Linda Rooney founded No Kidding, a website for women, like her, who were unable to have children.

On her birthday every year Emma* has this conversation with her womb: "Hey buddy, how are we doing down there? Are we good? Quite happy drinking bourbon and eating sushi? Shall we carry on doing that?"

Children, she says categorically, are not in the great life plan.

Not having children affords her the freedoms she cherishes - travelling, spending quality time with her partner, a disposable income, getting out of bed whenever she chooses.



At 36 she's pretty sure she won't be changing her mind. She doesn't hear a biological clock ticking or see a window of opportunity closing.



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The only window of opportunity she sees is accomplishing what she wants to accomplish in her life.



"My window is not focused on the timing of having children. My priorities are my career, my relationship, travelling."



The fact that people are even talking about women choosing to be child-free in 2017 baffles her.

"The fact that it's even a thing angers me. I don't want to feed into that but I also want to defend it," says the Wellington writer.



What drives Emma "nuts" is when people assume she'll change her mind.



It's never a malicious thing, she says.



"It's so well meaning. That's the problem, it's just so ingrained but you feel like some raging angry feminist bi..h if you start getting defensive about it.

"But I refuse to believe that everyone on this planet wants children because to me that's one heck of a coincidence, that everyone wants the same thing in life - the mortgage, the picket fences, the two or three kids."

Teresa Woodham, a retired psychotherapist and counsellor, is childless by circumstance.

Emma is resigned to carry on defending her choice to be child-free.

"It's no different from having to defend ourselves for wearing a low cut top or having three martinis or anything else women choose to do."



FASTEST GROWING DEMOGRAPHIC



Motherhood and womanhood seem inexorably linked in our society. And yet, with the global cohort of child-free women growing, change is in the air.



Women who don't have children are the fastest growing demographic in the developed world. Currently one in five women born since the mid-1970s are child-free. For women born in 1975, indications are that around 1 in 4 will not have children.



Sarah* is one of them.



The 29 year-old administrator from Hawke's Bay has three godchildren she dotes on. She loves spoiling them for birthdays and Christmas. She loves babysitting and playing with them. But, boy, does she love handing them back to their parents at the end of the day.



"I have a maternal instinct for my godchildren - I look after them, I worry about them, I care about them, but I just don't want that responsibility full-time.



"I just don't think looking after children is my number one want in life. I'd much rather spend time with other people's children without having to have any of my own."



Sarah is convinced motherhood is not for her. That decision was sealed after the trauma she went through when she unexpectedly fell pregnant last year.



"The feeling I had when I found out I was pregnant is not how you are supposed to feel. It was complete dread. You'd think that some sort of maternal instinct would have kicked in but for me it didn't. I didn't feel good. I did not want this thing in my body. It was a horrible negative reaction. I knew I wasn't ready and it made me feel I may never be ready.

"When I miscarried it was horrible but it was a bit of a relief. I feel for people who go through this who want a child but I was pleased my body had got rid of it naturally, as opposed to having something done about it."

Linda Rooney founded No Kidding, a website for women, like herself, who were unable to have children.

Sarah and her partner, who have been together for three years, are on the same page. They want a life together and that life does not include their own children.

"People think of a family as parents and children. I'm more interested in a family being me, my partner and some pets. That's a family too.



"I have friends who say to me 'But you have to have kids.' and I say 'Actually, no, I don't.'"



While she doesn't completely rule out having a child, she doesn't see motherhood in her future. She doesn't want the financial or emotional burden.



"I don't want to be constantly chasing after children, to be financially strained by school fees and kids camps. I'm not anti-children - it's just not something that's in the plan for me.



People are becoming more aware of a woman's right to reject motherhood, to choose her own path, she says.



"It's still an issue, just look at Jacinda Ardern being picked apart about whether she's going to get pregnant or not and how she'd cope if she did."



But with the growing number of women who don't want children, that status is becoming more the norm, she says.



SOCIAL INFERTILITY



But consider another cohort of child-free women - the "circumstantially childless".



Dr Lois Tonkin, counsellor at Genea Oxford Fertility Clinic and lecturer at Canterbury University interviewed 26 New Zealand women in their 30s and 40s who were circumstantially childless, that is, women who expected to have children but found themselves at the end of their natural fertility without having done so.



What struck her was how secretive women were about their childlessness. Those women often didn't talk to anyone about how they felt, even to other women they thought might be in the same circumstance, in case those women were sitting on the same level of emotional pain as they were and didn't want to "open Pandora's box".



Childlessness through circumstance, or social infertility as it is sometimes referred to as, is a rapidly growing phenomenon in the western world and yet there was very little research and discussion about it beyond insensitive wisecracks: think coffee mugs screaming "Oh no! I forgot to have children", says Tonkin.

Aside from that kind of comic response to it there was nothing that acknowledged the extraordinary level of anguish women were describing, or their sense of loneliness and isolation around other women.

Many of the women she interviewed who described themselves as circumstantially childless felt there was this added sense that if they had made different choices in their lives at various times then they wouldn't be in this situation.

"A lot of women feel it is their fault. They said it wasn't about their choice but the outcome of the choices that they had made. Because of this they felt they were not eligible for other people's support and that other people didn't understand. Certainly most of the women said they felt alone and isolated."

Many struggled with their identity as feminists.

These women were often raised by second wave feminists in the 1970s, and grew up with the idea that you can do anything, then found ouy that that's not how it worked out for them, says Tonkin.

"Very often they had this sense of a particular strand of feminism that really encourages women to do something else instead of mothering, or before mothering, that positioned motherhood as being a kind of entrapment, something that women did that demeaned them in some way.

"For many there's a sense that the understanding they had of feminism has let them down, because the ideals they were holding on to, and the choices they made, saw them end up in a situation they didn't want to be in at all."

There still existed that cliche, in a society where motherhood seems so often linked with womanhood and femininity, that women are nurturers and if you don't have a child to nurture, you are hard and barren.

Many of the women Tonkin spoke to felt perceived by others as hard or uncaring or uninterested in children.

"Men don't get this in the same way at all. Being a man and being a father is not linked as inextricably as being a woman and a being a mother.

"There's a huge historical weight to childless women. Women who haven't had children have been regarded as witches or dangerous women, the difficult ones, right throughout history. But men have not been perceived that way. Men have been perceived as the ones who go off and have great adventures."

Tonkin, who used the research to pen her forthcoming book, Motherhood Missed: Stories of loss and living from women who are childless by circumstance, says with the child-free demographic growing it would be surprising if there wasn't a pushback to a judgmental society.

"Things are shifting and changing in what is regarded as the family unit. I can't see that things won't shift for childless women. It will become something that's more readily understood, known about and talked about."

Talking about it is what we should be doing, says Teresa Woodham, a retired psychotherapist and counsellor.

Woodham is herself childless by circumstance. Having children was always something she wanted to do some day. By the time she was ready it was too late, she says.

Society's judgement of women who don't have children is changing but it's extraordinarily gradual, she says.

"It's a bit like homosexuality was 40 years ago. Women are starting to come out of the closet about being childless. For so many years, not having children has been associated with a sense of failure. Women carry that sense of shame and embarrassment. That's why it's fantastic to see this online community like Gateway Women gathering momentum."

Gateway Women, founded by British author Jody Day, is a global friendship and support network for child-free women. Day, also circumstantially childless, has millions of followers worldwide and is a regular on the speaking circuit. In a TED talk earlier this year, she said her growing cohort, which she calls The Lost Tribe of Childless Women, exists in a huge cultural blind spot.

But groups like these are encouraging women to break this taboo of being invisible, says Woodham.

"That's the only way it's going to change - by women saying 'this is my story', by acknowledging in themselves that there are other ways to be fulfilled and to have a rich and satisfying life as a woman in the 21st century without being a mother.

"Women who are childless can be judged very harshly by society. There's still a perception that you have failed as a woman.

"But it's an exciting time for women who are choosing to be defined not by their child producing, child-rearing abilities. God knows, the world needs mother energy now more than ever. Women are realising that there are so many other ways they can put that energy into the world."

Still, there are times of the year that smart.

Look at any festive advertisement and there's bound to be a narrative around a cute kid and doting parent. Single women, gay couples, not so much.

Christmas time is brutal, not only for women who are unable to become mothers but also for women who choose not to be mothers, says Woodham.

They are bombarded with the message that the nuclear family is essential to the Christmas story.

All the advertising and focus on "family" reminds women that they don't have children and they will never have children, says Linda Rooney who founded No Kidding, a website for women, like her, who were unable to have children.

"People are always saying 'Christmas is all about the children' and immediately it makes you feel separate and alone. It can be a reminder for women who wanted to have children that they don't and they won't."

Rooney, a self-employed marketing consultant, started No Kidding seven years ago as a way to reach others who were in a similar situation to her own.

She gets about 1000-2000 hits a week from women who want to talk about their lives without children.

"You are not a real women till you have children", "You don't know love till you're a mother" - these are some of the comments her online community get bombarded with every day, Rooney says.

Women, men, couples who don't have children are one in five now. They are a big group with a huge disposable income, and yet they are ignored by advertisers, she says.

"Politicians are really good at ignoring us too. Coming up to an election it's just 'family, family, family'. It's all about doing this for our children and our children's children. The implication is if you don't have children you don't have any investment in the future of your country or you don't have any interest in the future of this country or you don't matter."

And yet the contribution that childless people make is high. They fill in at work when parents have to leave work to look after a sick kid. They volunteer in large numbers. They are a very real contributing part of society and yet they are ignored.

* Names have been changed

The facts

* According to Statistics New Zealand, in 2013, 16 per cent of women aged 40–44 years were childless, up from 15 per cent in 2006 and 12 per cent in 1996 and 9 per cent in 1981.

* In 1981, the proportion of women aged 45–49 years who were childless was 9 per cent. This increased to 10 per cent in 1996, to 13 per cent in 2006, and then to 16 per cent in 2013.

* This trend of increasing childlessness is also apparent in other developed countries. In Australia, in 1981, 9 per cent of women aged 40–44 years had no children. In 2006, the proportion had risen to 16 per cent.

* The trend is expected to continue. For women born in 1975, indications are that around 1 in 4 may remain childless.