC
were raising children aged 5 and under. Only Victoria, Marlena, and Pamela had elementary
school aged children and Holly had a teenager. While many of the women with children under
two described being in “baby jail,” Holly’s 14-year-old daughter Maeve called to check in during
our interview, letting her mom know that she had arrived home from school safely and asking if
she could order pizza. Maeve’s independence had allowed Holly to work longer hours more
comfortably. Following up with the SMBC will be critical to understanding how their children’s
changing needs affect their work commitments and schedules.
Further demonstrating both the age and affluence of the SMBC sample, Nancy, Michelle,
and Marlena had all made the decision to take extended time off work to stay home with their
children. Michelle, who was 51-years-old and whose daughter was 5-years-old at the time of the
interview, had recently been laid off and had made the decision to take time out from work to
focus on childrearing, rather than looking for a new job right away. She explained:
I'm financially comfortable. I can spend time on pretty much a full time mom now so,
you know, that is a luxury. And after all those years of working, why not? I could take a
couple years off if I wanted to or I could take more time off. So I kind of just spend my
days managing my stock market investments and doing volunteer work for my daughter’s
school. … I'm pretty lucky. And I don't think the single moms that I've met, they're not so
lucky.
Nancy, who was 40-years-old and whose daughter was only 6-months-old at the time of the
interview, was taking an extended leave of absence from work so that she could focus on her
daughter. Her parents provided the financial support that made this leave of absence possible.
Nancy explained, “my career was going through a transition before I had her and I waited and
waited. I couldn't keep my mind off the baby thing. I felt like I couldn't move forward in my
career. I just said it has to come now or I could have no career and no baby and where's that
going to leave me? I might as well have a baby.” Feeling fairly “burnt out” on her demanding
career in the entertainment industry, Nancy decided to shift her focus before her daughter’s birth
and, once her daughter arrived, she had decided to take time off work entirely. With her daughter
still under a year old, Nancy was weighing her future employment options:
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That's something I'm struggling with now. When I do get back to work what is it I'm
going to do? … I'm very thankful that I can spend this time with her and not be stressed
financially. I do know there are single moms, they have to go back to work right away.
It's rough. I can't do this forever, nor would I want to. I do want to figure out what I'm
going to get back to doing. … I had some money as far as doing this, some investment
money that I saved up and savings. I'm also getting some family help, which without the
family help it would be hard to do in Los Angeles.
Finally, Marlena, who was 55-years-old and whose twins were 8-years-old at the time of the
interview, had opted for early retirement so that she could focus on full-time motherhood. All
three of these women benefitted from high earning careers that gave them personal savings,
investments that provided some independent income, and parental support in the form of
financial support or free childcare. Like all single mothers, single-mothers-by-choice must walk
a fine line between the stigmas associated with working motherhood—frequently manifested in
pressures on middle-class women to take time out of work to care for children—and dependent
motherhood—emblemized by the “welfare queen” and other poor single mothers who prioritize
motherhood over full-time employment. As I will demonstrate in the next chapter, the SMBCs
routinely manage this stigma by drawing on their class privilege and extensive personal and
familial resources to draw distinctions between themselves and more stigmatized single mothers,
including the “overworked single mom” and “welfare mothers.”

Saying No to Motherhood: Becoming Voluntarily Childfree
While the family formation trajectories of the EF and the SMBC were marked by
uncertainty, ambivalence, and delay, childfree orientation tended to emerge early for the VCF.
Roughly half of the VCF began to experience childfree leanings by high school, while for the
other half childfree orientation emerged during their 20s. Where relationship trajectories
constrained fertility intentions and family formation for the EF and the SMBC, for the VCF
fertility preferences constrained romantic relationships. While the absence of a parentally-
oriented romantic partner postponed or altered the SMBC and EF’s realization of their maternal
desires, the absence of maternal desire ruled out parentally-oriented romantic partners for the
VCF. The VCF cultivated their childfree lifestyles by ensuring that they only pursued
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relationships with partners who shared their childfree orientation and by pursuing birth control
strategies that protected them against the possibility of unwanted pregnancies.
Negotiating Parental Orientation in Romantic Relationships
The VCF frequently pointed out that there is no viable compromise position on having
children or not having children and a disagreement on the subject is likely to be an irreconcilable
difference that either leads to a break up or leaves one partner regretful or resentful.
Consequently, ensuring alignment in parental orientation was central to the VCF’s romantic
relationships. Most of the VCF pursued a strategy of discussing parental orientation early in
relationships to weed out paternally oriented men. Once they established relationships, the VCF
engaged in regular “check ins” with their partners to ensure that parental orientations hadn’t
shifted.
Having the conversation up front. Discussing parental orientations and desires occurred
early in VCF relationships—serving as a screening mechanism for potential partners—and
reoccurred in an iterative fashion over the course of their relationships. Most of the VCF
described bringing their childfree orientation up early in all relationships. For example, Joy
explained, “I made the choice [not to have kids] early on. When I was dating, I would ask guys,
‘Do you imagine yourself with a family one day?’ The ones who said yes, I was like, ‘I don’t
think I’m the right girl for you.’ … I’m like, ‘I don’t want to rob you of that dream.’” Many of
the VCF had had romantic partners opt out of the relationship early after this conversation and
others had experienced more disruptive break ups over parenthood later in their relationships.
Dana, the only lesbian among the VCF, had two long-term relationships—one of ten years and
the other of seven years—end when her partners decided that they wanted children. All of the
VCF had worried that this could happen to them and they were proactive about screening out
potential partners who wanted children.
However, when the fit was right, many of the VCF found that a shared childfree
orientation laid the groundwork for successful relationships. Naomi had bee married for 13 years
at the time of our interview and she recalled that the childfree conversation had been something
of a non-issue with her husband: “I told him pretty early on, because I wanted to be honest. I
don't remember exactly how the conversation went, but I think it was something like, ‘There is
something you need to know. I'm never having kids.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ I think it went kind of like
that.” Unlike the EF and the SMBC, most of the VCF had successful long-term relationships.
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Nine of the VCF were married at the time of the interview—all for over 10 years, most for over
20 years—and Leigh had only recently divorced after being married for over a decade. All of
these women had entered their marital relationships in their 20s, meaning that these relationships
developed during the same period in which childfree orientation solidifies. As a result, five of
these women (Sue, Alexi, Brenda, Kristina, and Leigh) described having “always been on the
same page” with their partners about remaining childfree and, in Alexi’s case, childfree
orientation had developed mutually as the couple discussed their vision of the future.
Checking in. Whether they had “always been on the same page” with their partners or
had used parental orientation as a screening mechanism when dating, the VCF continued to
“check in” with their parents about parental desire. Many worried that parental desire might
emerge later in life and they didn’t want to be blindsided by a shift in their partner’s preferences.
Kristina related a story about another childfree couple she and her husband knew who “were
previously totally childfree… but she hit 35 and decided that she wanted a baby. She stopped
taking her birth control and didn't tell him [until she was pregnant] … there was a lot of drama. I
don't think they're divorced yet but she moved down to [Texas], I think for work, and she raises
the kids pretty much by herself and doesn't ask him for child support or anything.” This
experience had intensified Kristina’s concern for “checking in” with her husband about his
parental orientation.
This “checking in” process often happened at benchmark events like engagements and
milestone birthdays. For example, Kristina—who had been with her husband for twelve years
and married for seven years at the time of the interview—described being fairly “casual” about
childfree orientation early in her relationship because she felt that she and her partner were
always “on the same wavelength” about not wanting kids. However, she explains, “When we
were engaged and we worked up to the wedding, a couple of times I was ‘Are you sure? Because
I have no desire for children whatsoever and if you want children, go! Get out of this!’”
Checking in also happened periodically over the course of the relationship. For some it was a
regular yearly check in while for others these conversations were triggered by interactions with
children or reading articles about parenthood or childlessness. For example, Naima—who had
been married for 24 years at the time of our interview—explained:
I would say that we obviously check in with each other on this a lot more. … In our
thirties, probably the early thirties when you know, prime childbearing years, that's
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probably when it came up. Even after that, you know, you can still have kids to 40, etc. It
came up contextually. If we were with friends, if we were with my brother or sister, and
they had their young baby. Any time the other person looked like they had just had a
wonderful time with a child, a little while of that, and the other person would just kind of
politely say, you know, “Are you thinking anything different? How are you feeling?”
Similarly, Bonnie had been with her husband for 23 years and they had been married for 15 years
at the time of your interview. She described “checking in” with her husband over the years:
[My husband and I have] been together for a very long time. We started dating in 1994,
dated on and off. It was interesting because when we first met, I told him, I said, “I want
to be clear. Number one, I don't want to have kids and number two, I never want to get
married.” I broke the second one because I found a good partner in crime. He also, along
the whole way, had always said he didn’t want to have kids too. … I graduated in ’98 and
that’s when we started getting serious. We still, back then, we would check in. I’m like,
“I still don’t want to have kids. Do you want to have kids?” He’s like, “No.” People
would always tell us, “You’ll change your minds.” Especially as a woman, people would
always say, “Just wait. Your maternal instincts will kick in.” Just hold on and wait like
it’s going to hit me one day like lightning. It never hit. Every year, I check in with him
like, “How are you doing? You still don’t want to have kids?” “No.” “Okay, talk next
year,” just touch in with each other. As we started to get in our 40s and we still both
didn’t want to, I’m like, “You know, this hasn’t changed at all for me.” As a matter of
fact, as we got older, it became more solid with us both. When he was 41, he got the snip-
snip [vasectomy] so that we don’t have to worry about that anymore. We’re both really
solid about that.
This “checking in” process was part of the open communication that formed the bedrock of the
successful long-term relationships so common among the VCF sample. However, as Bonnie’s
comments demonstrate, it was also motivated by pronatalist social pressures.
All of the VCF talk about how other people—from close family members to total
strangers—frequently tell them that they will eventually “change their minds” about wanting
children. While they felt confident and secure in their own childfree orientation, this narrative of
sudden onset of “baby rabies” caused them some anxiety. Joy told me:
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[I decided not to have kids] early and my friends are like, “Well, you might change your
mind. … How can you make a decision this early?” I’m like, “Well, I don’t know, I just
feel like – I just feel that in my mind.” I worried that I would change my mind. I worried
about like, “What if I change my mind? What if my husband changes his mind or what if
I feel the pressure and cave to it,” which I’m not that type of person, anyways, but you
just worry.
As Joy’s comments illustrate, the VCF also often worried that their partners might change their
minds about having children. As Kristina’s story illustrates, many had seen friends or relatives
experience a sudden and powerful desire for parenthood and they worried that it might happen to
them too. Many had also seen friends or relatives break up or divorce over differences of opinion
about having kids and they were even more worried that their partners might experience a
sudden desire for childrearing that could disrupt their happy relationships. By “having the
conversation up front” and then “checking in” periodically about parental orientation, the VCF
ensured that their relationships supported the cultivation of a childfree lifestyle.
Pursuing Contraception
Pursuing a childfree lifestyle also requires careful attention to birth control. All of the
VCF knew women who had experienced unplanned pregnancies and they reported being
“religious” and even “obsessive” about birth control since their earliest sexual experiences, with
the expressed purpose of avoiding an unwanted pregnancy. Joy described the care she took with
birth control as a teenager:
I remember, my first boyfriend that we dated for 5 years, from 16 to 21, we’d have sex. I
was like, “You need to wear a condom with spermicide and pull out.” … I remember I
went on birth control without telling him because I didn’t want him to try to pressure me
to not use condoms. I remember we had sex one time and the condom broke. We both
freaked out. I was crying, he’s freaking out. Finally, I disclosed that I was on birth
control. He’s like, “Then we don’t have to use condoms anymore.” That’s when that
started and we didn’t. Finally, we had to have the conversation about, “What if I get
pregnant?” I said, … “If we get pregnant, I’m going to have an abortion.” … That was
not what I wanted to have to do which is why I took so many precautions. Yeah, maybe it
was even earlier [that I started leaning childfree].”
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In the course of reflecting on her teenage commitment to multi-method birth control, Joy
concluded that this “obsession” with avoiding unplanned pregnancy was an early indication of
her emerging childfree orientation. Like Joy, most of the VCF affirmed pro-choice abortion
politics and many, though not all, expected that they would pursue abortion in the case of
unwanted pregnancy; however they also realized that this wouldn’t be an easy choice to make
and took great care to avoid putting themselves in that situation. Others, like Naima, expected
that they would “take responsibility” and raise the children resulting from an unplanned
pregnancy, which further strengthened their concerns with using effective contraception.
The VCF used a variety of birth control methods in their adult sexual relationships. These
included hormonal birth control, barrier methods, spermicides, and sterilization procedures. The
women selected their birth control methods based on a number of factors including ease of use,
effectiveness, side effects (both positive and negative), and personal health considerations. Like
Joy, most of the VCF relied on hormonal birth control or had done previously. Most took an oral
contraceptive pill, but several women relied on longer-acting, lower-maintenance hormonal
methods: Kristina used a hormonal IUD, Bonnie had previously relied on Norplant, and Naomi
had previously used Depo Provera. All three of these women and several of the women who used
oral contraceptives (without sugar pills) explained that they preferred a birth control approach
that allowed them to avoid having periods. When I asked Naomi if she had ever considered more
permanent forms of birth control she replied, “No, because I loved being on Depo Provera,
because I had no period. It was fantastic, but my hair started falling out. I had to go off of it in
case that's the reason. … Now I'm getting my period. It's awful. It's of no use to me too. It's not
like I need it to have a baby.” Similarly, Leigh explained how she opted to take low dose
hormonal birth control without sugar pills to avoid having her period:
I always wanted the most effective birth control because I was super paranoid about ever
getting pregnant. ... But, nonetheless, I had always used birth control pills because they
were like 99.9% effective. … I didn't like having my period because I was like “What the
hell? I don't need this biological feature here. This is not fun and I don't want to have
kids, so I don't want to have it.” So I would just take birth control pills straight through so
I didn't get my period, which I really, really, really liked. … I was always kind of
resentful of the period thing. I was like, “Why can you not opt out if we don't want to
have this?”
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Many of the other VCF shared Naomi and Leigh’s resentment of their periods, taking the
position that, because they never wanted to have children, menstruation was a completely
pointless and unnecessary inconvenience. This attitude also shaped the decisions of the only two
women in the study to have successfully received surgical birth control procedures.
Robin and Chelsea had both received endometrial ablation. This outpatient procedure
uses heat (or less commonly extreme cold) to destroy the endometrial lining, resulting in scarring
of the interior of the uterus. This technique is medically indicated for the treatment of heavy
menstrual bleeding as the scarring reduces development of the endometrial lining and thus
reduces menstrual flow. Sterilization is considered a “side effect” or “risk” of the procedure,
rather than its main effect, which may contribute to their relative ease of access to this procedure.
Both Robin and Chelsea saw ablation as a means of killing two birds with one stone: the
procedure provides a fairly effective form of permanent birth control (> 98%) and it eliminates
or severely reduces their menstruation. Robin, who was 41 at the time of our interview, had
received her ablation several years previously. She learned about the procedure through
happenstance:
I'm like sitting and watching TV and they literally have ads on TV for this gynecologist
woman and she's like, “Are you done having children? Do you want to have more fun,
like, riding these horses and whatever? Come and I'll give you an ablation and you'll
never have your period again.” Which is exactly what I wanted. … My friend is a
gynecologist. I said, “Can you tell me how to go about it?” And he said, "Why would you
do that to your body?" … I was like, “Why wouldn't you? If you don't want kids?” This is
how amazing it was. Just exactly what I wanted is on TV. I was like, “Holy shit! This is
exactly what I want.”
After securing health insurance Robin scheduled an appointment with the advertised clinic.
So literally, January first, I'm like, sitting in the office for the first appointment and I
come in and I was, like, “I want an ablation. Let's do this.” They were like, “Okay, that's
cool.” Then they were, like, “Oh, do you want to be sterilized?” I'm like, “How much
more is that?” Because I didn't know if it would be covered or not … They said, “Oh we
can also sterilize you, we would put this thing, coil or something, in your Fallopian tubes
and then it would seal up.” I was, like, first of all, it wasn't like I was having mad sex,
anyway. I was like, oh, I don't actually need it. It's not like I'm having mad sex. Second of
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all, I don't know that I want something like that in my body. … I was like, let's just do the
ablation. I won't worry about the sterilization. Two weeks later, I got the ablation.
Robin was pleased by how smoothly the process went. She had read reports online of women
being refused sterilizing procedures, but she said she didn’t experience any “push back” or
obstruction from the clinic. She pointed out that, given that ablation was their advertised business
model, they weren’t likely to discourage her from getting the procedure done.
Despite being the youngest participant in the VCF sample—32-years-old when I
interviewed her—Chelsea had also successfully received an ablation, as well as a bilateral
salpingectomy (removal of both Fallopian tubes), which unlike ablation is considered a
sterilization procedure. Given her relative youth and childlessness, Chelsea had to actively
recruit supportive health care providers to enact her decision:
When I started thinking about sterilization, I did make myself really think about [having
kids] and try to picture it. Honestly, I had a panic attack. I have occasionally had dreams
where I was pregnant and stuck being pregnant and those were just the most horrible
dreams of all. … I had to convince my therapist that this is a sane decision. This has
nothing to do with mother issues. This is just plain, "I got other shit I want to do". … I
was going to have the tubal ligation [“tubes tied”], but we ended up with her removing
the tubes entirely… I also had an endometrial ablation. … I've always wanted, ever since
I started having periods, I have wanted to get rid of them. They were such torture.
Chelsea had expected to experience barriers to accessing sterilization:
My mom would say, “No one will ever do that to you.” I didn't think that getting my
tubes tied and getting rid of my period would be an option, ever. I believed her. On the
sub-Reddit, I started seeing that people were doing it. I was really nervous. … I finally
got up the guts to go to a doctor and she was just like, “You're young, but I believe you.
However, since this is the first time I'm ever meeting you, if you want to reschedule and
ask me again in 3 to 6 months, I will tell you then. In the meantime, do some soul
searching.” She didn't say no, she just said, “Not yet. It just looks bad on paper if I say
yes the first time I meet you.” I gave it 6 months, and I went back and was like, “How
about now? I got my therapist on board, I got my psychiatrist. Do you need to talk to
them?” She's just like, “Nope, we're good.” Turns out that she is childfree as well. She
had no problem doing it. … I was really grateful for that, because I'm not very good at
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standing up for myself and being, “No, this is something I want.” The fact that she just
believed me was so wonderful.
Finding a doctor who was also a childfree woman was crucial to Chelsea’s ability to receive a
full sterilization as a 31-year-old childless woman. She found the experience personally
affirming and the doctor’s willingness to believe her ensured that she wasn’t prevented from
accessing desired sterilization, as so many other young childless women have been. However
many of the other VCF were not so lucky.
While Chelsea and Robin had succeeded in accessing permanent birth control procedures,
several of the other VCF told me that their doctors had refused to refer them for sterilization
when they requested it. Joy was frustrated by her gynecologist’s repeated refusals to provide her
with a sterilization procedure:
I knew pretty early [that I didn’t want kids]. It was interesting knowing that early and
people are like, “Oh you’re going to change your mind, oh you’re going to change your
mind.” Even my gynecologist. I’m like, “Can you take care of this, so it’s a permanent
solution?” He, to this day, and I’m 36, I asked him [the first time] I think 3 years ago, I
said, “Can you please tie my tubes, do something?” He said, “No.” … He was like,
“Here's why: You haven't had kids and you're young. You could change your mind.” I go,
“Doc, you've known me for eight years and I haven't changed my mind yet.” I go, “I ask
you every single appointment, will you fix me? Make it so I can't [have kids].” It's a big
surgery, that's the other thing, but he goes “I've been burned twice [by women who
wanted tubal ligations reversed].” … I was like, “I'll sign something so it will release you
of liability. I am of perfect sound mind. My husband and I will sign it saying that this is
it.” He was like, “I just can't. I can't do it.” … He's like, “Well, what if you meet someone
else?” I'm like, “I'm the one that doesn't want kids. It's not like [my husband is] saying he
doesn't want kids and wants me to get it. I knew that before I even met my husband.” [So
he said,] “What if you meet another person and they want to have a kid?” I'm like, “We'll
adopt. … I don't want to bear a child.” I'm like, "I don't know what part of this you don't
get. … I still don't want to have kids. I've never had kids and I still don't want to have
kids. Even if I meet a guy, he's like ‘I just want to be with you to have kids,’ I'm going to
say ‘I'm not the right person for you then.’”
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Despite her repeated requests for sterilization, stable and sustained commitment to a childfree
lifestyle, and willingness to indemnify her gynecologist, he remained resolute in his refusal to
sterilize her. Her doctor was unwilling to believe that her childfree orientation really was
permanent and he seemed more concerned with protecting the reproductive options of her
imagined second husband than in responding to her repeated requests for permanent birth
control. After three years of refusal, Joy changed tack: “I said, ‘All right, fine. If you won’t fix
me, give me someone that will do a vasectomy on my husband’ … and he was like fine. He had
no opposition to that.” This was not an uncommon approach. Among the ten ever-married
women in the study, four (Kristina, Bonnie, Naomi, and Joy) had husbands who had undergone
vasectomy in their relationship. Sue and her husband were still considering the option at the time
of our interview and Leigh and her husband had considered the option before their divorce. Irene
and Naima did not need to consider the option for medical reasons: Irene had a medically-
indicated hysterectomy at 31 and Naima’s husband’s childhood cancer had left him with
extremely low sperm quality. Of the married women only Alexi and Brenda reported that they
were happy to rely on hormonal birth control and did not feel the need to consider vasectomy.
Like the other women whose husbands had received vasectomies, Joy reported that her
husband experienced nowhere near the same level of questioning and medical obstruction in
pursuing a vasectomy as she had in pursuing a tubal ligation: “I think [the doctor] just
interviewed him … I don't remember him saying anything about he was questioning him or
anything because it's been a few years. … Nobody questions guys. They don't question.” Naomi,
whose husband had gotten a vasectomy three years before our interview, told me that she had
heard of women being refused access to sterilization: “That's so unfair. If a man wants it, it's no
problem and if a woman – That's awful. I hate stories like that. It makes me hate this country. …
That's awful and the idea that we don't have reproductive freedom is so – I think it's almost
laughable, except it's real.” As Naomi’s comments illustrate, these women are aware of the
reproductive inequalities between men and women. The gendered asymmetries of access to
sterilization procedures highlight the continued limits to women’s reproductive autonomy. While
a man is trusted to know his own mind and to be competent to make decisions about his
reproductive future, women’s declarations of childfree intention are frequently not believed and,
as Joy’s story illustrates, doctors are often more concerned with protecting the access of
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imagined men to these women’s fertility than they are with enabling their patients’ control over
their own reproduction.
Consequently, some of the VCF sought “proxy sterilization” through their husbands’
vasectomies. Like Joy, Kristina’s husband had also gotten a vasectomy after she struggled to
gain access to sterilization. He also saw it as a more equitable solution to their birth control
problem: “He and I talked and we had come to the conclusion that I had already suffered enough
for the cause. He went and got it done … [partially because the vasectomy] is so much less
invasive.” Like Kristina’s husband, some of the men were quite open to the idea of vasectomy.
Naomi, who had been very happy on Depo Provera for the first ten years of marriage, explained
that her husband was very receptive to the idea, “He would've done it at any time. It's just that I
had a solution already and it was a great solution while that lasted.” Joy’s husband was less
enthusiastic about the idea of surgery so they had his sperm quality checked first to ensure that
he wasn’t sterile. When his sperm checked out, he agreed to go forward with the procedure.
Several of the unmarried women also expected that they would encourage their partner to
get a vasectomy if they entered into a serious relationship. In opting for endometrial ablation but
no tubal obstruction, Robin decided, “If I'm ever in the position, where I'm having mad sex with
some dude, or I'm married or whatever, I'll tell him to get a vasectomy, if he doesn't have one
already. It's much less invasive and there's not some weird shit in my body.” As Robin’s
comments illustrate, the VCF were aware that vasectomy was a much less invasive and risky
procedure than any of the surgical sterilization options open to women. They also generally felt,
as Kristina’s husband pointed out, that women take on the majority of the burden of birth control
and that being open to vasectomy was only fair. This consideration highlights the concern for
egalitarianism that was so common in VCF marriages. Finally, the VCF also saw willingness to
undergo vasectomy as a strong sign of their partner’s commitment to continuing their childfree
lifestyle, which they found reassuring.

Chapter Conclusion
In this chapter I have demonstrated the decision-making processes by which each of these
groups of women enter into their fertility trajectories. For the EF and the SMBC, romantic
relationships—in the form of relationship instability and dissolution—shape their fertility
intentions and behaviors. These women choose to postpone having children while they search for
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a romantic partner with whom they can pursue their idealized family formation strategy of
married motherhood. Throughout their 20s and early 30s all of these women remained hopeful
that their ideal motherhood scenarios would materialize soon. Only when a traumatic catalyst
shook this hope did they begin to consider the possibility that motherhood might not be in their
futures. For most of the EF, an orientation to pursuing motherhood only within their ideal
scenarios leads them to freeze their eggs and continue postponing motherhood. They draw on
personal or familial financial resources to set aside a cache of reproductive potential that allows
them to remain comfortably ambivalent about motherhood. In contrast, traumatic catalysts
generally set off a period of introspection in which the SMBC realized that ensuring that they
become mothers, sooner rather than later, is more important than waiting for the ideal co-parent
to materialize. Most of these women harness their financial and class privilege to accomplish
assisted biogenetic motherhood, take time out of work to be with their children, and hire full-
time nannies as market-based “co-parents.”
It is also worth noting that several of the single-mothers-by-choice had attempted to
conceive with previously frozen reproductive materials. Like Amy and Aidan in the EF sample,
Joanne and Tina both froze their eggs before deciding to pursue single-motherhood-by-choice
and Rebecca had frozen embryos before undergoing cancer treatment. These five women offer
some glimpse into the possible futures still open to single women with frozen eggs. While some
of the EF, like Lindsey, Akemi, and Melissa, have achieved fertility in committed
relationships—generally without the assistance of their frozen eggs—other women with frozen
eggs may still find themselves single in their mid-to-late 40s and opt for single motherhood. In
these cases frozen eggs (and embryos) offer limited hope. Both Joanne and Tina had about ten
eggs frozen, in both cases a third of those eggs did not survive the thaw, an additional third did
not fertilize, and of the fertilized eggs, in both cases only one embryo proved genetically normal.
Both women transferred that single embryo. For Tina this resulted in the birth of her daughter;
however, for Joanne her single fertilized frozen egg did not result in a pregnancy and she
ultimately conceived her twin daughters with the assistance of an egg donor. Additionally, since
concluding the interviews I have been in touch with several of the women in this study. Lindsey
told me that the frozen eggs turned out to be a “bust.” Having conceived two boys naturally she
and her husband attempted to have a girl using the frozen eggs. Unfortunately, of her 13 frozen
eggs, only three thawed and two fertilized but both of the resulting embryos proved to be
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genetically abnormal. Lindsey told me that she now thinks that egg freezing “was completely
and utterly a waste of time and money, but at the time gave me some peace of mind.” As more
women begin to use their frozen eggs, the next stage of research on the social life of egg freezing
is likely to involve a shift to a focus on the frequent failure of frozen eggs to convert into healthy
live births (see Cha 2018).
Conversely, unlike the EF and SMBC whose romantic relationships shape their fertility
behavior, for the VCF, fertility intentions shape romantic relationship formation. The VCF see
parental desire as a “deal breaker” and most pursue strategies of having conversations about
parental orientation early in their relationships to weed out men who want to have children. Once
a relationship forms, they follow up these initial conversations by periodically “checking in”
with their partners about parental orientation, to ensure that a desire to parent isn’t emerging. In
addition to screening romantic partners based on parental orientation, the VCF also pursued
contraception to enable their childfree lifestyle. Several attempted to pursue permanent forms of
birth control, but found their access to sterilization procedures blocked, leading them to seek
“proxy sterilization” through their husband’s vasectomies. The gendered asymmetries of access
to sterilization procedures highlight the continued limits to women’s reproductive autonomy.
Childfree men’s competence, certainty, and authority over their reproductive futures garner
much greater trust than those of childfree women, who are repeatedly told that they will change
their mind. Further, in refusing these women access to sterilization, doctors are often more
concerned with protecting the access of imagined men to these women’s fertility than they are
with enabling their patients’ control over their own reproduction.
The medical and financial burdens that the EF and the SMBC endure to ensure their
access to biogenetic reproduction and the widespread refusal of doctor to grant the VCF access
to sterilization are, in fact, two sides of the same biopolitical coin. The vast majority of study
participants are professional-class, affluent, highly educated White women whose fertility is
culturally and medically marked out for preservation and promotion (Martin 2010; Rapp 2001;
Rottenberg 2016). The refusal of sterilization to these affluent White childfree women stands in
stark contrast to the coercive and—all too often—nonconsensual sterilization of poor women,
particularly women of color, whose fertility is culturally and medically marked out for
prevention (Bell 2009, 2010; Davis 2009; Rapp 2001; Roberts 2017; Shreffler et al. 2015). While
Bonnie’s doctor repeatedly questioned her certainty about her fertility plans before administering
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Norplant—which only suppresses fertility for a matter of years—several public health campaigns
have pushed Norplant and other long acting forms of birth control on low-income communities
of color, particularly when they come into contact with criminal justice and welfare systems
(Arthur 1992; Hand 1993; Henley 1993; Pierson-Balik 2003; Roberts 1994; Smith 2002;
Sutherland 2003). Further both the EF and the SMBC often contrast their own “responsible”
fertility choices with the “irresponsible” hyper-fecundity of the uneducated masses, who (they
presume) don’t need to worry about preserving their fertility and who do the “wrong” kind of
single motherhood. This drawing of distinctions along raced and classed lines of “responsibility”
is central to the stigma management strategies of the SMBC, which I discuss in greater depth in
the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 4: MANAGING STIGMA

The Stigma of Childlessness and Single Motherhood
All three groups of women in this study experience social judgment related to their
fertility choices, whether they decided to postpone childbearing, pursue single motherhood, or
forgo fertility in favor of cultivating a childfree lifestyle. Childrearing within a married
heterosexual nuclear family still represents the dominant cultural model of adulthood and both
childlessness and single parenthood are stigmatized in mainstream American culture. All three of
these groups of women occupy “discreditable” identity categories (Goffman 1963). While
techniques of information control—avoiding disclosure of “spoiled” identities—can help deflect
social judgment in many situations, when fertility status and family structure are known these
women are often called to account for their “non-normative” fertility trajectories. Consequently,
all three groups of women must develop approaches to stigma management.
The Stigma of Childlessness
Because women’s bodies are so closely conceptually linked to reproduction and cultural
ideals of femininity are so closely linked to motherhood, childlessness is particularly
stigmatizing for women (Firestone 1970; Greil et al. 1988; Lorber 1994; Mcquillan et al. 2008;
Mueller and Yoder 1997, 1999; Rich 1986). Given these close cultural linkages between
motherhood and femininity, childless women are frequently called to account for their
childlessness in many ways, both subtle and overt. When this occurs, conveying an appropriately
positive orientation toward motherhood and, often, emphasizing the involuntary nature of
individual childlessness is integral to the performance of normative femininity. Voluntarily
childfree women face particularly strong cultural stigmas, as their rejection of pronatalist norms
are generally held to be incompatible with normative femininity (Gillespie 2000, 2003; Morell
1994; Park 2002; Peterson 2011; Riessman 2000; Veevers 1975). Voluntarily childfree women
frequently account for their childlessness by emphasizing their own lack of biological urges to
reproduce (Park 2002; Peterson and Engwall 2013). While this appeal to biology naturalizes
these women’s non-maternal feminine identity—thereby conferring greater legitimacy and
reducing stigma—it also reifies pronatalist and gender essentialist beliefs that most women
experience a natural and innate maternal drive (Peterson and Engwall 2013).
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While childlessness among the voluntarily childfree is both highly intentional and stable,
childlessness among women with frozen eggs is more nuanced. The experience of childlessness
is not neatly divided along a voluntary / involuntary dichotomy (Carmichael and Whittaker 2007;
Ireland 1993; Letherby 2002b, 2002a; McQuillan et al. 2012). Between the poles of involuntary
childlessness caused by insuperable infertility and the strong ideological commitment to
childlessness of the voluntarily childfree, lies a wide range of intermediary positions including
“transitional” childlessness resulting from ambivalence about childrearing or competing
commitments like career (Ireland 1993); “childlessness by circumstance,” arising from
relationship instability, women's career-orientation, and men’s involvement in family formation
(Carmichael and Whittaker 2007); and “postponers” who may be intentionally childless at the
present time but are only delaying childbearing and may opt to have children later in life
(McQuillan et al. 2012). As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, most egg freezers in my
study occupy this middle range of childlessness and their decisions to freeze eggs are informed
by this ambivalence.
Egg freezing itself is deeply rooted in the stigma of childlessness and the technology
responds to this stigma in two primary ways: as medical means of countering age-related
infertility and as an interactive resource for accounting for childlessness and performing
normative maternal femininity. As a medical technology, egg freezing is based on the belief that
involuntary childlessness is an untenable position (Letherby 1999; Lisle 1996; Martin 2010;
Miall 1985, 1986, 1994; Remennick 2000; Slade et al. 2007). Becker (2000b) argues that an
inability to have children is more disruptive to women’s gender identities than to those of men.
Because infertility is experienced as a “gender role failure,” ARTs can act as a means of
performing gender, reproducing cultural ideologies and repairing spoiled gender identities
(Becker 2000b; Clarke et al. 2006; Rothman 1989). As Martin (2010) argues, the unacceptability
of anticipated infertility obligates clinicians to develop a means of “preserving” women’s access
to biogenetic reproduction and obligates women experiencing anticipated infertility to ensure
their own reproductive futures. As an interactive resource, egg freezing responds to the intense
stigmatization of voluntarily childfree women, allowing childless women to demonstrate both
that they are appropriately committed to motherhood and that their childlessness is involuntary
(Lisle 1996; Morell 1994; Mueller and Yoder 1997, 1999; Park 2002; Rijken and Merz 2014). In
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both medical and interactional modes, frozen eggs operate as resources for gender performance
(Risman 2009; West and Zimmerman 1987).
The Stigma of Single Motherhood
Single-mothers-by-choice face a different set of interactional challenges. While their
normatively maternal femininity is not in question, their family forms are vulnerable to being
discredited. The broader category of single motherhood—which includes never married,
divorced, separated, and widowed mothers whose entry into sole motherhood ranges from fully
elective to completely unexpected—has been widely vilified, with many social and political
actors attributing the “breakdown” of family values, poor childhood outcomes, rising poverty
rates, and social welfare dependency to single mothers’ failure to constrain childbearing to the
confines of marriage (Carabine 2001; Ellison 2003; Gordon 1994; Hyde 2000; Ladd-Taylor and
Umansky 1998; Silva 1996). Consequently, single mothers find themselves in a double bind with
regard to paid labor. While working motherhood is stigmatize among affluent and middle-class
women, poor and working-class women are subject to social and governmental pressure to
engage in full-time paid labor and experience social censure for being “welfare queens” if they
don’t work (Gordon 1994; Hays 2003; Jarrett 1996; Pulkingham et al. 2010; Silva 1996).
Consequently, professional-class, single, working mothers must negotiate carefully between the
stigmas and material constraints of working motherhood and dependent motherhood (Duncan
and Strell 2004; Hertz 1999; Hertz and Ferguson 1997; James 2009; Meier et al. 2016; Nelson
2014; Ng and Ng 2013; Simorangkir 2015; Wiegers and Chunn 2015).
Dominant belief in the importance of “intact families” and “involved fathers” inform both
cultural norms and social sciences research. Father’s involvement is often represented a critical
component of children’s academic achievement (DeBell 2008; Haskins 2016; Jeynes 2015;
McLanahan et al. 2013; Suizzo et al. 2017), well-being (Brown, Bell, and Patterson 2016; Coley
2003; McLanahan et al. 2013; Nelson 2004), “risk behaviors” (Anderson 2015; James 2012;
Mandara et al. 2011; Markowitz and Ryan 2016; Thomas et al. 1996), and development of
gender identity and sexuality (Allen 2016; Anderson 2015; Hill 2002; Johnson 2013; Leavell et
al. 2012; Lindsey, Mize, and Pettit 1997; Mandara et al. 2005). The blame for poor childhood
outcomes—including poor academic performance and behavioral problems—and the persistence
of poverty in low-income communities of color, particularly urban Black communities, is often
assigned to “father absence” due to non-marital fertility, multi-partner fertility, and paternal
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incarceration (Amato and Rivera 1999; Anderson 2015; Geva 2011; Haskins 2016; James 2012;
Turner and Waller 2017; Turney, Wildeman, and Schnittker 2012).
Single parent families are constructed as deficient in comparison to the heterosexual
nuclear family, which is held up as the stable and desirable norm, placing pressure on single
parents and their children to respond to negative perceptions (Ben-Daniel et al. 2007; Ifcher and
Zarghamee 2014; May 2008; Nelson 2014; Wiegers and Chunn 2015; Zartler 2014). Central to
the hegemony of the heterosexual nuclear family is the belief that children benefit from the
complementarity of the heterosexual dyad and from the presence of both male and female role
models in the home, which motivates concerns—on the part of both outsiders and single mothers
themselves—about the “absence” of a male role model in single mother households (Jadva et al.
2009; Mazor 2004; Zartler 2014). Among single mothers, single-mothers-by-choice are held
among the most accountable for the “absence” of a “father figure” in their children’s lives and,
along with poor and “unwed” single mothers, are vulnerable to experiencing some of the
strongest social stigma for their family structure (Ben-Ari and Weinberg-Kurnik 2007; Hertz
2006; Wiegers and Chunn 2015). While single-mother-by-choice families have the potential to
challenge the hegemony of biogenetic kinship and the heterosexual nuclear family, their
approaches to the figure of the absent father more often reaffirm normative narratives of family
(Hertz 2002, 2006). Given widespread disapprobation of “out of wedlock” motherhood, single-
mothers-by-choice engage in accountability work and respectability politics to differentiate
themselves from young, poor, welfare-dependent, and otherwise “irresponsible” single mothers,
assert their moral standing as “good” mothers, and manage stigma (Bock 2000; Hertz 2006).

Chapter Overview
In this chapter I engage with the various stigma management strategies of women with
electively frozen eggs (EF), single-mothers-by-choice (SMBC), and voluntarily childfree women
(VCF). Single and childless into their 30s and 40s, the EF violate gender norms and traditional
family formation scripts that hold that women should prioritize marriage and motherhood above
all else. Having pursued elective sole parenting, the SMBC violate social mores that prescribe
that reproduction should take place within the bonds of marriage. Conversely, the VCF—
particularly those in stable, long-term heterosexual marriages—reject definitions of family,
marriage, and femininity that center childrearing. While gender norms and family formation
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scripts are increasingly inclusive and flexible, particularly for highly educated professional-class
women, as I discuss below, the many experiences that women in all three study populations had
with being called to account for the fertility trajectories, the degree to which their fertility
decision-making was marked out as non-normative, and the refusal of social alters to recognize
the validity or legitimacy of single-mother-by-choice and voluntarily childfree families
demonstrates that cultural norms of maternal femininity and marital childbearing are still
prevalent, still carry social weight, and still require stigma management, even among affluent,
White, college-educated, professional-class women living in a progressive cosmopolitan city.
In managing stigma, all three groups engage in both reproductive and resistant agency, in
some cases affirming social norms and institutions and in other cases challenging them,
sometimes even affirming and challenging certain norms simultaneously (Dworkin and Messner
1999). I demonstrate how the EF draw on their frozen eggs as interactional resources for gender
performance. When called to account for their childlessness, the EF often point to their frozen
eggs as evidence of their “properly” maternal femininity, thereby reproducing hegemonic
linkages between femininity and motherhood. Given that their elective childlessness is generally
regarded as mutually exclusive of maternal femininity, the VCF more often resist dominant
gender and family norms; however, their appeals to their own biological difference in lacking a
maternal drive reproduce dominant ideologies that hold that all (or most) women do experience a
natural urge to mother. In countering the stigma of single motherhood, the SMBC draw
distinctions between themselves and other—more stigmatized—single mothers, thereby
reproducing hierarchies of maternal worthiness that marginalize poor women. I also demonstrate
how the SMBC and the VCF make appeals to increasing family diversity—including the
increasing prominence of same-sex marriage and same-sex parents—to legitimize their own
alternative family forms.
The stigma management strategies of these three groups illuminates the current state of
play of gender and family politics in the United States, demonstrating that—despite increasing
acceptance of family diversity and fluidity of gender norms—childlessness and single
motherhood are still stigmatizing for women, even in a progressive and diverse cultural setting
like Southern California. Their experiences demonstrate that marriage and motherhood are still
central to “appropriate” gender performance and women are still called to account for their “non-
normative” fertility trajectories. However, the fertility and stigma management strategies of these
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three groups also demonstrate the ways in which contemporary women are finding and making
space for deviation from these norms and demanding inclusion and acceptance. The complex
combinations of resistant agency—primarily in their fertility decision-making—and reproductive
agency—primarily in their stigma management—that these women enact illuminates the current
state of play and the uneven progress of gender liberation and family diversity in the US.

Managing Stigma and Doing Gender through Egg Freezing
Given the close linkages between cultural ideals of femininity and motherhood and the
pronatalist orientation of American culture, it is not surprising that many of the EF describe
experiences in which relatives, friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers inquire about
their marital and childbearing status and intentions, going so far as to offer unsolicited “advice”
about the importance of putting motherhood first and expounding upon their certainty that all
women eventually decide that they want to have children (see: Heitlinger 1993; Lisle 1996;
McMahon 1995; Park 2002). Given the non-normative and stigmatized status of childlessness
and particularly voluntary childlessness, these women are under pressure to offer “accounts” of
their fertility trajectories (Park 2002; Scott and S. Lyman 1968; West and Zimmerman 1987).
Regardless of their orientation to motherhood, many of the EF described mobilizing their frozen
eggs to account for their childlessness and to defend their “properly” feminine maternal
orientation. In these accounts, the EF employ their frozen eggs as a signal that they have “done
their part” in the service of motherhood and that their continued childlessness is a matter of fate,
not personal responsibility. Additionally, many of the EF describe having frozen their eggs as a
means of providing for the reproduction of a future male partner, thereby signaling their
acceptance and fulfillment of women’s disproportionate responsibility for reproduction.
Christine, a 38-year-old, divorced lawyer who was single and childless at the time of our
interview, described the sort of interrogation she often experienced with regard to her romantic
and maternal prospects:
When they look at me and they're like, “So any men on the horizon? Have you thought
about having kids? Have you thought about adopting?” Normally that's how they ask.
They say, “Have you thought about adopting?” Because they know I like children and
they know that I'm good with children. That's normally the question that gets asked:
“Have you thought about adoption?” And I go, “No, but I froze my eggs.”
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Here Christine clearly mobilizes her frozen eggs as a means of accounting for her childlessness
and deflecting the stigma of being voluntarily childfree. Having established that she has no
viable romantic prospects, Christine describes being asked whether she has considered single-
motherhood-by-choice. When this occurs she describes explaining that she froze her eggs as a
means of demonstrating that she has already taken action to preserve her access to motherhood,
thereby enacting a “properly” feminine orientation to motherhood, even though she is not
actively pursuing childbearing or adoption.
Similarly, Angela who was 39-years-old, childless, and had been dating her boyfriend for
about a year at the time of our interview, described mobilizing her frozen eggs as a response to
pronatalist social pressures:
I guess [I do get pressure] from society or people, other people or people I don't know
very well. “Oh, come on. You should have a baby. You're so cute. The baby would be so
cute.” … If people ask me if I want to have kids, I tell them like, “It's not my life's goal
but I would be into it if I was in love.” I would tell them, “When I was 35, I froze the
eggs just to make sure I would always have that option.” … I joke that I got my kids,
keeping cool, on ice.
Among the EF, Angela described some of the strongest childfree orientations, yet she
distinguishes herself from the VCF by affirming her interest in romantic-marital childbearing
and, like Christine, draws on her frozen eggs as an interactional resource for demonstrating the
she has taken responsibility for ensuring her own access to reproduction and, as I demonstrate
below, that she’s taken action to ensure her future husband’s access to reproduction as well.
Many of the EF presented having frozen their eggs as having “done their part” in the
service of motherhood. For example, Paula, who was 46-years-old, married, and not trying to
have children, described her experience of egg freezing in strongly maternal terms: “I felt this
strange little sense of like mommyhood in a way…. For just a little moment there I felt like,
‘Wow, I've just done my part. That's it for me.’ … I have just basically given birth to my eggs.
There they are and that's my little mommy contribution” (emphasis added). Many of EF
presented their own childlessness as contingent upon the lack of a suitable romantic partner and
co-parent. Having frozen their eggs allowed them to account for their own “properly” maternal
orientation while shifting the blame for their childlessness onto romantic partners, social
structures, or fate. Several of the EF also saw egg freezing as a way of preemptively deflecting
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blame for future age-related infertility. Representing their frozen eggs as their “mommy
contributions” allows these women to represent the possibility of lifelong childlessness as a
matter of fate or divine predestination, rather than a personal moral failing. As Karen, a
committed Christian who was 47-years-old, single, and childless at the time of our interview,
explains:
If I try to use [my frozen eggs] and for whatever reason everything goes wrong and it
doesn't work, at least, okay, I tried. It wasn't meant to be. Because if you go this far into it
and it doesn't work out – That's sort of like God and God said no.
Angela, who identified as “spiritual” but not religious, took a similar approach while attributing
the powers of fate to “the universe” rather than God:
I just thought, here's what's in my control and then I just left the rest up to the universe. If
I don't have children, I don't, but I know that I've done everything to make it happen. … I
was like, ‘Okay. I'm done. I don't need to worry about it anymore because it's not in my
control.’ … I've done what I can do. Letting the rest of it go, the rest of it's not up to me
… If it does happen to where I can't have a baby, they can't use those [frozen] eggs and
they can't take my current eggs, well then the universe is saying no.
These appeals to fatalism when preemptively accounting for future infertility demonstrate how
the EF mobilize their frozen eggs as interactional and discursive resources for performing gender
and abdicating responsibility for childlessness, thereby deflecting stigma and preserving access
to normatively maternal feminine identities. In this same vein, frozen eggs may eventually help
protect these women against the stigma of voluntary childlessness and the pressure to pursue
intensive ARTs, should to they experience infertility in the future, as they can appeal to their
frozen eggs as evidence that they’ve already given fertility their best shot.
Frozen eggs also enabled gender performance with regard to romantic relationships and
marital childbearing. Many of the EF saw freezing their eggs as a way of enabling a future male
partner’s reproduction, thereby accepting women’s primary responsibility for reproduction and
fulfilling their feminine responsibilities to provide for the perpetuation of the male line (see also:
Becker 2000b; Firestone 1970; Greil et al. 1988; Rothman 1989). For example, Christine
explains:
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The way I thought about [egg freezing] before was I'll get married, I'll fall in love but by
the time I do it, I'll be 40 or 43 and my eggs will be shriveled up and died but I'll have
these ones on ice and they'll be great. I can use them. My husband and I can use them.
Despite her childfree leanings, Angela took a similar approach to egg freezing:
I've frozen [my eggs] with my future partner [in mind.] … To be able to give him what he
wants if that's what he wants. … I always thought I would hate if I met the man with
brains and I chose not to freeze my eggs … I always thought if I fall deeply in love with
somebody and their hope is to have a child, they were born to be a dad and they want
more than anything, I'd like to give them that gift because of my love for them.
Even as Christine found herself opening up to single-motherhood-by-choice and Angela
reaffirmed her childfree leanings, both women draw on their frozen eggs to demonstrate their
commitment to childbearing within the context of heterosexual marriage as the preferred family
form. In these ways the EF draw on frozen eggs as interactional resources for the performance of
normatively maternal femininity and to account for their childlessness and manage the stigma of
their non-normative life-course trajectories.

Drawing Distinctions: Managing Stigma as a Single-Mother-by-Choice
As I have discussed in previous chapters, SMBCs must contend with both externally
imposed and internalized social norms that privilege the “packaged deal” of childrearing within
heterosexual marriage as the idealized family structure (Townsend 2002). These women
recognize that single motherhood is still a relatively stigmatized position in contemporary
society, despite increasing acceptance of family diversity. Stigma management requires both
internal labor of accepting the stigmatized identity and repairing self-concept, as well as the
external labor of managing interactions with (potentially) disapproving others (Goffman 1963).
Overcoming Internalized Stigma
Many of the SMBC had to grapple with their own internalized stigmatization of single
motherhood in order to follow this family formation path. However, coming to terms with
SMBC was often an ongoing process. None of these women saw single motherhood as their
preferred family formation strategy and several admitted to feelings of “failure,” frustrations
about “missing out” on traditional family life, and struggling to accept their own family form as
equally valid. As Victoria explained, “Sometimes it's hard for me to think of me and [my
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daughter] Julia as a family. Part of me really longs for a two parent model.” However, they all
agreed that it was very important that they confront this internalized stigma to avoid transmitting
it to their children. This was most acute when it came to having “the father conversation” or
telling children their “origin stories.” While a few of the women had waited or were waiting for
their children to ask about their fathers, most took a proactive approach to “the father
conversation,” telling their children their “birth stories” from infancy. This approach served dual
purposes: first, it ensured that there was never any secrecy about their child’s origins and,
second, it allowed the mother to get comfortable telling this story before their children were old
enough to ask questions. Beth explained that she had told her daughter, Stella (3-years-old), her
story from birth: “I wrote a story about her, how she came to be, and I read that to her now and
then. It's just sort of like an ongoing, hopefully casual, conversation. … Because you have to get
over your own discomfort. The kid doesn't have any hang ups.” These mothers were sensitive to
the fact that their own feelings about their family formation strategy would shape their children’s
feelings, so they placed great emphasis on helping their children to “own” their birth stories to
avoid conveying stigma or giving their children “hang ups” about their origins.
Experiencing External Stigma
The stigma of “father absence.” In addition to coping with internalized stigma, SMBCs
had to engage in impression and information management in day-to-day social interactions.
Many of the SMBC found that those closest to them often offered the harshest judgments of their
decisions to pursue single motherhood. As Tina explained, “Your family is, they're so close to
you, and you're going to get comments that you might not even get, that you wouldn't get from a
friend like, ‘What are you stupid?’ or ‘Why would you do that?’” The SMBC also frequently ran
into heteronormative and gender essentialist beliefs about the importance of having both a
mother and a father involved in childrearing, as Joanne’s experience with another mother at the
park demonstrates:
I was at the park with another group of moms, and one of the moms didn't know my
situation, and she was talking about another single mom who had a child. … She was
saying, “Those kind of kids, a little girl that doesn't have a dad, they are going to be wild,
and they are going to be more promiscuous, and they don't have that father figure, and
they are going to have sex earlier.” I was like, oh ... I hear some of that, not necessarily
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directed at me because they don't necessarily know, but [trails off with a look of
concern].
Sheila related a similar experience: “I once ran into a friend from junior high school at some
reunion party and he's kind of conservative guy but he makes some comments, just off hand.
‘Don’t you worry about not having a father figure?’ Something like that. I was like no.” The
intentional absence of a father—though of course most of the participants had wanted to raise
children with a father—was one of the most potentially stigmatizing aspects of SMBC family
formation, triggering both heteronormative and gender essentialist beliefs about the importance
of paternal role modeling and raced and classed stereotypes about the “irresponsible” fertility of
low-income “unwed mothers” and “father absence” in poor communities of color, which I
discuss further below. While class privilege and resources buffer these professional-class women
from some of the more extreme stigma that poor single mothers and single mothers of color
experience, they nevertheless had to contend with internalized beliefs and cultural expectations
about the importance of fathers to healthy childhood development. These women took a variety
of approaches to the issue of the “father figure.” Some pushed back against the heteronormativity
of these expectations, often making an appeal to the increasing visibility of same-sex families.
Alma, for instance, argued:
I am not convinced at this point that children need both a mother and a father figure. I
think they just need to be loved. They need to feel safe and protected. … There's plenty
of same-sex couples that have children and they are [saying], “we don't need to have two
genders to have a child that's grounded and competent and loved.”
However, many SMBC were concerned with providing a father figure or male role model for
their children and they made efforts to involve male friends or relatives in their children’s lives.
This concern for male figures bifurcated somewhat based on the child’s gender. Most of
the women in this study were raising girls, only Rebecca, Danielle, and Marlena were raising
boys. These three women were primarily concerned with providing a good male role model for
their sons. They worried that their boys weren’t receiving sufficient masculine socialization and
they were anxious that there were things they, as women, simply couldn’t teach boys. As I
discuss above, these anxieties are linked to racialized narratives about “father absence” and the
important role of fathers in socializing boys into appropriate masculinities (see: Allen 2016;
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Hunter et al. 2006; Ide et al. 2018; Mandara et al. 2005). Rebecca, whose son Daniel was 3-
years-old at the time of our interview, explained:
I'd like to think there's a father figure for Daniel. That would be really nice for him. He's
surrounded by women. He needs a father figure, but he also needs a role model of a
loving relationship. … He plays with all the girls. He's not interested in playing with the
boys. … The type of play that he likes to do is cooking and instruments. He's not the
smash things around kind of boy. … This is actually a huge thing, if a man would raise
him differently than I am in some ways. Sometimes I think that is a loss for Daniel. I do. I
don't roughhouse with him that much. I don't give him a role model to be a man. …
There's ways of being that I just can't teach him ... you are teaching your child how to be
a man. … When I was potty training Daniel, all of the sudden I was like, [mimes
uncertainty] “Uh, point your penis there.” … The guy I was dating took him to the potty
once, and he was like, “Shake.” I was like, “Shake!?” I didn't know!
The belief, gleaned from their readings of psychological research, that fathers provide more
physical or “rough and tumble” play and that this is important for children’s development
cropped up frequently across interviews, as did concerns about providing models of healthy
masculinity for boys and models of healthy heterosexual relationships for all of the children
(Leavell et al. 2012; Lindsey et al. 1997; Mandara et al. 2005). The mothers raising girls also
expressed a desire for their daughters to have positive relationships with men. As Joanne, who
was raising 4-year-old twin girls, explained, “I want them to like guys. … I don't want them to
think that I made this choice because I am anti-guys because I didn't. I want them to love men. I
am not saying that they have to be married to a man, but I want them not to think that they're bad
or they're evil.” Similarly Nancy, whose daughter was only 6-months-old, explained, “I would
like her to be able to trust and have good feelings towards men.” Like Joanne, many of the
SMBC who brought this up were quick to point out that they didn’t expect that their daughters
would necessarily have to be attracted to men, but it seemed that they were concerned with not
inhibiting “healthy” heterosexual development through their own actions. By seeking out
familial male role models for their children, the SMBC attempted to head off stigmatizing
accusations that they were undermining their children’s “natural” development of (cis)gender
and (hetero)sexuality.
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The stigma of adoption. While most of the SMBC had pursued some form of assisted
conception—mostly donor insemination through IUI or IVF—having adopted children presented
unique challenges for Pamela and Holly. Holly, whose daughter Maeve was 14-years-old at the
time of our interview, explained that she used to encounter much more judgment when her
daughter was still a baby and other parents would ask about pregnancy and delivery, “so you
have to say, ‘Well, my child was adopted.’ In the beginning, I got the, ‘Well, how did you do
that as a single parent?’ or ‘Who let you?’ I'm like, ‘Well, you know, there's no laws against it.’
… or the, ‘Why would you want to do that?’” However, as Maeve grew older, most of these
questions ceased and Holly admitted, “I think another thing that we have going for us is nobody
every suspects Maeve is adopted. We fly under the radar in that she looks just like me. …
Nobody ever questions it, versus some of the other moms like you’re white and your child is
very, very chocolaty.” For Pamela, who adopted her daughter Matilda (8-years-old) from Central
America, the visibility of international adoption made it impossible for them to “fly under the
radar.” Pamela started Matilda at a dual-language program in Los Angeles’s Korea Town in the
hopes that her daughter would feel more comfortable in the school, which she described as “50%
Korean, 50% Latino.” However, “the other families were heterosexual and much more
traditional. Not only did we stand out because I'm white and she's brown, but because there was
no dad in the picture. There, she started to feel unhappy, because kids were asking a lot of
questions.” Eventually Pamela moved Matilda to a different dual-immersion program in North
East Los Angeles where the students came from a wider range of family backgrounds. This had
proved a much happier placement, Pamela explained, “We just blend in, so it's beautiful.”
Invasive questions and accountability. Children were not the only ones to ask invasive
questions of the SMBC, several of whom described their frustration at being asked unnecessary
personal questions and feeling that they were held to a higher standard of accountability than
married parents. Nancy described her frustration at being asked about her support systems as a
single mom:
I cringe a lot when people are like, “Wow. You're doing this alone. You must have a
great support system.” The truth is I don't have a great support system. … It's just
annoying that … no one says that if you're married and having a kid. They're like, “As
long as you have your husband it's fine.” When you say you're single you better have a
great support system in place.
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Similarly, Marlena described her irritation at the way in which her motivations for motherhood
were questioned:
Married people are like... Why do you want a kid? They ask, “Why do you want a kid?”
It's like there's this set of questions for single people, but there aren't for married people.
… . We get asked these basic questions, why do you want to have kids? Well, why do
you want to have kids? Married people never get asked. If a married couple gets
pregnant, are they asked, “Why do you want to have a kid?” That would be considered
rude and unbelievable. Single people get asked that all the time … then you're judged on
what you say. People will start picking apart, whereas married people, you don't get
asked those questions in the first place.
As Nancy and Marlena demonstrate, there was a general feeling among the SMBC that they were
held to a different standard than married parents, that they were called to account for their
resources and their parental motivation in ways that married parents almost never are. In some
cases, the SMBC took these invasive questions as an opportunity for active stigma management.
Several SMBC described being questioned on why they hadn’t adopted instead of pursuing
reproductive technologies and they used their explanations to demonstrate the responsibility and
conscientiousness of their single motherhood. By explaining the careful research they had done,
the complex cost-benefits analysis they had considered, and describing the genetic screening of
donors as more optimized even than married reproduction, these SMBCs demonstrated their
thoughtfulness and diligence in giving their children the best start in life.
Managing Stigmatization
Disavowing stigma. While all of the SMBCs both described and performed stigma
management around their family structure during our interviews, many were resistant to viewing
themselves as stigmatized. When I asked participants whether they felt they encountered much
social judgment or disapproval of their family structure, about half reported that they had while
the other half stated that they had not experienced any social judgment, which they generally
attributed to the progressive and inclusive cultural climate in Los Angeles, allowing that it might
be different elsewhere. Additionally, while they rarely acknowledge the role that their privileged
class positions played in their family formation, these women generally live and work in affluent
and socially progressive neighborhoods and employment sectors, which further buffers them
from the more intensive scrutiny, surveillance, and social judgment that poor and working-class
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single mothers experience on a regular basis. Although the advantages of their class privilege
generally went unacknowledged, the SMBC frequently mobilized their financial and cultural
capital to secure access to single motherhood, arrange work and care networks, and defend
themselves against stigma by distinguishing themselves from “irresponsible” poor single
mothers, as I discuss further below. Even though half of the SMBC stated that they did not
experience social judgment, all of these women went on to describe experiences of social
stigmatization. For example, Beth responded in the negative saying:
It's weird because I have run into nothing [in the way of stigma]. … I've literally never
run into anyone with anything other than being totally fine with it. … [So I don’t
experience judgment] but I do feel like it's very subtle, but when I talk to people about it,
there's the “Oh that's great,” and then there's like sort of this subtle discomfort. It's like a
very subtle discomfort that's hard to even pinpoint. I think people don't have the
language. We don't say dad, we say donor. They don't really know what to say, so they're
afraid of saying something that might be offensive. You know what I mean? It's this very,
very subtle thing ... If I talk about something donor related, that moment will be like,
“Ohhh – I don't know what to say right now.” It's like, “It's fine.” It's certainly not a big
deal, but I take it as my responsibility to be someone who facilitates normalizing. It's
okay to talk about it. It's just a family, like them all. … It's all about being in LA too. …
You read things. Moms say terrible things. Nothing for me.
Having claimed never to experience any negative responses to her single motherhood, Beth goes
on to describe frequent experiences of social “discomfort” in which her family structure is
marked out as non-normative, in which her peers lack (or fear they lack) the language to discuss
her family structure in an accurate and respectful way, in which she feels the pressure to
“normalize” her family structure and facilitate its shift from “unspeakable” to “unremarkable.”
Having described this everyday stigma management, Beth reaffirms that, by virtue of living in
Los Angeles, she hasn’t had any negative experiences. Nor was this performative disavowal of
stigma coupled with a description of real life stigma management limited to Beth. Michelle told
me she was surprised by how supportive everyone had been, but went on to explain how she
feels “a bit out of place” because there aren’t other families like hers in her neighborhood or her
child’s school and then to admit that “nobody really knows the details” because she doesn’t tell
neighbors or other parents that she is a single mom, information management being one of the
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first lines of defense in stigma management. Alma also attributed a lack of social judgment to the
“forward thinking” nature of Los Angeles, but went on to explain that she is happy to act as a
role model for single-motherhood-by-choice because, “I think the more that people hear about it,
the more normal it becomes. I would hope that by the time my daughter is school age, it's less of
a stigma than it was.” Like Alma, several SMBC who claimed not to experience stigma
acknowledged their own roles in “surrounding” themselves with supportive and non-judgmental
people.
Why do these women make the claim that they do not experience social judgment when it
is clear that they engage in everyday stigma management? In part this may serve a
psychologically protective role. Viewing the self as stigmatized can be painful and
overwhelming. By not self-defining as stigmatized, these women may be protecting themselves
against the psychological weight of a “spoiled” identity. They may also be defining “social
judgment” more narrowly in terms of explicit discrimination and prejudice, as the “terrible
things… you read about” happening to other people. If no one has called their family inferior or
sinful to their faces, they reason, then they can’t be experiencing social judgment. Certainly the
women who had experienced direct criticisms of their family formation were more likely to state
that they had experienced social judgment. However, I also argue that this disavowal of stigma is
part of the stigma management in which the SMBC are engaged. One of the most common
stigma management techniques that the SMBC use is that of drawing distinctions between
themselves and (more) stigmatized single mothers. Both implicitly and explicitly they define
their own experiences of single motherhood as both distinct from and superior to: dependent
welfare mothers, homeless mothers, poor single mothers working multiple jobs, divorced
mothers suffering through marital conflict, abandoned single mothers, and irresponsible “unwed”
mothers who had unintended pregnancies. Along with appeals to increasing family diversity,
these appeals to the intentionality and responsibility of their motherhood represents a form of
rhetorical stigma management, which they combine with more practical forms of stigma
management, including limiting disclosure and engaging in self-advocacy.
Practical stigma management. The SMBC engaged in many forms of practical stigma
management in everyday interactions. As is often the case, information management, particularly
regarding disclosure of single motherhood, was a first line of defense for many of the SMBC.
While some of the women, like Beth and Alma took a visible “spokesperson” or “role model”
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approach, many of the single mothers opted to disclose their single motherhood very selectively.
Schools were particularly fraught environments for disclosure. Children tend to be bluntly
inquisitive and classroom discussion and assignments—particularly in preschool and
kindergarten—often center around heteronormative family scripts, placing the burden on SMBCs
and their children to educate others about their family form. Holly, whose 14-year-old daughter
Maeve was the oldest in the study, explained how exhausting but necessary this self-advocacy is:
She's always had to educate her peers ever since she was a little girl. “No, I wasn't born in
an orphanage.” She actually got into battle with one of her teachers once about the dad:
“No, I don't have a dad.”
“Everybody has a dad, Maeve.”
“No. I don't have a dad.”
“Even if your dad is not around, everyone has a dad, Maeve.”
“No. No, I don't.”
It's been people around her and making sure that she's educated, and understands, and is
able to articulate and educate the people around her. I think our kids, and I've heard some
of the other moms say this, it's a burden for them because they have to advocate for
themselves, they have to be the educators and I think that gets exhausting and tiresome.
You have to be poster child for adoption and explain to everybody. … She feels like she's
the person who has to, anytime there is a moment, do that, but I think she also gets tired
of it. It gets exhausting constantly educating people who are shortsighted.
All of the SMBC with school-aged children had discussed their family form with their children’s
teachers in an effort to encourage more inclusive language about families; however, disclosure to
other parents was more variable. Some, like Michelle, opted not to let other parents know, in the
hopes that they could avoid the conversation and the questions and judgment that often come
with it. Others, like Joanne, would have preferred not to have to discuss their family with others,
but opted to take a direct approach:
It bothers me that I have to have that conversation every year now. [Since I have twins,] I
am going to have it with two kids' teachers every year, and then I will get all of the
parents from two different classes questioning and wondering. … I don't want them
questioning, so I come out and say it, but then I am like I don't even have to say it. It's not
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for anybody to [know] ... [but] I feel like I owe it to my kids to say it so that people don't
talk about it and make up a story.
Although Joanne elaborated on her frustrations with having to repeatedly disclose, explain, and
justify her family form, she felt that controlling the narrative was the most important aspect of
information management. While practical approaches to stigma management, including
information management and self-advocacy were common among SMBCs, they also engaged in
a rhetorical form of stigma management centered on drawing distinctions between themselves
and other more stigmatized single mothers.
Appealing to financial resources. Single-mothers-by-choice were very sensitive to the
stigmas attached to single motherhood. They made a variety of rhetorical moves to distinguish
between themselves and more stigmatized single mothers including dependent welfare mothers,
homeless mothers, poor mothers working multiple jobs to make ends meet, divorced mothers
locked in conflict with ex-husbands, and “unwed” mothers and other “irresponsible” women who
had unplanned pregnancies. They accomplished this through rhetorical mobilization of their
financial resources, the intentionality of their motherhood, the insufficiency of marriage as a
guarantee of happy or successful parenting, and the frequency and deleterious effects of marital
conflict and divorce on children. In presenting a vision of their homes as happy, healthy,
emotionally stable, and well-resourced, they mobilized their class-based resources to hold their
own families up as superior not only to other single mother families, but also many married
families.
Given the close cultural associations between single motherhood and welfare
dependency, appeals to their financial resources to make class-based distinctions between
themselves and low-income single mothers were a primary form of stigma management for
many of the SMBC. The same resources that allowed these women to pursue expensive
reproductive technologies, employ full-time nannies, and take extended time off of work also
enabled this class-based stigma management strategy. Recall that most of these women had
incomes over $100,000 and owned their own homes, placing them in positions of affluence even
in Los Angeles, yet the specter of welfare dependency cropped up for many of them. Victoria
described an acrimonious exchange with an aunt: “Most people [have been supportive], except
for this one fucking bitch aunt, who I ... heard said to my mom, ‘Victoria and her welfare baby.’
I never was on welfare, but it's like, ‘Fuck you bitch.’ I don't even know what I will say to her.”
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Alma was very sensitive to this stigma, she explained, “growing up in the ‘80s and the early ‘90s
like the idea of a single mother was like that was horrible. That woman either did something
really bad or she is milking the welfare system or whatever.” Although these women rarely
invoked race when discussing the stigma of single motherhood, the figure of the “Cadillac
driving welfare queen” that haunts their narratives is racially coded as Black. While avowing
politics of diversity and inclusion and eschewing overt racism, these affluent, mostly White
women were at pains to distance themselves from Moynihan-esque visions of the “breakdown”
of poor urban Black families and their “tangle of pathology” that single mother households still
conjure up for many Americans (Moynihan 1965; Patterson 2010). As one of the few women of
color in the sample, Alma may have felt particularly vulnerable to the stigma of the welfare
mother. When a friend of her mother’s told her that single motherhood was “a terrible idea” and
asked her why she would do it, Alma appealed to her financial resources and her intentionality
immediately:
Growing up like in the ‘80s, ‘90s, like single moms were like the welfare mom. It was
such a stigma. I think that's why my initial gut reaction to my mom's friend was, I said, “I
make six figures a year. I own my own house.” I was justifying it this way. Or like, “I am
not making this immature decision. I have really thought about this and I am responsible
in this decision.”
Through references to their high incomes, homeownership, and thoughtfulness in pursuing
intentional motherhood, the SMBC distanced themselves from the stigmatized figure of the
welfare mother and other irresponsible single mothers.
Financial resources and intentionality were at the heart of distancing themselves from
other poor single mothers as well, including those that couldn’t provide secure housing and those
that had to work such long hours that they couldn’t provide their children with much quality
time. As Beth explained, “You want to have some financial resources. Enough to make sure that
everything is going to be okay. You don't want to be on the street with your baby.” Like several
of the other SMBCs, Michelle brought up how her financial security had allowed her to take
extensive time off work after her daughter’s birth, providing the quality time and deep emotional
bonding so central to intensive motherhood: “I'm financially comfortable. I can spend time on
pretty much a full time mom now so. … I could take a couple years off if I wanted to … I kind of
just spend my days managing my stock market investments and doing volunteer work for my
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daughter’s school.” The class privilege involved in having sufficient savings and independent
income from investments to take an extended leave of absence from work highlight the
resources, both practical and rhetorical, that these women brought to their family formation.
These women also tended to hold positions of occupational privilege as well. Either by
virtue of seniority in their workplaces or being in high demand in the market, many of these
women are able to secure family-friendly working conditions—like flexible schedules and
working from home—that are often unavailable to other parents, even more junior professional-
class women. When I asked Nancy about the resources necessary for successful single-
motherhood-by-choice, she went immediately to financial resources and job flexibility:
If you're not going to have money, this is a crazy thing to do unless you're comfortable
living off of welfare and things like that. I think it's just a crazy thing to do without
money. I don't mean a lot, but … that you're financially able to do it, and that also your
career, your job situation is such that you still have time to give to a child that you're not
working two jobs to support a kid because if you have a kid and you're never home,
because you have to support her because you're single, that's a shame in itself. (emphasis
added)
Through these appeals to financial resources, Nancy distances herself from welfare dependency
and from the only slightly less stigmatized figure of the poor single mother working multiple
jobs to make ends meet. These women emphasized their intentionality and the “wantedness” of
their children as primary virtues of single-motherhood-by-choice. By distinguishing between
themselves and poor, homeless, or overworked single mothers, the SMBC highlighted the ways
in which their privileged financial and occupational positions allowed them to fulfill the
demands of intensive motherhood, moving them closer to idealized forms of motherhood and
further from stigmatized forms of motherhood.
Appealing to intentionality. The SMBC also pushed back against the privileging of
marital childbearing as the best possible environment for children. While all of them would have
preferred to have loving and committed partners with whom to raise their children, they
frequently pointed to high rates of divorce, marital conflict, married friends’ complaints about
the failings of fathers, and their own impressions of the “thoughtlessness” or unexamined nature
of marital childbearing to argue for the benefits of single-mother-by-choice families. All of the
SMBC made an appeal to their own intentionality, explaining that they were thoughtful and
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deliberate about pursuing motherhood and that their children were wanted, which they argued is
best for the child. As Marlena explained, “The other thing about single moms by choice is that
… as opposed to [some single moms], we are so intentional about this. We put so much thought
into it. We want these kids so bad. This isn't an accidental pregnancy.” In addition to drawing
distinctions between themselves and “unwed mothers” and other “irresponsible” women who
had unplanned pregnancies, the SMBC also contrasted their strong desire for children with many
married couples who they felt had children simply because it was “what you do.” Nancy made a
strong argument for the harm that not feeling wanted could do to children:
If you don't want them, that's the last thing you should be doing is having kids. There
might be women who feel, or never really thought they had a choice. You grow up, you
get married, you have kids. Then sometimes you see the product of those kids who have
ambivalent mothers. There's just enough screwed up people in the world. I think you
have to really know you want kids if you're going to have them.
Beth echoed Nancy’s sentiments and added, “I think the best thing for kids is to be raised by
people who love them and want them.” By contrasting their own intentional motherhood with the
obligatory parenthood of many married couples, the SMBC draw distinctions among married
families—distinguishing functional from dysfunctional and loving from indifferent—to reject
dominant beliefs about the inferiority of their family forms, countering with arguments for their
superiority to the “packaged deal” of marital childbearing in several regards. In addition to
emphasizing their children’s “wantedness,” the SMBC emphasize the absence of marital conflict
and unmet expectations in their homes.
Appealing to marital conflict. One of the most commonly cited benefits of single-
motherhood-by-choice is that, because they elected to “go it alone,” no one is “letting me down”
or “dropping the ball.” Many of the SMBC pointed out that marriage was no guarantee of
happiness or successful childrearing. Most pointed to the frequency of divorce, which I will
discuss below, but several also pointed out that “intact” marriages also didn’t guarantee success.
Tina was initially resistant to single motherhood due to her parents acrimonious divorce, but her
experience as a nanny brought her around: “I think being a nanny and being a part of other
people's families and seeing the inner workings of a marriage, I started to realize that no
marriage is perfect even with couples that are intact and it didn't make for happier children to
have their parents together.” Similarly Rebecca pointed out, “How many people are married with
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kids that took the normal path and aren't happy? Marriage isn't the key to happiness. I'm not anti-
marriage and I hope to get married someday, but that is not the key to happiness.” Many of the
SMBC felt that a primary source of marital conflict had to do with the continued inequitable
division of domestic labor. While they did see the benefits of a second income and a second pair
of hands, they also pointed to the experiences of their married friends to argue that fathers don’t
necessarily provide much help and that these unmet expectations could lead to anger, resentment,
and conflict. Many of the SMBC shared Alma’s impression:
I've got lots and lots of friends that have a partner and they've got children together. I
hear them complain about 75% of the time about how their partner does nothing. They've
got all of the responsibilities and they complain, ‘I am at work all day.’ … Their partner
comes home and doesn't want to be engaged in doing anything. … [Whereas,] I can't be
upset at anyone but myself if things go in a way that I hadn't planned.
Having elected single motherhood, they argued that they had saved themselves from the
frustrations of unhelpful partners and protected their children from parental conflict.
Additionally, several of the SMBC made an argument that no partner was better than a
bad partner. While the ideal partner would be helpful and supportive, many of the SMBC had
seen friends marry men who required care rather than providing it, who were sources of conflict
and instability, and who were drains on mother’s emotional and financial resources. Many of the
SMBC had been criticized for being “too picky” and unwilling to “settle” for less than ideal
partners. Victoria told me, “My mom's like, ‘Your standards are too high.’ It's like, ‘Well I don't
want some jerk.’ I do not want any negative complications in my life, so if somebody is a pain in
my ass, I don't want them around.” Beth pointed out that not having a husband was “a shitload
better than having the wrong person” because, as Tina put it, “If it's not with the right person
then it can sour the whole experience.” Many of the SMBC contrasted their decisions to pursue
single motherhood with the decisions that other women made to settle for less than ideal
partners. They argued that this approach allowed them to focus their resources—temporal,
financial, and emotional—fully on their children and resulted in a household free of harmful
conflict. They also argued that this approach protected them and their children from divorce.
Appealing to divorce. In addition to distinguishing themselves from women in unhappy
or high conflict marriages, the SMBCs also argued that their form of single motherhood was
superior to divorced single motherhood. They made the case that it was better for their children’s
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emotional wellbeing that they were not exposed to the disruption of joint custody, the negativity
of parental conflict, or the feeling of abandonment should a divorced father fail to show up or
become invested in a “new” family. The SMBC frequently pointed out that many women ended
up single mothers, even when they started out married. As Alma explained, their awareness of
high divorce rates contributed to their serious consideration of single-motherhood-by-choice:
To be honest, there really is no guarantee when two individuals have a child together that
that relationship is going to be a healthy nuclear family. There's no guarantee and we
know that the half of marriages end in divorce. It's kind of a gamble that I was willing to
take just to do it on my own because the likelihood is there's a high chance I would have
done it [alone] anyway [because of divorce].
All of the SMBC knew at least one divorced parent and many of them had met many more
divorced parents through single parenting meet ups. They presented the absence of conflict and
shared custody as the primary benefits of single-motherhood-by-choice. As Sheila explained, “I
know some people who [settled] and then got divorced and then now they have to share custody
with this person that they don’t like. I'm glad I don’t have to do that.” Joanne echoed this,
describing all of the anger toward ex-spouses she had observed at single parent meet ups,
pointing out, “I don't have to deal with any of that … I don't have to share my kids every other
weekend … There is no conflict in my house … there is only love in my house.” They were very
clear that this was beneficial to their children as well. Pamela explained:
Divorce is so prevalent, and at [my daughter’s] elementary school, I see there's a lot of
divorced parents, and I see the kids. One week, they're with the mom, and one week,
they're with the dad. They're really having a lot of emotional problems, and it's really
tough on them. I wanted to have a peaceful family. … Doctors, other parents, teachers,
they're always telling me that Matilda is really well-adjusted.
By drawing distinctions between the emotional toll that divorce takes on children and her own
“well-adjusted” and “peaceful” family, Pamela argues for the superiority of single-motherhood-
by-choice to divorced motherhood. With divorce increasingly common, the stigma of divorced
families has decreased, making this one of the least stigmatized forms of single motherhood,
arguably second only to widowed single mothers in the popular imagination. Thus, by setting
single-motherhood-by-choice up as superior to divorced single motherhood, these women are
claiming a very privileged position in the hierarchy of single motherhood and distancing
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themselves from many of the characteristics of single motherhood—financial vulnerability,
parental conflict, and feelings of abandonment—that are most closely linked with poor childhood
outcomes for children of single mothers. This strategy of “drawing distinctions” allows these
affluent single-mothers-by-choice to distance themselves from raced and classed stereotypes of
highly stigmatized single mothers and to disavow and displace the stigma of single motherhood,
managing their own stigma by projecting stigma onto the family forms of other more
marginalized women.
Appealing to family diversity. In addition to practical stigma management through
information control and self-advocacy and rhetorical stigma management through the drawing of
distinctions between themselves and other single mothers (and some married parents), the SMBC
also make frequent appeals to increasing family diversity—embodied in the growing visibility of
same-sex headed households—as a means of normalizing and validating their family forms and
rejecting heteronormative and gender essentialist stigmatization. As Danielle puts it, “We're just
a modern family and that's it. Some people have two mommies. Some people have two daddies.
You know, this is just our shape.” Like Danielle, many of the SMBC refer to same-sex families
when explaining their own family form to their children and many sought out schools or other
social environments were a variety of family forms are represented. For example, Beth
approaches these discussions by referring to diversity among her daughter’s friends’ families:
“I've talked about it with her a lot, that there are lots of different kinds of families. We have a
mommy/kid family. Sean and James have a mommy/mommy/kid/kid family, you know. Bailey
has two mommies, Parker has two dads.... I'll say, ‘We don't have a dad in our family. We have a
mommy/kid family.’” Similarly, Pamela relies on the diversity of families at her daughter’s
school to address family structure: “She understands that a lot of families don't have dads, and
she understands that some families have two dads, because in preschool, she had a girlfriend, her
age, that had two dads, and that some families have two moms, and that our family doesn't have
a dad.” By drawing these parallels to same-sex families, SMBCs capitalize on the rejection of
gender essentialist and heteronormative scripts these families represent while positioning
themselves on the right side of history, as it were, in line with the progressive move toward
increasing family diversity. These appeals to same-sex families include implicit arguments: If
lesbian couples don’t need a dad, then neither do we. If it is no longer acceptable to discriminate
against same-sex families, then it is equally unacceptable to discriminate against single-mother-
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by-choice families. Notably, despite occupying the opposite end of the maternal spectrum, the
voluntarily childfree made similar appeals to family diversity to validate their own fertility
decision-making and family forms.

Resisting Traditional Scripts and Mobilizing Alternative Ethics of Care as a Voluntarily
Childfree Woman
En/Countering Stigma
Given the close cultural linkages between motherhood and femininity, the voluntarily
childfree women’s identities are the most discreditable in the study. The VCF encountered many
forms of stigma and social judgment in their everyday lives: they were subject to invasive
questions about their fertility, relationships, and maternal desires; they often felt isolated or
abnormal within the broader pronatalist culture; some people refused to recognize their families
(usually comprised of themselves, their spouses, and their pets) as families; they faced an endless
condescending refrain of “you’ll change your mind;” and they were frequently accused of being
selfish, heartless, or child-hating. While the EF can reclaim some degree of normative femininity
through the discursive mobilization of their frozen eggs and the SMBC can deflect much of the
stigma of single motherhood by drawing distinctions between themselves and other types of
single mothers, voluntary childlessness places the VCF irreparably outside of normative
femininity. Consequently, the VCF engaged in fewer “reparative” modes of stigma management.
Instead of accepting dominant gender and family norms and making an argument for their
inclusion, they primarily engaged in resistant stigma management including countering negative
stereotypes, rejecting traditional scripts and norms, and mobilizing alternative ethics of care.
These forms of stigma management generally focused on repairing their moral or ethical
standing and self-concept, rather than their femininity.
Because questions about marriage and children are both common and socially acceptable,
the VCF were frequently put on the spot with regard to their fertility status when interacting with
strangers or new acquaintances. Drawing parallels to the invasive questions that same-sex
couples are often asked, Leigh explained, “It's probably second or third question into a lot of
meeting someone for a new time [ask] … people introduce themselves and they immediately
start asking about your child. You know, ‘do you have children?’” A simple “no I don’t have
kids” rarely settles the matter. Most of the VCF shared Alexi’s experience, “You know when you
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are like, ‘oh you don't have kids,’ like, ‘no’ and then [they are] like, ‘oh why?’ … I wouldn't
want to rehash it all the time and people are like really rude. They ask a lot of personal questions
and you are like I don't want to talk to you about this decision. It is kind of interesting how
people don't have boundaries about that.” Consequently decisions about how to identity with
regard to childfree status are a first line of information management. Some of the VCF choose to
get disclosure out of the way up front. Sue explained, “I think that's why, my husband's always
asking, ‘Why do you use these funky terms?’ I'm like, ‘because I think it’s easier to tell people
so they don't really have to ask.’ If I just say, ‘child free be choice.’ It kind of tells you.” Notably
Sue’s husband does not have to give the same consideration to identification around parenthood.
As a man he is called to account for his fertility status and parental motivations much less
frequently.
Most of the VCF identified as either “childfree” or “childfree by choice” and many of the
VCF explicitly rejected a “childless” label. For some it felt dishonest or inaccurate, as Frances,
who identified as childfree, explained, “Childless connotates [sic] somebody who wanted to have
kids but couldn't, to me. I never wanted to have children.” Others resented the negative
implications of the term, as Joy, who identified as childfree by choice, made clear: “I don’t like
the word ‘childless’, that was one that like, ‘Oh, you’re child-less.’ I’m like, ‘No, we’re child-
more, but I chose not to have them.’ It’s not something that I feel less because I don’t have it.”
By affirming the elective nature of their child-free-ness and rejecting a “less than” status in
relation to mothers, many of these women actively rejected the privileging of maternal
femininity through their self-identification. However, several of the participants worried about
seeming “too militant” if they identified as childfree. While she was anti-categorical and resistant
to labels in general, Leigh admitted:
I tend to use “childless by choice” only because I'm not so worried about the whole
stigma of being childless. But I'm comfortable with the word childfree. I tend to be
someone who more worries about other people's reactions because I manage my own
fine. Childfree can sounds a little militant to other people or judgey, so I tend not to use it
because I'm not trying to shove my values in their face either even though I'm in a
pronatalistic [sic] society.
Leigh felt that natalist values were often “shoved in her face” leading her to worry that
identifying as “childfree” might garner negative reactions. She also took care to consider the
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feelings of others, including those who might be struggling with infertility. However, this
consideration was rarely returned, as Naima points out. Like Leigh, Naima was concerned about
how identifying as childfree might be perceived by others and how it might adversely affect her,
particularly at work:
I don't tend to say childless or childfree. I just say, no children. I don't say childfree
because it's negative. It makes it something like, there's something to be free of. Childless
makes it sound like you tried and it didn't work, kind of a medical situation. I never found
a term other than “I don't have children.” I could write a book about the things people say
to women who are, who don't have children, right? If it's a workplace or anywhere if I run
around saying childfree, that would be such an antagonistic way to say it and I, if you're
[trails off]. I can't afford that. … Anything that looks like it's passing judgment on being a
mother is unacceptable whereas it is completely acceptable for it to go the other way. It's
completely acceptable for people to make judgments about not having children.
Naima was not alone in opting to say, “I don’t have kids” and resolutely leaving it at that. Britta
and Dana also took this approach explaining both that, like Leigh, they don’t like labels and also
that they don’t see fertility status as a relevant aspect of their identity. While Leigh and Naima
were actively attempting to manage stigma by distancing themselves from any perceived
judgment of parents, Dana and Britta simply refused to be defined by their fertility status.
Accusations of being selfish or child-hating were among the most frequent leveled
against the childfree. Many of the VCF identified theses stigmas as the primary disadvantage of
being childfree. As Joy explained that the hardest parts of being childfree are the “isolation and
then assumptions that are made about whatever, ‘Oh, you're cold hearted or you're selfish or you
have no feelings or you hate kids,’ all of the assumptions that people make about what childfree
people are.” While roughly half of the VCF admitted to me—a sympathetic non-parent—that
they didn’t like children, many actively countered the stereotype that childfree people hate kids.
Joy, for example, explained, “One of the things that bothers me is people are like, ‘You must
hate kids.’ No, that’s not it at all.” Similarly, Alexi explained that she dislikes discussing her
childfree-ness because “it is just so uncomfortable because people assume you hate kids. I'm like
I don't hate kids. They are adorable, I love them. It's just a weird conversation.” Given the
centrality of a nurturing love of children to idealized forms of femininity, being perceived to
dislike children puts childfree women squarely outside of normative femininity. While some
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mobilized their love of children, their close relationships with the children of friends and
relatives, and their nurturing tendencies to counter this stigma, others made appeals to feminism
and gender politics to argue that maternal roles are limiting to women. While doing so did not
ease the stigma of being non-normative for this later group, it did allow them to repair their own
ethical self-concept.
Accusations of selfishness tended to cut deeper and were often the subject of more active
contestation. Many of the VCF countered these accusations by arguing that parenthood is often
(or even exclusively) a selfish endeavor. Frances had given the matter a lot of thought:
I have tried with all my might to identify an altruistic reason to have a child, and I cannot
come up with one. They all seem selfish to me. I don't think there's anything wrong with
it, but when it comes down to it, they want someone who is part of their DNA. … In the
same way that people who have kids look at childfree people as being selfish, and self-
absorbed, I actually think the same thing about them often. That there is no such thing as
an altruistic reason to have a child. Not that there's anything wrong with that. You don't
need an altruistic reason to have a kid, but don't go around saying that other people are
selfish for not doing it.
Other participants countered that they didn’t have children specifically because they felt it would
be selfish of them to do so. Chelsea, who struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder and
anxiety, explained that she felt that it would be selfish of her to have children who would likely
suffer the same mental illnesses and to whom she could not always be an adequate mother. On a
different front, Naima—who saw her work in the aerospace industry as directed toward
safeguarding the future of humanity and who spent her vacation time pursuing philanthropic and
humanitarian causes in developing nations—felt that focusing on her work rather than her family
was the very antithesis of selfishness. She told me:
I'm not sure that my colleagues and my friends know that when they tell me that
everything changed the minute they became a mother—and I'm not talking about how
much time you have, and whether you can go to the movies, I'm not talking about leisure
time—I'm talking about how priorities and perspectives [change]. When I'm told that all
of that changed, I don't want it to. It's not because I want to be selfish, it's because I don't
want to be selfish. The definition of selfish seems to be staying focused on myself, but
I'm not focused on myself, I'm focused on the human race.
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Like Naima, many of the VCF explained how not having children allowed them to focus on
providing care or assistance to people already in the world, or to focus on the humanity, in
general, rather than on the needs of their own children.
Mobilizing Alternative Ethics of Care
Rather than being uncaring, most of the VCF saw engaging in nurturing, helping, or
giving back as central parts of their lives. In describing this work, the VCF frequently mobilized
an alternative ethics of care focused on caring for those who are already in the world and not
creating new people—who may suffer and will certainly consume limited resources—simply to
provide parents with love, fulfillment, or a sense of genetic continuity. They expressed this
alternative ethics of care through a strong preference for fostering or adoption as an ethical route
to parenthood, doing volunteer work with disadvantaged populations, and engaging in helping
professions. They saw all of this work as a better use of their time, abilities, and resources than
creating another “spoiled American child” as a “mini-me” or “immortality project.”
Although they reject normatively maternal modes of caring rooted in biogenetic
reproduction, most of the VCF mobilize an ethical perspective rooted in feminist ethics of care,
which are frequently tied to feminist theories of “mothering” (as a potentially gender neutral
activity) and feminist psychoanalytical theories of gender identity development and the
perpetuation of gender inequality that look to mother-child relationships and triadic relationship
between mother, father, and daughter (Gilligan 1982; Held 2006; Ruddick 1995; Tronto 1993).
The ethics of care that emerges from my conversations with the VCF center the importance of
attending to the needs of others, taking responsibility for providing care to the marginalized and
the vulnerable, and working to alter systems of inequality or, at least, compensate for their
effects. These ethical commitments mirror many of the central tenets of feminist ethics of care,
particularly as laid out by Joan Tronto (1993). Although VCF ethics of care operate at the level
of practice or praxis, rather than pure theory, as I will demonstrate below, the VCF commitment
to an ethics of care based on redistribution of resources rather than resource consolidation and
transmission through the mother-child relationship reflect Tronto’s (1993) contention that “how
we think about care is deeply implicated in existing structures of power and inequality. As we
currently formulate it, care functions ideologically to maintain privilege, but this function is
disguised” (21). In their critiques of the “selfishness” of parenthood and their rejection
biogenetic motherhood in favor of teaching, mentoring, advocating, engaging in helping
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professions and philanthropy, and envisioning pursuing motherhood through fostering or
adoption, should they ever pursue it, these voluntarily childfree women espouse an ethics of care
through which they seek to resist structures of power and inequality.
Preference for fostering and adoption. This alternative ethics of care is most evident in
the VCF orientation toward fostering and adoption. While none of the VCF had any intention of
conceiving their own biological children, several remained open to the possibility of fostering
children later in life. A few were considering taking in nieces or nephews to help young relatives
in difficult situations, provide respite to overwhelmed siblings, or, as in Naomi’s case, to give
these young relatives a broader experience and access to California residency and the preferred
admission to the University of California and California State University systems that it confers.
Additionally. Joy, Dana, Alexi, Robin, Chelsea, and Naima all expressed openness to fostering
or adopting older children. Robin demonstrated this alternative ethics of care focused on helping
those who are already here when she explained, “I wouldn't mind adopting a teenager. … I like
the idea of helping people who need help. That's my jam … at one point, I was having this dream
that I would adopt 17-year-olds that have really good grades. Then send them to [my Ivy League
alma mater] on legacy” (emphasis added). Drawing a link, as many of the VCF did, between
their engagement in taking in rescue or shelter pets and openness to fostering children, Alexi
described an imagined future:
I am really sure I don't want my own [kids], but like I have this dream that when I get
older and maybe I have money, to have rescue dogs and foster kids. … I think [my
husband and I] both were really open to the fostering and adoption route. … Neither of us
were like “I have to have my bloodline going.” … I think that takes the pressure off, you
know like in your 20s and 30s, because you are like, “Oh it is always an option.”
Like Alexi, most of these women saw the option of fostering or adopting not only as a more
ethical approach to parenthood, but also as a counter to external narratives of “you’ll change
your mind” and to their own anxieties about future regret. As Joy explained, “I always just said,
‘If I do change my mind, there are so many kids … out there that need homes that people aren’t
willing to take on because of psychological histories or come from a really nasty background.’
… It’s never like you’re completely out. I don’t think I need to birth a child to be a parent.”
Redefining care and nurturance in non-biological terms is central to the expansive ethics of care
espoused by the VCF.
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The preference for adoption or fostering was also tied up with environmental and
population based rationales for childlessness. While most of the VCF in my study did not
strongly identify with environmentalist arguments for being conscientiously childfree, they did
make appeals to over-population as a justification for not having children or admit to making
strategic appeals to over-population as a means of deflecting pronatalist pressure. Environmental
and population concerns did enter into their belief that foster/adoption is the most ethical
approach to parenthood and shaped their expectations about how they would pursue adoption. As
Robin explained,
Like environmentally, one American child is worth 40 in the Sudan for carbon footprint
wise. Today, I would not go to China to adopt somebody, I wouldn't go to the Sudan to
adopt somebody, I would adopt an American because they were probably already going
to have that carbon footprint, anyway. So I'm not adding anything, I'm just taking care of
what we already have. … People are like, “Let's care about our kids, let's focus on the
future of our kids.” What about the people here that are alive right now who are lost or
just need some help? (emphasis added)
This focus on caring for “what we already have” is at the heart of the VCF’s expansive ethics of
care. Chelsea summed this stance up best when she said, “I always say I don't want my own
child because I take care of people who already exist.” In addition to informing their preference
for fostering and adoption, the VCF also enacted this expansive ethics through their paid and
unpaid labor.
Giving back, volunteering, and helping professions. There is an underlying
redistributive philosophy to this expansive ethics of care. As Chelsea explained, “Someone is a
good person, in my eyes, if they contribute more than they take from people that they meet, from
society as a whole. You have to be able to bring something to the table … and not take too much
for yourself, not take more than you need just because you can.” Consequently, “giving back”
was a central value for many of the VCF. Many of the VCF argued that, because they didn’t have
children, they could give their time and resources to helping more disadvantaged groups. Naima
made frequent trips to underdeveloped nations to do humanitarian work and promote education,
particularly for girls. She had also worked at a suicide prevention centre while Robin had worked
at a rape crisis center. Joy did community volunteering and participated in dog rescue. Several,
including Robin and Alexi, were involved in non-profit work. As Robin explained, “I'm involved
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with non-profits, I'm on [a city advisory board], so I'm trying to make life better for a lot of
people, not just me.” For many of the VCF, volunteer work was an important part of their lives,
it provided a fulfilling outlet for their nurturing impulses and it operated as an expression of their
ethics of care. While they did report mobilize their volunteer labor to defend or account for their
childlessness, this strategy seemed to do less to mitigate external pronatalist stigmas and more to
repair their own internal ethical self-concept.
In addition to their feeling that volunteer labor was rarely accepted as a full accounting
for childlessness, some of the VCF felt resentful that the childfree were expected to perform
volunteer labor, as though this labor only made up for some of the deficit of not having children.
Now that she was over 50, Naima had an increasing number of interactions with empty nesters
who demanded that she account for her time. “They somehow felt like I needed to have a very
strong volunteer resume … or philanthropic resume because I hadn't been [raising kids]. It was
very much a sense of, you need to show what you've been doing with yourself and with kids. ... I
tend to say, look, I've been working. I work 80 hours a week for the future of humanity.” Like
Naima, many of the VCF saw their paid labor as a central component of their ethics of care.
Roughly half worked in a traditional helping profession, primarily psychology and education, as
well as non-profits. Additionally, others—like Naima who worked in the aerospace industry and
Frances who worked freelance as a writing coach—saw their work as a form of helping or giving
back, even though they weren’t conventional helping professions. Leigh who, like Joy, applied
her psychology degree to helping students with learning disabilities, explained:
I'm overseeing a learning resource center … my background in learning disabilities is
helping student learning but then I have this opportunity to work at a more macro level
with a larger amount of students. Instead of my population of 200, I have 3,000 that we
serve. … For me, I know I nurture in a lot of areas in my life, even if I'm not a parent,
and for me what I do, I do more professional development. I've helped a lot of younger
folks excel in their careers, and complete their degrees, and get jobs, and that's a thing
that I enjoy doing. It's like my little niche of mentoring, or nurturing. (emphasis added)
Instead of rejecting nurturing, the VCF choose to nurture through an expansive ethics of care.
Rather than focusing narrowly on their own children, hoarding their time and resources to
reproduce privilege within their own families, the VCF saw not having children as a choice that
enabled them to care for a much larger number of people, distribute their resources in a more
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equitable fashion, and keep a broad focus that encompassed thousands of students, millions of
under-resourced girls in developing nations, or the whole of humanity. Living up to this
alternative ethics of care was central to internal stigma management for the VCF, allowing them
to repair their own self-concept in the face of spoiled identities. However, other people rarely
accepted this alternative ethics of care as an adequate accounting for their “failure” to enact
normatively maternal femininity. Rather than attempting to repair their spoiled femininity, the
VCF generally engaged in resistant external stigma management, rejecting traditional scripts and
norms and countering prescriptive gender roles with appeals to feminism, increasing family
diversity, and their own biological difference.
Resisting Traditional Scripts and Norms
The VCF could not help but be aware that their lives deviated from traditional life course
scripts and gender norms. Generally highly educated with some exposure to feminist philosophy
and politics, they readily identified American culture as pronatalist and motherhood as intimately
linked to normative femininity. Many of the VCF identified as non-conformists or as “go against
the grain people,” as Joy put it. They recognized that they were not willing to make the
concessions that would have allowed them to reclaim normative femininity; instead they made
biological and political appeals to the injustice of normative femininity and of social
expectations that all people to conform to a singular family structure. Their first line of defense
against the expectation that all women should and do want children was the appeal to biology,
which I discuss extensively in Chapter 2. As Park (2002) and Peterson and Engwall (2013) found
in their research with the voluntarily childfree, the VCF in my study consistently explained their
decisions to remain childfree in terms of an absence of the natural drive to have children. They
believed that most women experienced a natural biological drive to procreate, but that they
themselves did not have the “urge” or “desire” that drove other women to have children. They
often attributed this to some sort of genetic predisposition, with Robin drawing an explicit
parallel to biological explanations of sexuality: “You might be born gay, you might be born
never wanting kids. It's just something that happens, it's just part of the panoply of being a
human. I ended up being that way.” As Robin’s remarks demonstrate, this biological appeal bled
over into their political appeals to increasing family diversity.
Like the SMBC, the VCF often implicitly and occasionally explicitly advanced the
argument that increasing diversity of family forms is a sign of social and political progress and,
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if we can accept the expansion of gender and family norms to include same-sex families and
single parent families, then they should also include childless families. Despite being
predominantly heterosexually married, many of the VCF expressed pleasure and approval at
growing family diversity. As Sue put it, “There are so many varieties now of what's a family. …
I just think it's great that we're not all the same … that it's not, a man and a woman and a family.
I think it's nice to have variety. I think variety just makes you more open minded in accepting
things.” While some of the VCF accepted the language of a “break down” of “traditional family
values”—though they used this language to argue for the benefits of breaking down these
traditional mores—others rejected this language all together. Leigh argued, “I don't think there is
this … breaking down of families. I think the ‘50s was rife with problems, and those were not
necessarily happy marriages, happy childhoods, and women with rights. I don't hold that
anywhere close to an ideal … I don't believe in traditional family, I believe there's many ways to
create families.” As Leigh’s comments demonstrate the appeal to family diversity can bleed over
to an appeal to feminist gender politics.
Many of the VCF expressed frustration with the attitude that motherhood is a woman’s
primary purpose in life and that a woman who does not achieve marriage and motherhood is both
incomplete and fundamentally unfulfilled. Brenda saw this as part of traditional heternormative
life scripts: “There's this design for life that you are going to finish school and then you're going
to get married and have a hetero-normal [sic] relationship and then you're going to buy a house
and then you're going to have a baby. Even when I was in high school, the thought of that, oh my
god [expression of horror].” She went on to explain how the stigma of childlessness was
intensely gendered and to argue that not having children had allowed her to pursue a fulfilling
life, rather than denying her one:
If I were a man, nobody would give two shits about me not having children. Nobody
would care. Nobody would ask if there's something wrong with me. … They care
because I'm a woman and so we see a woman's role as being a mother and being a wife
but I see myself as a full human in my own right and that I have lots of other things to do
in the world. I feel like because I don't have children, the life that I have led is possible.
In addition to recognizing that the stigma of childlessness fell disproportionately upon them, as
women, the VCF made many direct appeals to feminism when defending their rejection of
traditional scripts and gender norms and also in identifying the ways in which motherhood
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limited women. They drew particular attention to the inequitable division of parenting and
domestic labor along gendered lines and the disproportionately negative impact that motherhood
has on women’s careers. Many saw their choice to remain childfree as a direct outgrowth of
feminist social progress. Dana argued, “The feminist movement has given us our own lives. We
can do everything we want to with them, which is fantastic. The women in the ‘50s, they had
horrible lives.” Kristina tied these cultural shifts directly to the emergence of childfree women,
“The whole childless or childfree movement, I just feel like it's evidence of women's revolution
and women finally realizing that they have a choice.” In addition to exercising this choice for
themselves, many of the VCF felt a responsibility to educate young women about reproductive
autonomy. While they were careful not to “push” their lifestyle on young women, they did feel it
was important to be open about their choices and to encourage young women to consider all of
their options. Bonnie, who works in higher education, sometimes incorporates discussion of
family diversity and reproductive autonomy into her lectures:
I feel that not enough girls and young women are educated about the choices that they
have as people, that you should not be defined by your reproductive system and like I
said, just because you have it doesn’t mean you should use it and that having a child
shouldn’t define you. You should define yourself first. Having a child or not having a
child is a choice nowadays.
While they recognized that the voluntarily childfree were likely to remain a small minority—
which they largely attributed to biological reproductive imperatives—the VCF felt that
increasing reproductive autonomy and control was a necessary part of continuing progress
toward gender equality. While they always grounded their decision not to have children in a
biologically-based lack of desire, living their feminist gender politics was also of central
importance for most of the VCF. Rather than trying to reclaim normative femininity or repair
their non-normative femininity, the VCF rejected traditional life scripts and gender norms and
actively resisted and contested social pressures to conform to them. While this approach
generally did little to mitigate the external stigma they experienced, it was crucial to their efforts
to repair their own self-concept, which is central to internal stigma management processes.

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Chapter Conclusion
In this chapter, I have demonstrated the stigma management strategies of women with
electively frozen eggs, single-mothers-by-choice, and the voluntarily childfree. All three groups
violate dominant norms of gender and family. Deviating as they do from the pursuit of
reproduction within heterosexual marriage, they are subject to the stigmas of childlessness or
single motherhood and their femininity is rendered suspect. While the EF can make the case that
they are only postponing—but still “properly” oriented to—motherhood and the SMBC can
make an appeal to the pursuit of motherhood—albeit by non-normative means—to perform
normatively maternal femininity and repair their spoiled gender identities, the VCF can make no
such appeals but must contest the validity of dominant gender roles and life scripts instead. This
highlights a key difference in the stigma management strategies of the EF, SMBC, and VCF.
While the EF and SMBC often engage in “reproductive agency”—affirming the
legitimacy of (some) dominant gender and family norms while making a case for their inclusion
within them—the VCF must more often engage in “resistant agency”—challenging the
legitimacy of these dominant norms. When the EF draw on their frozen eggs as evidence of their
normatively maternal femininity, they reproduce the centrality of motherhood to womanhood.
When the SMBC affirm their preference for marital reproduction and draw distinctions between
themselves and more stigmatized single mothers, they reproduce dominant hierarchies of
motherhood, privileging heterosexually married motherhood while trading on the
marginalization of other forms of single motherhood, particularly the raced and classed figure of
the “welfare mother.”
However, these divisions are not absolute. In making the appeal to biology, the VCF
reproduce dominant notions that (most) women experience a natural maternal instinct. And,
despite their efforts to normalize their fertility trajectories, the EF and SMBC share with the VCF
the experience of having lived lives as fully shaped by feminist notions that motherhood should
not define women and that women should be free to pursue fulfillment and self-actualization
through education and careers. Further, in making appeals to family diversity and same-sex
families, the SMBC and the VCF subtly acknowledge that their family formation strategies are a
bit queer, placing them outside of the strictures of heteronormative femininity. Ultimately, the
stigma management strategies of these three groups demonstrate the persistence of social norms
that women should prioritize the pursuit of married motherhood above all else. While they may
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(or may not) attach ideological rationales to them, the fertility trajectories of the EF, SMBC, and
VCF are all fundamentally personal and each represents an uneasy compromise between
prevailing gender and family norms, the realities of contemporary work and romance, and the
uneven progress of the gender revolution.

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CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS

Despite increasing rates of non-marital childbearing, delayed childbearing, and lifelong
childlessness, the majority of American professional-class women will achieve married
motherhood—which is held up as the ideal middle-class family form—by the end of their 30s
(Monte and Ellis 2014). In fact, between 1994 and 2014, rates of childlessness among college-
educated women aged 40 to 44 have declined from 24% to 19% for women with Bachelors
degrees, from 29% to 22% for women with Masters degrees, and from 35% to 20% for women
with Doctorates (Pew Research Center 2015). This study is, in many ways, the story of what
happens to professional-class women when they either miss out on or opt out of normatively
timed first pass family formation. The experiences of these elective egg freezers, single-mothers-
by-choice, and voluntarily childfree women shed light on major demographic trends—including
increasing rates of single motherhood, rising age at first birth, and substantial (though recently
declining) rates of lifelong childlessness—at an individual level. Their stories expose the
contemporary state of play of the moral order of motherhood and the professional-class
American family. The challenges these women face reveal the strains that result from uneven
gender progress and the stalled gender revolution while the fertility trajectories they pursue and
their strategies for defending their decisions and family forms reveal the potential that creative
combinations of resistant agency, reproductive agency, and medical technologies hold to open up
new trajectories for women who reject or are shut out of marital fertility.
While their peers marry and have children in their late 20s through their 30s, most of the
women in this study decide to put off or forgo having children for a variety of reasons. Maternal
orientation—particularly holding an indifferent, ambivalent, or childfree orientation to
motherhood—motivates the fertility trajectories of many of the women in this study. For those
women who were positively oriented toward motherhood, relationships instability and
dissolution played a major role in both their postponement of childbearing and their eventual
decisions to freeze eggs and/or pursue single-motherhood-by-choice. Despite the prevalence of
the work-family conflict narrative in much of the popular discussion of egg freezing, delayed
childbearing, and childlessness, careers played a relatively muted role in the stories of the egg
freezers, single-mothers-by-choice, and the voluntarily childfree. Many of the VCF believed that
being able to commit themselves more fully to their careers was one of the benefits of being
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childfree, but they were clear that it was not the primary or even secondary reason that they had
elected not to have children. Some of the EF and the SMBC did describe putting family
formation on the backburner while they pursued careers and a few others felt that characteristics
of their work—including extensive business travel or demanding work schedules—had played a
role in their unsuccessful romantic lives, but most had been actively pursuing the kind of
committed romantic relationship that could lead to marital childbearing throughout their 20s and
30s and they attributed their postponed childbearing to the challenges and set backs they
encountered on the dating market much more than any challenge presented by their careers. The
romantic life histories of the EF and SMBC illustrate the challenges of dating in a post-Women’s
Liberation cultural context marked by later ages of marriage, higher rates of divorce, the rise of
dual-earner households among the middle class, and discrepancies between men and women’s
desires and expectations about egalitarianism and the division of labor within their relationships
(Gerson 2010).
While gender norms and family formation scripts are increasingly inclusive and flexible,
particularly for highly educated professional-class women, the many experiences that women in
this study had with being called to account for the fertility trajectories, the degree to which they
were marked out as non-normative, and the refusal of social alters to recognize the validity or
legitimacy of single-mother-by-choice and voluntarily childfree families demonstrates that
cultural norms of maternal femininity and marital childbearing are still prevalent, still carry
social weight, and still require stigma management, even among affluent, White, college-
educated, professional-class women living in a progressive cosmopolitan city. All three groups
blend reproductive and resistant agency to manage stigma, repair their own self-concept, and
make claims to inclusion and legitimacy (Dworkin and Messner 1999). Ultimately, the stigma
these women experience demonstrates the persistence of social norms that women should
prioritize the pursuit of married motherhood above all else while their fertility trajectories and
stigma management strategies represent uneasy compromises between prevailing gender and
family norms, the realities of contemporary work and romance, and the uneven progress of the
gender revolution.
Contributions to the Literature
The analytical and theoretical insights I gleaned from the stories of these elective egg
freezers, single-mothers-by-choice, and voluntarily childfree women contribute to a wide variety
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of literatures. Most obviously, I contribute to a greater understanding of these three relatively
under-researched groups. Egg freezing, in particular, is a relatively new technology and the story
of egg freezing as a social and medical technology is still unfolding. I also contribute to
literatures on fertility intentions and behavior, the social life of assisted reproductive
technologies (ARTs), stratified reproduction, the stigma of childlessness and single motherhood,
gender performance, feminist ethics of care, and the moral order of motherhood.
I add depth and nuance to research on fertility intentions by attending to the importance
of variability, contingency, uncertainty, and ambivalence in shaping fertility desires and
intentions. In developing a maternal orientation spectrum I reject naturalizing narratives of the
“reproductive drive” that divide women into the normatively maternal majority and the non-
maternal minority, showing that many women do experience complicated and unstable
orientations toward motherhood. Further, by attending to the roles that intensive mothering
ideologies, relationship instability and dissolution, family background, and occupational
contingency play in shaping maternal orientation, I denaturalize the maternal drive and illustrate
the cultural, interpersonal, and structural forces that shape fertility desires and intentions. In
exploring the roles that hope, optimism, pessimism, anxiety, fear, and traumatic catalysts play in
shaping these women’s fertility trajectories, I also illustrate the affective—rather than purely
rational—components of fertility behavior.
In addressing the non-reproductive uses of frozen eggs, I make a significant theoretical
contribution to the literature on the social life of ARTs. I demonstrate that taking a
technologically deterministic stance that presumes the reproductive function of ARTs and the
reproductive intentions of patients blinds researchers to the social and psychological functions of
these technologies. Continued expansion of this literature requires researchers to be theoretically
open to the possibility that patients may not always engage in ART to have babies. Additionally,
the emphasis that the EF and SMBC place on securing access to the biogenetic reproduction and
the experiences of the VCF in being refused access to the sterilization reveal biopolitical systems
of stratified reproduction, in which the fertility (and genetic continuity) of these affluent White
women is marked out for preservation and promotion.
I contribute to stigma literature by illustrating the stigma experiences and diverse stigma
management strategies of these three groups of women. All three of these groups violate gender
norms of maternal femininity and heterosexual marital childbearing. Consequently, I
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demonstrate that gender performance and stigma management are intertwined in responding to
calls to “account” for “non-normative” fertility behavior. The use of frozen eggs to preserve
sense of self and social position illustrates the role that medical technologies can play in identity
formation, gender performance, and stigma management. The SMBC strategies of disavowing
stigma, drawing distinctions, and displacing stigma onto more marginalized women
demonstrates how intersectional inequalities allow more privileged individuals to mitigate their
own stigmatization by trading on the stigmatization of more marginalized groups. The VCF
strategies highlight the importance of internal stigma management strategies and the salvaging of
moral self-concept for individuals occupying social positions generally held to be fully
discredited. While these women counter negative stereotypes and resist dominant gender and
family norms, their expansive ethics of care is primarily oriented toward protecting their own
self-concept as moral actors. In refusing to prioritize marital childbearing, all three of these
groups have the potential to resist traditional gender and family norms, contribute to the
continued expansion of family diversity, and promote alternatives to biogenetic reproduction.
However, this potential is not always realized. All three groups blend resistant and reproductive
agency in their fertility trajectories and stigma management strategies. These findings contribute
to the literature on the current state of play within the gender order and the moral order of
motherhood.

Denaturalizing Maternal Orientation
Popular wisdom holds that the maternal drive is an innate biological characteristic shared
by all—or at least most—women and research on fertility desires, intentions, and behaviors has
tended to reflect that. In much of the demographic literature maternal orientation is often treated
as a dichotomous variable—“wants children” or “does not want children”—that is stable across
the lifecourse. However, my research with women with electively frozen eggs, single-mothers-
by-choice, and voluntarily childfree women contributes to the emerging literature on the roles of
variability, contingency, and uncertainty in shaping fertility intentions and behaviors. I find that
most participants in all three groups share youthful expectations that their futures will include
marriage and motherhood, reflecting the pronatalist bent of dominant American cultural values.
As these women gain more experience with childcare, observe the childrearing practices and
challenges of others, become socialized into dominant ideologies of intensive mothering, and
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develop other modes of self-actualization—including education, careers, and other sources of
self-development and fulfillment—these youthful expectations of motherhood often give way to
periods of uncertainty about motherhood. Indifference towards motherhood—that is low salience
assigned to motherhood—transforms into childfree orientation among the VCF and can lead the
EF and SMBC to postpone fertility while they pursue other life goals. Similarly, ambivalence
towards motherhood—that is strong feelings both in favor or and in opposition to motherhood—
leads many of these women to postpone motherhood until they feel more certain about their
fertility desires. This pattern of behavior is particularly common among women with electively
frozen eggs.
Uncertainty is closely linked to the contingent nature of fertility desires and intentions.
As I have demonstrated, maternal orientation is not monolithic; rather, individual fertility desires
and intentions are generally contingent on a variety of factors. Instead of having a stable, core, a
priori orientation toward motherhood, participants imagine a variety of mothering scenarios and
they evaluate their fertility intentions based on the characteristics of each scenario. Taking a
social-ecological approach, we can see that individual fertility intentions and behaviors are
shaped by the interaction of individual, interpersonal, structural, and cultural factors. At the
individual level, fertility decision-making has strongly affective, rather than purely rational
components. Particularly for the EF and the SMBC emotional states shaped by hope, optimism,
pessimism, and trauma contribute to their decisions to postpone fertility and to take action by
freezing eggs or pursuing single motherhood. At the interpersonal level, relationship status,
instability, and dissolution play a major role in shaping fertility behavior, particularly for the EF
and SMBC, who have a strong preference for partnered parenthood leading them to postpone
fertility while they search for a romantic co-parent. Family of origin also shapes fertility
intentions. The SMBC often attribute their initial resistance to single motherhood to their family
of origin, whether they come from an “intact” family—which they hoped to emulate—or a
divorced or single-parent family—which they hoped to avoid. Several of the VCF attribute their
early emergence of childfree orientation to being the oldest girl in a large sibling set. Having
spent much of their adolescence providing care for their younger siblings, these women feel that
they have already done enough childcare for a lifetime, leading them to pursue childfree
lifestyles. At the cultural level, expectations about relationship instability, the division of
domestic labor within relationships, and childrearing ideologies all contribute to fertility
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intentions. The dominant childrearing ideology of intensive motherhood shapes the perception,
shared among all three groups of women, that motherhood is an overwhelming undertaking.
These women also generally shared a preference for egalitarian relationships and division of
domestic labor; however, many of them also expected that men would not share or would fail to
live up to these expectations and that the burdens of childrearing were likely fall
disproportionately on mothers. Additionally, awareness of high rates of divorce left all of these
women feeling that they might end up with sole or primary responsibility for childrearing, even
if they started out married. At the structural level, the lack of family-friendly policies at the state
of workplace level and the challenges of work-family reconciliation also contributed to
uncertainty about or resistance to motherhood. Generally speaking, ideal mothering scenarios
involved a committed co-parent, financial security, and sufficient occupational flexibility to
successfully combine work and intensive motherhood.
The EF and the SMBC are generally positively oriented toward motherhood under ideal
scenarios, but their fertility intentions under less ideal scenarios vary quite widely. The SMBC
are the most strongly oriented toward motherhood. They are willing to forgo the marital
requirements of their ideal scenarios, but most still set criteria on acceptable scenarios for single
parenting, including financial and residential security and occupational flexibility. Conversely,
the greater maternal ambivalence of the EF is linked to the stronger orientation to pursuing
motherhood only within relatively ideal scenarios, although some did eventually re-evaluate their
parenting scenarios to include single motherhood. While the VCF are strongly oriented toward
the childfree lifestyle, many of them can imagine scenarios in which they would parent. These
scenarios included parenting orphaned children of close friends or relatives, taking in adolescent
relatives for shorter periods of time to support relatives going through hard times, or fostering
later in life should they have the resources or experience emerging maternal orientation.
Contingency is linked to the highly variable nature of maternal orientation over the
lifecourse. Even strongly maternally oriented women had experienced periods of uncertainty,
with ambivalence being a particularly common experience. To address the variability and
contingency of maternal orientations, I have proposed a maternal orientation spectrum that
ranges from strong, stable lifelong maternal orientation to strong, stable lifelong childfree
orientation. This maternal orientation spectrum draws particular attention to the intermediary
positions of maternal uncertainty and denaturalizes the “maternal instinct.” In her ethnographic
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research on gay male parenthood in Los Angeles, Judith Stacey (2006) identified what she
termed a “passion for parenthood” continuum. She found that most men occupied an
intermediate zone, which left their fertility outcomes largely contingent on their intimate
relationships and the parental orientation of their partners. She argues that heterosexual
“situations” tend to lead straight men to paternity, while homosexual “situations” tend to lead a
majority of gay men to childlessness. While she draws on the fertility behavior of gay fathers to
indicate that “homosexual ‘situations’” need not always lead gay men into childlessness, she
leaves largely uncontested the maternal desires of heterosexual women. I expand upon her work
by demonstrating that many women also occupy intermediate positions in the maternal
orientation spectrum and that their fertility outcomes are similarly contingent on their intimate
relationships. Further, I would argue that transitioning to adulthood in a context in which affluent
women experience widespread access to effective birth control, rising ages of first marriage and
first birth, high levels of romantic relationship instability and dissolution, and strains between
expanding opportunities for (childless) women in the public sphere coupled with largely
unreformed expectations about female caregiving in families and workplaces now leads many
more straight women into situational childlessness.

The Moral Order of Motherhood
The contemporary state of play in the moral order of motherhood is most clearly on
display in participants’ experiences of stigma and their stigma management strategies. All of
these women describe experiences of having been called to account for their childlessness by
friends, family, coworkers, and even near strangers, like taxi drivers and new acquaintances.
They describe being told that children are a joy like no other and that nothing else in life can be
as fulfilling as parenthood. Childless women routinely find that their self-determination and self-
knowledge are frequently called into question by both a seemingly never-ending refrain of
“you’ll change your mind” and doctors’ refusal to accommodate their requests for sterilization.
When discussing their decisions to freeze eggs, pursue elective sole parenting, or remain
childfree by choice all of these women describe being met with baffled and even hostile
questions of “Why would you do that?” While gender norms and family formation scripts are
increasingly inclusive and flexible—particularly for highly educated professional-class women—
these experiences demonstrate that cultural norms of maternal femininity and marital
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childbearing are still prevalent and still carry social weight, even among privileged women living
in a progressive urban environment. The precise forms of stigma these women experience and
the stigma management strategies they pursue demonstrate that the moral order of motherhood
still privileges biogenetic kinship and the heterosexual nuclear family, while working
motherhood, older motherhood, non-maternal childbearing, and non-biogenetic methods of
family formation are still marginalized.
The EF and the VCF are called to account for the childlessness and their deviation from
normatively maternal femininity. As I have demonstrated, the EF mobilize their frozen eggs as a
resource for gender performance and stigma management. When called to account for their
childlessness, the EF often draw on their frozen eggs as a signal that they have “done their part”
in the service of reproduction and as evidence of their “properly” maternal femininity. They
appeal to the time and resources they dedicated to egg freezing to demonstrate their commitment
to securing their own access to motherhood, providing for their (future) husband’s reproduction,
and ensuring their (future) children’s wellbeing. While these accounts can mitigate some of the
stigma of childlessness that these women experience, they also reproduce hegemonic linkages
between femininity and motherhood and the disproportionate responsibility placed on women to
ensure both their own reproduction and the continuity of the male line. In addition to illustrating
the privileged position of biogenetic kinship and the marginalized position of older motherhood
in the moral order of motherhood, the use of frozen eggs as interactional resources for stigma
management and gender performance reveals that ARTs can be used in a “non-reproductive”
manner to protect childfree status, in addition to serving more traditionally reproductive ends. By
allowing these women to “keep their options open,” claim that they have “done their part,”
account for their childlessness without having to relinquish their childfree status, and
(potentially) side-step the opportunity costs of delayed childbearing I argue that egg freezing
preserves social position and sense of self as much as—if not more than—it preserves practical
access to biogenetic reproduction. This represents a substantial contribution to the literature on
the social life of ARTs, opening up new avenues of research that resist technological
determinism, asking researchers to consider what ARTs accomplish, in addition to or instead of a
live birth.
While the EF can draw on their frozen eggs to argue that they are only postponing
motherhood and offer normative accounts of their maternal orientation, the VCF cannot lay
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claim to normatively maternal femininity. Instead, they offer accounts of their childlessness that
naturalize their childfree orientation through appeals to “biological” or “genetic” difference.
While this appeal to biology can confer greater legitimacy to their childfree orientation and
mitigate the stigma they experience, it also reifies pronatalist cultural beliefs that most women
experience a natural and innate maternal drive. However, even this appeal to biology often
proves insufficient to dispel the stigma of voluntarily childlessness. Burdened with the weight of
a “spoiled” identity, the VCF engage in resistant external and internal stigma management. They
mobilize a non-maternal ethics of care to redefine biogenetic reproduction and the intensive
investment of resources in offspring as selfish and inequitable. They hold up fostering and
adoption as ethical routes to parenthood and commit themselves to a redistributive ethics of care
by directing their resources to larger numbers of people and marginalized populations through
helping professions, volunteering, and philanthropy. Although rarely accepted by social alters as
a legitimate account of their childlessness, this ethics of care helps the VCF repair their own self-
concept as moral actors in the face of their spoiled identities.
Unlike the EF and the VCF, the maternal femininities of SMBCs are not generally in
question, instead the SMBC are called to account for their deviation for heteronormative marital
family formation scripts. The distinctions that the SMBC draw between themselves and more
marginalized family forms provide a clear illustration of the moral order of motherhood. Despite
being engaged in elective sole parenting, all of these women hold up (happily) married
motherhood as the pinnacle of the moral order of motherhood. They appeal to their ability to
provide a low-conflict environment and their ability to focus their emotional (and financial)
resources entirely on their children to make a claim to superiority to divorced single mothers,
mothers in high-conflict marriages, and mothers in blended families, emphasizing the role that
stability and domestic felicity play in the moral order of motherhood. They appeal to the
intentionality of their pregnancies to claim superiority to “irresponsible” women who experience
“unplanned” pregnancies and to ambivalent or indifferent married couples who having children
simply because “it’s what you do.” By making an appeal to “choice” and responsibility, the
SMBC highlight the importance of conforming to these neoliberal values to achieving a
privileged position in the moral order of motherhood. Many of the SMBC opt to take time off or
work or arrange work-from-home or flexible work schedules. They argue that it’s a “shame”
when parents work so much that they don’t spend time with their children—claiming that this
Myers Dissertation 160
“misses the point” of parenthood—and they distinguish between themselves and the
“overworked single mother” who takes on multiple jobs just to make ends meet. However, the
SMBC also frequently appeal to their class privilege, homeownership, and financial security to
distinguish themselves from poor, homeless, or welfare-dependent mothers. In addition to
demonstrating that poverty and dependency define the very nadir of the moral order of
motherhood, these two appeals—to being neither “overworked” nor financially dependent—
highlights the complex position of working mothers within the moral order of motherhood.
While welfare-dependency marks the lowest point in the moral order of motherhood, affluent
women who choose to work rather than spend time at home with their children also find that the
morality of their motherhood is in question.
The subtle invocation of race in the moral order of motherhood—with the happily
married White heterosexual family at its peak and the Black “welfare queen” at its nadir—also
highlights the effect of stratified reproduction on the fertility trajectories of study participants.
The medical and financial burdens that the EF and the SMBC endure to ensure their access to
biogenetic reproduction and the widespread refusal of doctors to grant the VCF access to
sterilization are, in fact, two sides of the same biopolitical coin. The vast majority of study
participants are professional-class, affluent, highly educated White women whose fertility is
culturally and medically marked out for preservation and promotion. The refusal of sterilization
to these affluent White childfree women stands in stark contrast to the coercive and, all to often,
nonconsensual sterilization of poor women, particularly women of color, whose fertility is
culturally and medically marked out for prevention. When the SMBC draw distinctions between
themselves and more stigmatized single mothers, they reproduce hierarchies of maternal
worthiness that center heterosexually married motherhood and the fertility of privileged women
while trading on the marginalization of other forms of single motherhood, particularly the raced
and classed figure of the “welfare mother” and other poor women of color. Even as they seek to
revise the moral order of motherhood to make room for their inclusion—putatively just below
widowed single mothers and above divorced single mothers and mothers in high-conflict
marriages—they also reproduce many dominant cultural beliefs about maternal worthiness.

Myers Dissertation 161
Uneasy Compromises: Resistant and Reproductive Agency
All three groups of women enact complex combinations of resistant agency and
reproductive agency. In pursuing non-normative fertility trajectories, these women resist
dominant gender and family norms. However, in managing the stigma of these non-normative
fertility trajectories, they often reproduce and affirm dominant narratives to offer accounts of
their behavior that are legible to social alters. In focusing on preserving or reproducing with their
own eggs, the EF and SMBC reproduce the privileged position of biogenetic kinship. In
mobilizing their frozen eggs as a mode gender performance, the EF reproduce the centrality of
motherhood to femininity. In drawing distinctions between themselves and more marginalized
single mothers, the SMBC reproduce the prevailing moral order of motherhood and hierarchies
of maternal worthiness. In making an appeal to biology and their “natural” or “genetic”
difference, the VCF reproduce dominant narratives that most women experience a natural
maternal instinct.
However, all three of these groups of women share the experience of having lived lives
shaped by feminist notions that motherhood should not define women and that women should be
free to pursue fulfillment and self-actualization through education and careers. Whether they
were opting for a childfree lifestyle or simply postponing fertility, all of these women embraced
childlessness at certain points in their lives, resisting pressure on women to prioritize marriage
and motherhood above all else. Further, in making appeals to family diversity and same-sex
families, the SMBC and the VCF align themselves with resistance to “traditional” family scripts
and they do contribute to the expansion of the definition of family by making claims for
inclusion. The VCF push back against cultural beliefs that “children make a family” and that
parenthood confers true adulthood, while the SMBC reject the “package deal” of the
heterosexual nuclear family (Townsend 2002). Ultimately, the fertility trajectories and stigma
management strategies these women pursue represent uneasy compromises between prevailing
gender and family norms, the realities of contemporary work and romance, and the uneven
progress of the gender revolution.

Myers Dissertation 162
APPENDIX
TABLE 1: Comparison of Economic and Demographic Characteristics of Egg
Freezing, Single-Mother-by-Choice, and Voluntarily Childfree Interview
Participants
Egg Freezers
Single-Mothers-by-
Choice
Voluntarily
Childfree
# % # % # %
Count 23 100% 13 100% 15 100%
Birth Year
Median 1975 1970 1972
Min 1967 1952 1955
Max 1990 1976 1983
Race / Ethnicity
White 20 87% 11 85% 12 80%
Asian American 2 9% 2 15% 2 13%
African American 0 0% 0 0% 0 0%
Latina 1 4% 0 0% 1 7%
Relationship Status
Currently Single 11 48% 13 100% 3 20%
Currently Dating 10 43% 0 0% 3 20%
Currently Married 2 9% 0 0% 9 60%
Educational Degree
Some College 0 0% 0 0% 1 7%
Associates 0 0% 1 8% 1 7%
Bachelors 10 43% 6 46% 6 40%
Masters 9 39% 6 46% 4 27%
Doctorate 4 17% 0 0% 3 20%
Employment Status
Employed Full-time 14 61% 7 54% 9 60%
Employed Part-time 0 0% 1 8% 0 0%
Employed Freelance 6 26% 3 23% 5 33%
Not employed 2 9% 2 15% 1 7%
Individual Income
Not reported 2 9% 0 0% 2 13%
< $25,000 3 13% 0 0% 1 7%
$25,000 - $49,999 1 4% 1 8% 1 7%
$50,000 - $74,999 2 9% 1 8% 2 13%
$75,000 - $99,999 4 17% 3 23% 6 40%
$100,000 - $249,999 8 35% 7 54% 3 20%
$250,000 - $499,999 3 13% 0 0% 0 0%
$500,000 or greater 0 0% 1 8% 0 0%
Combined Income
Not reported 2 9% 0 0% 2 13%
< $25,000 0 0% 0 0% 0 0%
$25,000 - $49,999 1 4% 1 8% 1 7%
$50,000 - $74,999 1 4% 1 8% 2 13%
$75,000 - $99,999 3 13% 3 23% 1 7%
$100,000 - $249,999 12 52% 7 54% 9 60%
$250,000 - $499,999 4 17% 0 0% 0 0%
$500,000 or greater 0 0% 1 8% 0 0%

Myers Dissertation 163
TABLE 2: Individual Characteristics of Egg Freezing Interview Participants
Participant
Age at
Interview
Age at
Egg
Freezing Race Education
Employment
Status Occupational Field
Relationship
Status Fertility Status
Aidan 45 41 White Masters Freelance Marketing Single Raising 4-y-o boy
Akemi 38 32 White/API Bachelors Freelance Aviation Dating Raising 3-y-o girl
Amanda 42 38 White Bachelors Full-time Health & Fitness Dating Not trying
Amy 41 36 White Doctorate Full-time Law Single Raising 2-y-o girl
Angela 39 36 White Doctorate Freelance Psychology Dating Not trying
Anita 44 39 White Doctorate Unemployed Management (previously) Dating Trying to conceive
Aubrey 31 29 White Bachelors Freelance Entrepreneur Dating Not trying
Christine 38 35 White Doctorate Full-time Law Single Not trying
Ericka 37 36 White Masters Full-time Education Single Not trying
Jamie 40 38 White Bachelors Full-time Entertainment Single Not trying
Judy 41 36 White Masters Full-time Non-Profit Management Single Raising 14-w-o girl
Karen 47 45 White Bachelors Full-time Sales Single Not trying
Kelsi 25 20 White Bachelors Part-time Health / Graduate Student Dating Not trying
Kimberly 44 40 White Bachelors Freelance Entertainment Single Not trying
Lindsey 31 28 White Masters Unemployed Psychology (previously) Married Raising 2-m-o boy
Lori 45 39 White Masters Full-time Information Technology Single Childfree
Melissa 38 37 White Bachelors Full-time Human Resources Dating Pregnant
Nicole 40 38 White Bachelors Full-time Sales Single Not trying
Paula 46 41 White Masters Unemployed Entertainment (previously) Married Not trying
Sandra 37 33 White Masters Freelance Entrepreneur Dating Not trying
Shannon 37 35 White Masters Full-time Non-Profit Management Dating Not trying
Teresa 36 35 API Masters Full-time Accounting & Finance Single Not trying
Valeria 44 35 White/Hispanic Bachelors Full-time Entertainment Dating Not trying

Myers Dissertation 164
TABLE 3: Individual Characteristics of Single-Mother-by-Choice Interview Participants
Participant
Age at
Interview
Age at
First
Birth Race Education
Employment
Status
Occupational
Field Child(ren) Conception Method
Alma 39 38 White/Latina Masters Full-Time Non-Profit
Management
1-y-o girl IUI w/ donor sperm
Beth 44 41 White Bachelors Full-Time Entertainment 3-y-o girl IVF w/ donor sperm
Danielle 40 40 White Bachelors Full-Time Entertainment 1-y-o boy IUI w/ donor sperm
Holly 43 29 White Bachelors Full-Time Education 14-y-o girl Adoption (private,
domestic)
Joanne 48 44 White Bachelors Not Employed Management 4-y-o twins
(g/g)
IVF w/ donor eggs &
donor sperm
Marlena 55 48 White Masters Retired Government
(previously)
8-y-o twins
(g/b)
IVF w/ donor eggs &
donor sperm (brother)
Michelle 51 46 API Masters Freelance Aerospace
(previously)
5-y-o girl IVF w/ donor eggs &
donor sperm (brother)
Nancy 40 40 White Bachelors Part-Time Entertainment 6-m-o girl IUI w/ donor sperm
Pamela 63 55 White Associates Freelance Entertainment 8-y-o girl Adoption (international)
Rebecca 49 46 White Bachelors Full-Time Management
consulting
3-y-o boy Surrogate w/ donor eggs &
donor sperm
Shelia 45 42 White Masters Full-Time Entertainment /
Marketing
4-y-o girl IVF w/ donor sperm
Tina 45 45 White Masters Freelance Entertainment 4-m-o girl IVF w/ donor sperm &
frozen eggs
Victoria 48 43 API Masters Full-Time Entertainment 6-y-o girl IUI w/ donor sperm

Myers Dissertation 165
TABLE 4: Individual Characteristics of Voluntarily Childfree Interview Participants
Participant
Age at
Interview Race Education
Employment
Status Occupational Field
Relationship
Status
Number
of
Siblings Family of Origin Religion
Alexi 37 White Associates Full-Time Non-Profit
Management
Married 1 Christian, Not Religious
Bonnie 44 White Doctorate Full-Time Education/Healthcare Married 1 Episcopal, Not Religious
Brenda 42 White Masters Full-Time Education Married 3 Catholic, Religious
Britta 60 White Masters Freelance Psychology Dating 4 Catholic, Religious
Chelsea 32 White Bachelors Freelance Finance Single 2 Catholic, Religious
Dana 49 White Bachelors Full-Time Entertainment Single 1 Lutheran, Conservative
Frances 49 White Some college Freelance Business/Entertainment Dating 3 Catholic, Religious
Irene 47 Latina Bachelors Freelance Business Married 2 Catholic, Religious
Joy 36 White Doctorate Full-Time Psychology Married 2 Christian, Not Religious
Kristina 33 White Bachelors Full-Time Information
Technology
Married 1 Catholic, Not Religious
Leigh 40 White Doctorate Full-Time Education Dating 0 Catholic, Not Religious
Naima 51 API Masters Full-Time Aerospace Married 2 Muslim, Conservative
Naomi 43 White Bachelors Unemployed Journalism (previously) Married 3 Jewish, Cultural
Robin 41 White Bachelors Freelance Entertainment Single 1 Christian Scientist,
Religious
Sue 46 API Masters Full-Time Business/Management Married 0 Christian, Not Religious

Myers Dissertation 166
TABLE 5: Comparison of Economic and Demographic Characteristics of Egg Freezing
Survey and Interview Participants

All Survey
Participants
All Interview
Participants
# % # %
Count 47 100% 23 100%
Birth Year
Median 1972 1975
Min 1963 1967
Max 1990 1990
Age at Egg Freezing
Median 38 36
Min 20 20
Max 45 45
Race / Ethnicity
White 36 77% 20 87%
Asian American 9 19% 2 9%
African American 1 2% 0 0%
Latina 1 2% 1 4%
Relationship Status
Currently Single 25 53% 11 48%
Currently Dating 14 30% 10 43%
Currently Married 8 17% 2 9%
Educational Degree
Bachelors 17 36% 10 43%
Masters 16 34% 9 39%
Doctorate 14 30% 4 17%
Employment Status
Employed Full-time 24 51% 14 61%
Employed Part-time 5 11% 0 0%
Employed Freelance 15 32% 6 26%
Not employed 3 6% 2 9%
Individual Income
Not reported 2 4% 2 9%
< $25,000 3 6% 3 13%
$25,000 - $49,999 3 6% 1 4%
$50,000 - $74,999 4 9% 2 9%
$75,000 - $99,999 11 23% 4 17%
$100,000 - $249,999 15 32% 8 35%
$250,000 - $499,999 7 15% 3 13%
$500,000 or greater 2 4% 0 0%
Childbearing Status
Already has children 6 13% 4 17%
Pregnant 3 6% 1 4%
Trying to have children 3 6% 2 9%
Not trying 32 68% 15 65%
No longer intends to have children 3 6% 1 4%

Myers Dissertation 167
TABLE 6: Demographic Characteristics of Egg Freezing Survey Participants by Non-
utilization Category
Total Already
Accomplished
Holding Out
Hope
Permanently
Childfree
# % # % # % # %
Count 47 100% 12 26% 32 68% 3 6%
Birth Year
Median 1972 1973 1973 1969
Min 1963 1968 1963 1967
Max 1990 1983 1990 1970
Age at Egg Freezing
Median 37 36 37 41
Min 20 28 20 39
Max 45 42 45 42
Race
White 36 77% 9 75% 25 78% 2 67%
Asian 9 19% 3 25% 5 16% 1 33%
Black 1 2% 0 0% 1 3% 0 0%
Latina 1 2% 0 0% 1 3% 0 0%
Relationship Status
Single 25 53% 2 17% 20 63% 3 100%
Dating 13 28% 3 25% 10 31% 0 0%
Married 9 19% 7 58% 2 6% 0 0%
Childbearing Status
Already have kids 6 13% 6 50% 0 0% 0 0%
Pregnant 3 6% 3 25% 0 0% 0 0%
Trying to get pregnant 3 6% 3 25% 0 0% 0 0%
Not Trying 32 68% 0 0% 32 100% 0 0%
Longer wants kids 3 6% 0 0% 0 0% 3 100%
# Children Desired
Median 2 2 2 1
Min 1 1 1 1
Max 4 4 3 2
# Children Expected
Median 1 2 1 0
Min 0 1 1 0
Max 3 3 2 0
Willing to consider SMBC?
No 8 17% 2 17% 4 13% 2 67%
Yes 24 51% 6 50% 16 50% 0 0%
Not Sure 15 32% 3 25% 10 31% 1 33%
Expect to use frozen eggs?
No 7 15% 4 33% 2 6% 1 33%
Yes 21 45% 3 25% 18 56% 0 0%
Not Sure 19 40% 5 42% 12 38% 2 67%

Myers Dissertation 168
TABLE 7: Economic and Educational Characteristics of Egg Freezing Survey Participants
by Non-utilization Category
Total Already
Accomplished
Holding Out
Hope
Permanently
Childfree
# % # % # % # %
Count 47 100% 12 26% 32 68% 3 6%
Educational Degree
Bachelors 17 36% 3 25% 14 44% 0 0%
Masters 16 34% 4 33% 9 28% 3 100%
Doctorate 14 30% 5 42% 9 28% 0 0%
Employment Status
Employed Full-time 24 51% 6 50% 15 47% 3 100%
Employed Part-time 5 11% 2 17% 3 9% 0 0%
Employed Freelance 15 32% 2 17% 13 41% 0 0%
Not employed 3 6% 2 17% 1 3% 0 0%
Individual Income
Not reported 2 4% 2 17% 0 0% 0 0%
< $25,000 3 6% 0 0% 3 9% 0 0%
$25,000 - $49,999 3 6% 2 17% 1 3% 0 0%
$50,000 - $74,999 4 9% 2 17% 1 3% 0 0%
$75,000 - $99,999 11 23% 2 17% 9 28% 0 0%
$100,000 - $249,999 15 32% 2 17% 11 34% 2 67%
$250,000 - $499,999 7 15% 2 17% 4 13% 1 33%
$500,000 or greater 2 4% 0 0% 2 6% 0 0%

Myers Dissertation 169
TABLE 8: Motivations for Freezing Eggs and Non-utilization of Frozen Eggs of Egg
Freezing Survey Participants by Non-utilization Category
Total Already
Accomplished
Holding Out
Hope
Permanently
Childfree
# % # % # % # %
Count 47 100% 12 26% 32 68% 3 6%
Reason for Egg Freezing*
Fertility-threatening
condition
5 11% 1 8% 3 9% 1 33%
Family history of infertility 1 2% 1 8% 0 0% 0 0%
As an "insurance policy" 27 57% 9 75% 17 53% 1 33%
Concerned about "running
out of time"
34 72% 7 58% 26 81% 1 33%
Encouraged by others 3 6% 1 8% 2 6% 0 0%
To continue my family line 1 2% 0 0% 1 3% 0 0%
Single at the time 22 47% 7 58% 14 44% 1 33%
Not sure I wanted kids 10 21% 1 8% 8 25% 1 33%
Reason for Non-utilization*
Had kids w/o frozen eggs 6 13% 6 50% 0 0% 0 0%
Decided not to have kids 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0%
Not sure I want kids 6 13% 0 0% 4 13% 2 67%
Still not ready to have kids 14 30% 0 0% 14 44% 0 0%
Partner still not ready to
have kids
5 11% 0 0% 5 16% 0 0%
Still need to find a
committed co-parent
25 53% 1 8% 22 69% 2 67%
Still need to advance in my
career
1 2% 0 0% 1 3% 0 0%
Still need to complete my
education
1 2% 0 0% 1 3% 0 0%
My current schedule does
not accommodate kids
3 6% 0 0% 2 6% 1 33%
I still need to achieve
greater financial stability
7 15% 0 0% 7 22% 0 0%
I still need to buy a home 1 2% 0 0% 1 3% 0 0%
Poor health 1 2% 0 0% 1 3% 0 0%
* Participants were permitted to select all applicable responses, percentages will not add up to
100%

Myers Dissertation 170
TABLE 9: Demographic Characteristics of Egg Freezing Survey Participants by
Occupational Category
Total Full-time Freelance
Part-time or
less
# % # % # % # %
Count 47 100% 24 51% 15 32% 8 17%
Birth Year
Median 1972 1973 1972 1971
Min 1963 1967 1963 1968
Max 1990 1977 1990 1983
Age at Egg Freezing
Median 37 38 36 37
Min 20 32 20 28
Max 45 45 45 41
Race
White 36 77% 16 67% 14 93% 6 75%
Asian 9 19% 1 4% 0 0% 2 25%
Black 1 2% 1 4% 0 0% 0 0%
Latina 1 2% 6 25% 1 7% 0 0%
Relationship Status
Single 25 53% 14 58% 9 60% 2 25%
Dating 14 30% 6 25% 5 33% 2 25%
Married 9 19% 4 17% 2 13% 4 50%
Childbearing Status
Already have kids 6 13% 2 8% 1 7% 2 25%
Pregnant 3 6% 3 13% 0 0% 0 0%
Trying to get pregnant 3 6% 1 4% 1 7% 2 25%
Not Trying 32 68% 15 63% 13 87% 4 50%
Do not want kids 3 6% 3 13% 0 0% 0 0%
# Children Desired
Median 2 2 2 2
Min 1 1 1 1
Max 4 4 3 3
# Children Expected
Median 1 1 2 2
Min 0 0 1 1
Max 3 2 3 3
Willing to consider SMBC?
No 8 17% 5 21% 1 7% 2 25%
Yes 24 51% 12 50% 9 60% 3 38%
Not Sure 15 32% 7 29% 5 33% 3 38%
Expect to use frozen eggs?
No 7 15% 1 4% 3 20% 3 38%
Yes 21 45% 9 38% 8 53% 4 50%
Not Sure 19 40% 14 58% 4 27% 1 13%

Myers Dissertation 171
TABLE 10: Economic and Educational Characteristics of Egg Freezing Survey
Participants by Occupational Category
Total Full-time Freelance Part-time or less
# % # % # % # %
Count 47 100% 24 51% 15 32% 8 17%
Educational Degree
Bachelors 17 36% 8 33% 9 60% 0 0%
Masters 16 34% 11 46% 3 20% 2 25%
Doctorate 14 30% 5 21% 3 20% 6 75%
Employment Status
Employed Full-time 24 51% 24 100% 0 0% 0 0%
Employed Part-time 5 11% 0 0% 0 0% 5 63%
Employed Freelance 15 32% 0 0% 15 100% 0 0%
Not employed 3 6% 0 0% 0 0% 3 38%
Individual Income
Not reported 2 4% 1 4% 1 7% 0 0%
< $25,000 3 6% 0 0% 2 13% 1 13%
$25,000 - $49,999 3 6% 0 0% 2 13% 1 13%
$50,000 - $74,999 4 9% 3 13% 1 7% 0 0%
$75,000 - $99,999 11 23% 6 25% 4 27% 1 13%
$100,000 - $249,999 15 32% 9 38% 3 20% 3 38%
$250,000 - $499,999 7 15% 3 13% 2 13% 2 25%
$500,000 or greater 2 4% 2 8% 0 0% 0 0%

Myers Dissertation 172
TABLE 11: Motivations for Freezing Eggs and Non-utilization of Frozen Eggs of Egg
Freezing Survey Participants by Occupational Category
Total Full-time Freelance Part-time or
less
# % # % # % # %
Count 47 100% 24 51% 15 32% 8 17%
Reason for Egg Freezing*
Fertility-threatening
condition
5 11% 2 8% 3 20% 0 0%
Family history of infertility 1 2% 0 0% 0 0% 1 13%
As an "insurance policy" 27 57% 14 58% 8 53% 5 63%
Concerned about "running
out of time"
34 72% 20 83% 10 67% 4 50%
Encouraged by others 3 6% 3 13% 0 0% 0 0%
To continue my family line 1 2% 0 0% 1 7% 0 0%
Single at the time 22 47% 12 50% 7 47% 3 38%
Not sure I wanted kids 10 21% 7 29% 2 13% 1 13%
Reason for Non-utilization*
Had kids w/o frozen eggs 6 13% 3 13% 1 7% 2 25%
Decided not to have kids 0 0% 0 0% 0 0% 0 0%
Not sure I want kids 6 13% 5 21% 1 7% 0 0%
Still not ready to have kids 14 30% 5 21% 6 40% 3 38%
Partner still not ready to
have kids
5 11% 2 8% 2 13% 1 13%
Still need to find a
committed co-parent
25 53% 14 58% 9 60% 2 25%
Still need to advance in my
career
1 2% 0 0% 1 7% 0 0%
Still need to complete my
education
1 2% 0 0% 1 7% 0 0%
My current schedule does
not accommodate kids
3 6% 2 8% 1 7% 0 0%
I still need to achieve greater
financial stability
7 15% 3 13% 3 20% 1 13%
I still need to buy a home 1 2% 1 4% 0 0% 0 0%
Poor health 1 2% 0 0% 0 0% 1 13%
* Participants were permitted to select all applicable responses, percentages will not add up to
100%

Myers Dissertation 173
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Situated within the fertility shifts of the second demographic transition and the ongoing inequalities of the stalled gender revolution, this dissertation examines the fertility strategies of three groups of professional class women: 1) women who have postponed motherhood through the use of elective egg freezing, 2) women who have pursued motherhood as single‐mothers‐by‐choice, and 3) women who have foregone motherhood to pursue a voluntarily childfree lifestyle. I draw on in‐depth interviews to examine attitudes toward motherhood, life course sequencing, and family formation among these groups of women. I find that participants experience conflict between the rapid expansion of opportunities for (childless) women and the incomplete reformation of gender norms in families, schools, and workplaces. Faced with increasingly fluid life course sequencing and shared perceptions of high instability and insecurity in both romantic relationships and careers. Further, I find that relationship quality and instability are often more salient than work‐family conflict in directing their fertility trajectories. I demonstrate how reproductive and contraceptive technologies—including egg freezing, donor insemination, and birth control—operate as resources these women can draw on to perform normative femininity, manage stigma, and exercise reproductive autonomy. ❧ In my dissertation, I develop a maternal orientation continuum to address the salience of ambivalence toward motherhood that shapes the fertility trajectories of many of the participants, particularly those with frozen eggs. I illustrate the shared preference for partnered parenthood and the commitments to intensive mothering ideologies common to all three groups and address the roles that relationship instability and perceptions of the burdens of intensive motherhood play in shaping their fertility trajectories, particularly among the egg freezers and single‐mothers‐by‐choice. I discuss the decision‐making processes that these three groups engage in to realize their fertility intentions and their engagement with medical technology. I conclude by discussing the strategies each of these three groups draws on to manage the stigma of childlessness or single motherhood and to repair gender identities “spoiled” by deviation from the normative script of heterosexually married motherhood. I bring together literatures on gender, motherhood, and reproduction to make contributions on the moral order of motherhood, intensive mothering, the stigma of alternative fertility trajectories (including childlessness and single motherhood), the social life of reproductive technologies, and gender inequalities at work and at home.

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The role of public policy in the decisions of parents and caregivers: an examination of work, fertility, and informal caregiving

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Creator Myers, Kit (author)

Core Title To pursue, to postpone, or to forego? Motherhood decision-making and reproductive technology use among professional-class women

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 04/18/2020

Defense Date 03/07/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag assisted reproductive technologies,egg freezing,Family,fertility,gender,Motherhood,OAI-PMH Harvest,single‐motherhood‐by‐choice,voluntarily childfree

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Language English

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Advisor Hook, Jennifer (committee chair), Messner, Michael (committee chair), Hancock Alfaro, Ange-Marie (committee member), Hasson, Katie (committee member)

Creator Email kitmyers@usc.edu,mx.kit.myers@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-494281

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