Melanie Notkin could not have been clearer about her desire to have children. At age 12, she was buying baby-name books. When she was 23 and interviewing for her first job, she inquired about maternity benefits — just in case.
That was 23 years ago, and while she has changed jobs in the intervening years, she still has never used maternity benefits. And she doesn't know if she ever will.
Although the number of childless women is increasing steadily, many of the assumptions about why they don't have children — primary among them that they don't want kids — are being proven false. Some waited too long and face fertility problems, while others have struggled to find a mate. They are childless by chance, not by choice.
Fifteen percent of women in the 40- to 44-year-old age group were childless in 2014, up from 10 percent in the 1970s, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.
A frequently cited 2006 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family suggests that about 40 percent of the 1.6 million childless women ages 40 to 44 are childless because of fertility problems. About 16 percent still expect to have children, perhaps because they're actively trying. But no one really knows how many of the remaining 44 percent, who are presumably fertile but expect no children, are childless by choice and how many are childless because they lack a partner. Studies haven't been designed to answer that question.
"It's an important question," said Gladys Martinez, a statistician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Being able to know if women are delaying childbearing because they haven't found the right partner — that's a new path that we haven't studied before."
Notkin, who has never married, is author of the book "Otherhood: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness" (Seal Press). In her book, she describes her experience as a successful single woman in New York City and decries stereotypes and misconceptions, among them that childless single women don't like kids or are comically inept when it comes to dealing with them; that they're too picky in love — or not picky enough; that they're too careless (about their fertility) or too serious (about their careers).
"It's the first time, certainly with any frame of reference that any of us has, where there's a large group of women in their mid-30s and early 40s who haven't found a partner, and I think that a lot of people make assumptions about why that person is that way," said Lori Gottlieb, author of the bestseller "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough."
