Not having children

Women choose not to have children in order to focus on their own life, to have privacy and time for independent thought, to have the freedom to travel, to work, to richly experience the world, and to have more intimate personal relationships with adults. Some regret the missed opportunity for self-knowledge that having children brings; others choose careers which bring them much contact with children; others are happy without that contact at all.

In the 1960s only one women in ten was voluntarily childless in the UK; in the 1990s that figure has risen to one in five.