While I was deeply desiring a baby, I couldn't get enough of anything baby-related. I was a closet reader of magazines like Parents, loved catalogs by Hannah Anderson and adored baby pictures of children known and unknown to me. This was at the height of the Anne Geddes craze, so I was able to get a baby pic fix pretty readily. I never did buy any of her stuff though. Especially her last coffee table book which freaked me out with those women wearing sheer dresses with babies tucked underneath. Ick.

Last night I was groping through piles of old... more

Continuing with the second part of the women without children series by Erica Hielman at the Chicago Sun-Times, is the article concerning indecision.

One of the most helpful points of this part of the article involved the myth of fertility treatments. In a sense, our society has now been convinced that we can delay pregnancy due to the new technology. Another point that she made was that "The role of American women in the workplace and in the culture at large has changed radically in the last hundred years. The biology of reproduction, however, has not,"

In reading this part of the article, I felt that Dr. Ireland had lost some of her empathy towards women who had focused... more

Finishing up with the article, "Women Without Children: Finding Their Place", written by Erica Heilman, I wanted to re-print some more of the interview, and also give some of my opinions about what was said. Once again, this was a very interesting perspective of life as a woman.

You talk in your book about the importance of making a conscious choice about motherhood at some point. Why is this so important? It has been true that there is an expectation that if you're female, sooner or later you will also be mother. And so, whether or not you like it, that equation is in the picture from your girlhood on, and this expectation is somehow internalized.... more

I just finished reading an article in the archives of the Chicago Sun-Times. Doing a search, I found that this paper had quite a few articles relating to fertility. All of which, I was interested in. This article is titled, Women Without Children: Finding Their Place, written by Erica Heilman. It is the initial part of a three part series speaking to Psychologist Dr. Mardy Ireland, located in San Francisco, about her research and subsequent book involving women who do not have children. It seems to me that in the majority of infertility books that I have read, and in my personal story as well, there are times in some women's lives that they question even becoming... more