"As a little girl, I had never imagined myself with babies, or, for that matter, with a husband."

"My vision of the future had involved an apartment in New York City, a cat, and a typewriter. I was sure children would get in the way of my ambitions — and, worse, that I’d poison them with my resentment. In Caroline Moorehead’s biography of the swashbuckling journalist Martha Gellhorn, she describes how Gellhorn adopted an Italian orphan after World War II. At first she was smitten, but before long she felt trapped, writing that her son was, 'through no act of his own, but because of a careless, inconceivably frivolous and selfish act of mine, making life untenable.' She was a distant and sometimes cruel mother, and her child grew up to be a great disappointment to her; she once described him as 'a total loss, a poor small unwanted life.' Chilling as this was, I took a bleak sort of comfort in it, since it confirmed that I was right not to take the leap...."

From Michelle Goldberg's essay "I Was a Proud Non-Breeder. Then I Changed My Mind."