To bear or not to bear children: that’s the question asked of us even when we’re not asking it of ourselves. Nearly all of the writers in the anthology Shallow, Selfish, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (Picador) tell stories of being insistently, publicly, impudently asked to justify their choice not to reproduce. These writers express the imperative as feminists to demand an end to this question—and all of the attendant societal pressures and expectations that come with it.

Essayist and longstanding Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum edited the collection “to lift the discussion out of the familiar rhetoric, which so often pits parents against non-parents and assumes the former are self-sacrificing and mature ...