She Wanted to Have Three Kids. Then Life Happened.
· The Atlantic
Rachel Somerstein thought it would be “really wonderful and fun to have three children.” That is, until what happened happened.
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When she was delivering her first baby, many years ago, Somerstein spent nearly 24 hours in labor before the baby’s heart began decelerating. The physician recommended a C-section. She received anesthesia, but as soon as the scalpel touched her skin, she knew something was deeply wrong. “I felt that,” she recalled saying as her legs bucked from the pain.
As Somerstein wrote in her 2024 book, Invisible Labor, she felt all of it—the entire surgery. In the following years, Somerstein developed PTSD and would panic during medical procedures; she told her husband she wasn’t sure if she’d ever want to have another baby. She remembers thinking, “I just don’t know that I can get over the fear,” she told me.
She ultimately did: Four and a half years later, she had her second baby. But she now thinks that, if not for the horrible first birth, she might have had another child in between. Somerstein’s experience was extreme, but her deliberations over her family size reflect a typical trajectory: Many women start out with a notion of their ideal number of children, and then finances, health, relationship status, and other factors can push that number up or down. Sometimes, women have more children than they initially intended, but, more commonly these days, they have one or two fewer than they’d hoped.
As politicians and academics puzzle over what, if anything, to do about America’s shrinking fertility rate, lost in the conversation is that many people would like to have more kids—but their personal circumstances prevent them from doing so. Rather than simply promoting the idea of being a parent, then, one way to boost the country’s birth rate may be to make it easier for parents to say yes to additional children.
[Read: What number of kids makes parents happiest?]
Since roughly the 1970s, if you were to ask a random 20-year-old woman how many children she’d like to have, the odds were pretty good that she’d say “two or three,” several researchers told me. But this was less a true, firm preference than a reflection of the social norm, which is that for several decades, the majority of women were having two or three kids. “Saying you want two kids when you’re 20,” Sarah Hayford, a sociologist at Ohio State University, told me, “is not telling us that much about you”—or how many kids you’ll go on to have. (Although men, of course, also have opinions about the number of kids they want to have, few studies have been conducted on their preferences, Hayford said, and thus I’ll mostly focus on women in this article.)
Over the past decade or so, the picture has shifted: More and more, women say they aren’t sure how many children they’ll have, if any. In a study published last year, Hayford and two other researchers analyzed a nationally representative survey of more than 40,000 women and found that in 2018, 48 percent of childless women who hoped to have children were uncertain whether they actually would, compared with 40 percent in 2002. This change may reflect an understanding that having children can be derailed by various obstacles—the first being that most people want to be married before they have kids, Julia Behrman, a sociologist at Northwestern University, told me. The marriage rate is declining, and although plenty of people have children on their own or with a partner they’re not married to, many unmarried women won’t go on to have one child, let alone multiple.
Being married or partnered, however, does not determine how many children a person will have. Karen Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies family formation, described fertility intentions as a learning process of sorts. A couple might have a baby and discover that they love being parents and want to do it again and again; others might find that day care costs far more than expected, making another child unaffordable. “Before you have kids, you are imagining what parenthood is like based on your friends’ experiences, based on what you’ve seen on TV, based on what you see out in the world,” Guzzo said. Only once people have a child do they know what parenthood is really like, and the experience might be better or worse than they had imagined. “People who are pretty determined about having that first kid can often find a way to do that,” Guzzo said. But “increasingly, that second kid is, Let me evaluate where I am right now and see if I can fit another kid in here.”
A number of factors can determine whether a couple has a second child, Rachel Margolis, a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario who has also studied family formation, told me. “People who I know who stopped at one,” she said, “either they met each other really late in life, or they disagreed about how many kids they wanted.” Or, she continued, they weren’t happy with how they were allocating child-rearing responsibilities, or they had stressful jobs that didn’t accommodate parenting, or they’re in a same-sex partnership and it was harder for them to have more than one kid, or, or, or. Life comes at you fast.
[Read: The unglamorous truth about the average tradwife]
As in Somerstein’s case, a difficult birth and postpartum period can make someone hesitant to do it all over again: Margolis found in a 2015 study that Germans who had a pronounced drop in well-being after having their first child were less likely to have a second child than those who had no decline. Similarly, a study of women in the U.K. found that those who experienced postpartum depression after one birth were less likely to have additional children. Somerstein, who now leads birth-trauma groups, told me that the question of whether to have another baby “comes up in every single meeting.”
Another reason people may vacillate about having kids, or having more of them, is that many Americans have been sent—and have absorbed—the message that “you should not have a kid until you’ve got all your ducks in a row,” Guzzo said. Finish school, get a job, get married—don’t be an unwed mother. People may feel pressure to live in a good neighborhood with good schools, where housing tends to be more expensive, and to have a partner who wants that too. Oh, and make sure that partner takes on half the physical and mental load. “I think people want to have kids,” Guzzo said, but they might also think: “Some of those things that I think need to be in place before I have kids might not happen.”
Social and policy changes might address some of the obstacles that prevent people from having a family of their desired size. Guzzo said that if child-care infrastructure were stronger and if paid leave were more plentiful, America would “probably see a bit of a boost in birth rates, particularly the second- and third-birth rates.” If young people felt established enough to marry and buy homes earlier in life, they might start having children sooner, which could increase the likelihood that they’d have a second or third kid. And if more medical providers took women’s pain—both physical and mental—seriously, fewer women might have the kinds of traumatic births that discourage them from trying again.
When Somerstein was 41, after she’d had her two children, she got her appendix taken out. A friend suggested that she get her fallopian tubes removed at the same time—a procedure that can lower the risk of ovarian cancer without the need for a separate surgery. “I just couldn’t do it,” Somerstein said. “I was like, Maybe I want to have another baby.” Uncertainty can take another form too—that of leaving the door ajar.