One evening when she was 14 years old, Laura Scott was washing dishes in the kitchen with her mother when she decided she didn’t want to have a child. “You might change your mind,” said her mother, whom Scott describes as “bone tired” from a life in which she “didn’t have any time for herself.” Scott’s mom worked as a samplemaker for an upholstery company; after making dinner for Scott and her brother, she’d park them in front of the television and go down to the basement to spend her evening cutting and sewing. That life was what “doing it all” meant to Scott. “I learned you could ”” but did you want to?” she says. At 26, Scott got married and waited for her mind to change. “I thought I would be struck by a biological lightning bolt,” she recalls. “It never happened. And I realized I was going to be fine.” As she says from her Tampa office, where she works as a professional coach, writer and documentary filmmaker, “My main motive not to have kids was that I loved my life the way it was.”
Now 50, Scott is more than fine: she’s fulfilled. And she’s not alone. The birthrate in the U.S. is the lowest in recorded American history, which includes the fertility crash of the Great Depression….
Read it all (if necessary another link may be found there).
You are childless fifty year old, but you may have a spouse, you have good friends, a fulfilling life. Great. And what happens twenty or thirty years when your spouse and friends start predeceasing you and you suddenly realize, “I’m going to die alone…”
This is I think one of the main reasons why suicide is rising among certain sections of the population.