People Aren’t Sure About Having Kids. She Helps Them Decide

Merle Bombardieri learned she was a micro-celebrity in 2020, when she happened to Google her own name. Her search led her to a Reddit group of “fence sitters”—people who aren’t sure whether they want to have children—where she is a very big deal. Post after post mentions her book The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life and its power to help people get off the fence, one way or the other. “It’s a sort of bible,” says Christy Starr, a 36-year-old member of the Reddit community who lives in Wisconsin.

Bombardieri, a 75-year-old therapist who also coaches people about whether they should have kids, was tickled by her VIP status among a group of people young enough to be her children or even grandchildren. She joined the r/Fencesitter message board and now spends about five hours per week answering people’s questions for free. (She could easily spend even longer: once, she hosted an “ask me anything” thread, and it took her 10 weeks to answer every question.) She sees her involvement in the group, which today has about 70,000 members, as a moral obligation. “Not everybody can buy a book. A lot of people can’t afford a coach or a therapist,” she says. “And I really want the information to be out there.”

There’s clearly a need. Most U.S. adults eventually have children. But more people—both men and women—are thinking critically about a major life choice that not too long ago was basically seen as a given. 

About a third of U.S. adults under 35 who don’t already have kids say they don’t know whether they want them, and only 22% of people in that age group say having kids is very important or extremely important for living a fulfilling life, according to 2024 statistics from Pew Research Center. A stunning half of U.S. adults under 50 who don’t already have kids think they’ll stay child-free forever. Most say they simply don’t want kids. But financial strain and concerns about the state of the world and the environment are also common reasons, according to other Pew data. People are feeling so much angst about when, how, and whether to procreate that new psychological concepts have emerged to help make sense of how people make these decisions.

Bombardieri, herself a mother of two and grandmother to one, was far ahead of that curve. She published The Baby Decision in 1981, decades before fence sitting was mainstream. It flew largely under the radar before blowing up in 2016, when Bombardieri self-published an updated version. “At the age of 67,” Bombardieri says, “I became more well-known, more financially successful, than I was when I was younger.”

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Not only did she have the internet on her side the second time around, which helped more people find the book, but the world had also changed in other ways. Shifting cultural norms; evolving ideas about gender, sexuality, and partnership; concerns about politics, climate change, and gun violence; and the aftermath of a brutal economic recession had left many 20- and 30-somethings unsure about parenting and desperate for a book like The Baby Decision. Bombardieri has sold about 60,000 copies of the updated version and plans to release a new book, Baby or Childfree?, in early 2026.

Starr, from the Reddit fence sitters’ community, credits an exercise in The Baby Decision—acting out an argument between your pro-baby and anti-baby sides—with helping her decide to become a mother. It nudged her to realize that she really did want a kid, and that most of her reasons for being child-free were rooted in fear. “It was surprising, how much the side that wanted a child was arguing for it,” Starr says. “It really made me feel more secure.”

Bombardieri isn’t alone in doing this work. Others have made a name for themselves in the space, such as Ann Davidman, a California-based psychotherapist who wrote a book on parenthood decision-making and offers workshops and coaching sessions, for one. And there’s now a bona fide industry of “decision coaches,” along with traditional therapists, who help people work through all manner of difficult choices, including whether to have children.

But Bombardieri is the OG. People from all over the world—most of them women—pay $200 to $300 per session to hash out the parenthood question with her. Once upon a time, Bombardieri says, most of her clients ultimately decided to have kids. But these days, the breakdown is closer to 50-50.

People with kids know that it’s impossible to truly grasp what you’re in for before you become a parent. Making this life-altering decision is always, on some level, about coming to terms with uncertainty. You can’t really know how you’ll feel about waking up in the middle of the night to feed a screaming baby until you have to do it.

How can anyone, even a trained mental-health professional, help someone make a decision so momentous and personal? “There are people who think that no one else can help them,” Bombardieri says, but she disagrees. She sees herself as a guide for people who are “lost in their own thinking,” paralyzed by endless worry about all the ways their lives will change and all the questions that are impossible to fully answer. “It’s never just about ‘Baby or no baby?’” she says. “It’s about everything. It’s about acknowledging that you’re going to die someday, and what do you want to have happen in between?”

Bombardieri tries to help people interrogate their preconceived notions about parenthood and visualize what they’d gain or give up on either path. Perhaps most importantly, she helps people grapple with the idea of regret, which haunts many fence sitters. Most people will have at least occasional pangs for the road not taken, and that’s OK, Bombardieri says. The goal is to figure out which road will lead to fewer regrets, and to grieve those feelings rather than suppress them. “The people most likely to regret a decision are the people who don’t make a decision”—people who run out their biological clock or accidentally-on-purpose forget to take birth control because they can’t bring themselves to fully commit to a choice, Bombardieri says.

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Katie Wilson, a 46-year-old living in Washington, D.C., had all but committed to the child-free life until she hit her mid-30s. Spooked by the reality that she was running out of time to change her mind, Wilson spiraled into indecision. “I felt alone,” she remembers. “I felt like I was the only person I knew who wasn’t clear.”

Wilson learned about Bombardieri’s book in her search for clarity. And in 2014, she flew to Boston to attend Bombardieri’s parenthood-decisionmaking workshop. For hours, Bombardieri led attendees through exercises and discussion groups meant to help them make sense of their inner turmoil. She seemed to Wilson like “a vessel for all of these questions that have come before mine,” an unbiased and quietly confident voice helping her make sense of her own scrambled thoughts. Eventually, after the workshop and additional one-on-one coaching sessions with Bombardieri, Wilson and her husband decided to stay child-free.

Today, Wilson and Bombardieri together moderate a Facebook group called The Decision Café, where hundreds of people in the throes of making their choice can lean on one another for support. For Wilson, the group is a way to democratize the experience that Bombardieri offered her years ago. “A lot of people are looking for role models,” she says. “They’re looking for people like them.”

Bombardieri knows what she’s talking about because she’s lived it. While an undergrad at Michigan State University, she turned down a marriage proposal from her now husband Rocco because he wanted kids and she wasn’t sure. Her mother had always seemed bored in her role as a housewife, and Bombardieri, who dreamed of getting a doctorate in literature and becoming a professor, worried motherhood might hold her back. Plus, Bombardieri just wasn’t positive she’d enjoy the daily realities of parenthood. When Rocco proposed, “I had just come back from being a counselor at a summer camp with really, really spoiled 12-year-old girls, and my favorite part of the day was when the camp day was over and the campers were asleep,” she says. Bombardieri loved solitude and tranquility, time to read and reflect, and she couldn’t envision where screaming babies or angsty teens fit in.

This was also the 1970s, the era of consciousness-raising groups and second-wave feminism, when some women were chafing against their roles as mothers and housewives. “There was kind of a feeling of ‘If you have a child, you’re going to be a traitor to the movement,’” Bombardieri says.

Slowly, though, her opinion changed. She found role models who’d successfully balanced interesting careers in academia with motherhood and got more comfortable around children while working in day-care centers. She also devised early versions of the exercises that eventually appeared in The Baby Decision, like the one that helped Starr: staging an argument between your two minds on the matter. “It would have been nice to have the book,” she says with a laugh.

Eventually, Bombardieri concluded that she could have kids without losing herself. After marrying Rocco, she had her first daughter in 1977, then her second in 1979. In 1981, The Baby Decision was born. She was pregnant with Vanessa, her youngest, while writing it on her typewriter. “I’d be going, ‘Click, click, click,’ and she’d be going, ‘Kick, kick, kick,’” Bombardieri says.

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She hoped the book would help other people unsure about parenthood and destigmatize the choice not to have children—which she argues should be the default position unless people are confident they want to bring kids into the world. Bombardieri hated the stereotype that child-free adults were selfish Peter Pans who just wanted to “lie in the sun and go on vacations,” because she felt the exact opposite tended to be true. “If you’re not going home and spending all weekend nurturing a young child, you have time and energy to do other things that make the world a better place,” she says.

Even 40 years later, with the U.S. fertility rate falling to record lows and heteronormative family structures no longer necessarily the standard, so-called pronatalism has surprising staying power. Bombardieri still considers people who choose not to have children “mavericks”—and although her book is neutral about the question of having kids, Bombardieri says the most emphatic thanks she gets are from child-free people who feel relieved that someone validated their choice.

“When I wrote my book in 1981, I would have assumed that by now there would be a lot more acceptance of child-free people than there is,” she says. But as it turns out, even in 2024—and perhaps especially in 2024, when Vice President–elect J.D. Vance’s suggestion that “childless cat ladies” shouldn’t have the same voting privileges as parents got a huge new platform during his campaign—child-free people need a voice, she says. That’s partly why she’s writing her new book. But it’s also a recognition that people’s worries about parenthood have changed even since the 2016 version of The Baby Decision.

Back in the ’80s, she says, people were still awakening to the reality that there are many ways to achieve happiness and that procreating is only one. Her book helped further that idea. The 2016 rerelease rose from a desire to share the wisdom won from her decades of coaching and therapy work, and to speak to the concerns of a generation that felt politically, economically, and socially unsettled. “I hope I have a long life,” she remembers thinking when it came out, “but if I died tonight, I’m so glad that I have these ideas out in the world.”

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In recent years, however, she began getting peppered with questions from her clients and Reddit followers that even the newer book couldn’t answer. Climate-crisis projections continue to intensify, leading some people to question the morality of having a child and others to fear what kind of world their future offspring would inherit. The rollback of reproductive rights has many people worried about what could happen if their pregnancy went wrong. Even many women in states with robust reproductive care now report deep fears about the risks of pregnancy and childbirth—because the news and social media are so full of horror stories that many women now think outcomes that are bad, but rare, are likely, Bombardieri believes. And many potential parents are worried about how a baby would change the division of labor in their partnership, a particularly relevant concern now that women outnumber men in the college-educated workforce.

It’s a fraught time for could-be parents. They are confronted, from one angle, with people like billionaire (and father many times over) Elon Musk arguing that declining birth rates will lead to societal collapse. On the other side, there’s a small but growing anti-natalism movement that argues it’s irresponsible to bring children into a violent and overpopulated planet plagued by a worsening climate crisis.

These forces clearly weigh on people, as more seem to be struggling with the baby decision than ever—enough that Bombardieri is training a handful of clinicians (including her daughter Vanessa) to continue her work in this burgeoning specialty.

Bombardieri is a decade postretirement age, after all. Once she finishes her forthcoming book, she’d like to get to a place where she can finally wrap up a long-gestating novel about surrogacy, write poetry, draw, and simply slow down, enjoying time with her friends, family, and husband.

The life she is heading toward, full of meaningful relationships and time for rest, relaxation, and contemplation, sounds an awful lot like the one she imagined for herself before deciding to have kids all those years ago. She gave up the peace and quiet of her daydreams for the messy unknown, making the leap that scares so many fence sitters. Did she ever regret it? 

“You know, certainly in the earliest years of parenting, when it was really taxing and two kids were crying at the same time or whatever, I would think, Life would be easier if I didn’t have a child,” Bombardieri says. “But I didn’t regret the decision. I just love my daughters so much and enjoy them so much.” 

That’s not to say Bombardieri hasn’t wondered, from time to time, what a different life might have brought with it. More travel and less financial stress, probably. More published books, maybe even an M.F.A. Bombardieri can clearly visualize that alternate route, and she seems neither guilty for admitting to its existence nor wistful about not having taken it. It’s merely a different ending to the choose-your-own-adventure book of her life—exactly the kind she’s trying to help fence sitters everywhere write for themselves.