Denver Metro No Kidding chapter is here.

Almost 20% of women 40 to 44 years old are childless, compared with 10% in 1980, and it's especially hard to be childless in Utah.

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Childless in America's baby capital

By Elaine Jarvik
Deseret Morning News

      Sometimes, on her way from women's clothes to the shoe section at Wal-Mart, Becky Skolmoski finds that she has drifted by mistake into the baby aisle. On these occasions, looking up to suddenly find herself in a sea of tiny pink and blue outfits, Skolmoski feels suddenly rudderless and lost, overwhelmed by the details of what she doesn't have.
Mark and Becky Skolmoski stand in a supermarket baby aisle. They say it's especially hard to be childless in Utah.
Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret Morning News      In Utah, she says, there are babies everywhere she looks. And, after six years of trying to get pregnant, she is the only one of her longtime friends who is still childless. She wonders if maybe she and Mark should just move to a different state, one where it might not feel so weird to be a 27-year-old married woman without children.
      Heartache over infertility doesn't know any state boundaries, of course. And Utah didn't invent babies. But children are arguably the state's most famous product, the way Idaho is famous for potatoes. "Baby capital of the nation" is the way demographer Ken R. Smith puts it. Utah's high birthrate (the highest in the nation), young marriages (four years younger than the national average) and a dominant religion that encourages procreation all add up to an environment that is more difficult for people who are childless, Skolmoski says.
      "Almost the first question people ask you when they meet you is, 'How many kids do you have?' " says Pauline Edwards, who is 47 and single. In other places she has lived, Edwards says,"the focus isn't on whether you have children."
      Or grandchildren. "Everybody assumes you have grandkids," says a 77-year-old Salt Lake widow. The other night, when her furnace stopped working, she called the gas company and was told to call a heating contractor. "What if I was 90 and all my income went to my medicine," she asked the Questar representative. "He said, 'Well, you'd have to get one of your kids to help you out.' "
      For Utahns who are childless by choice, the assumptions carry less emotional weight but are still awkward. Geriatric physician Fred Gottlieb says most of his patients ask him if he and his wife have children. "When I say 'no,' it's a conversation stopper."

Babies everywhere
      There are babies everywhere, but at the same time childlessness is on the rise — even in Utah but especially in America at large.
      One way to measure this is to look at a statistic called "children ever born," and then to zero in on the age category 40 through 44 (assumed, by demographers, to be at the end of their child-bearing years). In 1980, 10 percent of women in this age group had never given birth. In 2000, the percentage had nearly doubled.
      David Popenoe, professor of sociology at Rutgers University and co-director of its National Marriage Project, lists these as the reasons: "Women are marrying later and may marry so late that their clock has ticked too far. . . . Then there's another group that's into their career so much they haven't found a man or they don't have time to have children. And then there's another group that we're hearing more about, who choose not to have children because they feel they have better things to do." Popenoe, whose phrasing might make some women and couples cringe, readily admits his pro-marriage, pro-children bias.
      In "The State of Our Unions, 2003," a report issued by the National Marriage Project, Popenoe and his colleagues also concluded that "indeed, though Americans aspire to marriage, they are ever more inclined to see it as an intimate relationship between adults rather than as a necessary social arrangement for rearing children."
      According to the report, a 2001 Gallup Poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans surveyed (and nearly 80 percent of 20- to 29-year-olds) disagreed with the statement that "the main purpose of marriage is having children."
Joanne Siekierski, who calls herself "Dawgmom," has never wanted children but enjoys raising puppies from the Humane Society.
Joshua Brown, for the Deseret Morning News      A research study of changing attitudes about family issues, published two years ago in the "Journal of Marriage and Family," found that "the 'oughtness' that used to be associated with parenthood has been removed for a substantial fraction of people in the United States today." In 1962, 85 percent of mothers queried felt that "all married couples who can ought to have children." The number had dropped to about 40 percent by 1980 and has remained at that level.
      At the same time, however, the same study noted that "the number of young people expecting to remain childless is quite small."
      Popenoe points to child-free communities and the growing number of households without children (fewer than a third of American households now include children) — a trend influenced in large part by increased longevity. Out of sight, out of mind has led to "a loss of child-centeredness," he says. "There are cases where people have voted down school bonds because they don't want to pay for other people's kids."
      Popenoe, who says he has no sympathy for childless people who complain that the workplace favors workers with children, does admit that it's a myth that people with children are happier than those without children.
      "Many statistics have shown that the arrival of the first baby commonly has the effect of pushing the mother and father further apart and bringing stress to the marriage," he writes. Still, couples with children have a slightly lower rate of divorce than childless couples, he adds.
      There are no "children ever born" statistics state by state. "But from research I have done," says Pam Perlich of the University of Utah's Bureau of Economic and Business Research, "there are more childless women (in Utah) than 20 years ago. We're not immune from social trends."
      "We have one of the most effective forms of contraception (in Utah): female full-time employment," notes Ken R. Smith, professor in the department of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah. "One could argue that the more empowered a woman becomes, the more she may be able to exert her wishes about family planning in a way she couldn't if she was not employed." As a general rule, he says, "If you talk to couples and put the husbands and wives in different rooms, the men report wanting more children and the women less."


Deseret Morning News graphicChildless by choice
      And sometimes neither the husband nor the wife wants any children at all. In some cities, groups such as No Kidding! are flourishing, providing outlets for those who prefer their social interactions to be with people who don't talk about breast-feeding and piano lessons. Child Free, they call themselves; Child Burdened, they call the folks with children. For some, the decision not to have children is motivated by a sense that the world already has too many inhabitants. ("May we live long and die out" is the motto of The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.)
      Gottlieb and his wife, Cindy, married when he was 38 and she 40, and both already had established, demanding health-care careers. Neither had any great urge to be parents, neither was pressured by their parents to produce grandchildren and shortly after they married, they moved to Africa, where he was a medical director in the Peace Corps. "There was no question of having kids there," he says. Plus, he says, "I have no arrogance about my gene pool."
      What Cindy's parents passed on was a belief that "you don't have to be married or have children to be happy," she says.
      Fred, the kind of compassionate, diligent physician whom people thank in obituaries, says he barely has enough time as it is without the demands of children. "I don't know how people can do this kind of work and still have time to spend with their family and still have time for their own self-preservation."
Deseret Morning News graphic      Like many other childless couples and singles, they report that once their friends had babies, those friends suddenly had no time for Fred and Cindy. And like some other childless couples and singles, they think of their home as "a safe haven for other people's kids."
      What about someone to take care of you when you're old yourself, the reporter asks. "That's a Third World reason to have children," Gottlieb says.

One woman's story
      Joanne Siekierski never wanted children either. Can't even stand the smell of disposable diapers. Is not one of those women at work who rush toward a visiting baby, eager to get her hands on its pudgy cheeks.
      Siekierski is a warm, enthusiastic woman who has a standing date every weekend with an elderly woman from her old neighborhood. Maybe some women just don't have the urge to be a mother, she says — although once, near the end of her marriage, she and her then-husband nearly adopted a 13-year-old girl.
      She wonders if her disinterest in babies began when she was 5, when her own mother told her, "Don't have kids 'cause they're not worth it." And there was that birthing movie in high school, one of those awful movies where the mother is screaming. And then her marriage to a man who had a child from a previous marriage and told her that "kids mess up a marriage."
      For five years, Siekierski has been a foster mom to puppies from the Humane Society. The dogs aren't a substitute for children, she says, but are definitely a place to focus her desire to nurture. "Dawgmom," her license plate says.
      Jenny Peterson is single, LDS and 30 — and jokes that "that makes me an old maid around here." She has traveled, has a good job, paints watercolors, takes tai chi, is always busy. It's a fulfilling life, she says, but she still wants children.
Deseret Morning News graphic      "I decided I'll give myself 10 years — if I'm not married by then, I'll look into adoption." About a quarter of adoptive parents who adopted last year through the agency "Families For Children" were single women, director Suzanne Stott says.
      Peterson is relieved that her church is, in her view, "trying to be more aware of single members. . . . I hear a lot now, 'You can still be a mother, even if you don't have kids.' . . . I've been happy to see that focus."
      She and her single friends admire Sheri Dew, who until recently was a leader of the LDS Relief Society and is single. "Motherhood is more than bearing children," Dew told women gathered for the annual Relief Society meeting in 2001; it's about "loving and leading." Still, she added, the inability to bear children for any reasons is difficult for "righteous women."
      "I don't know of many devout, practicing Mormons who are voluntarily childless," demographer Smith says. "It has to be a rare thing."
      And for women who want children but can't have them, going to church can be a painful experience.
      "We stopped going to church," says a woman who has tried for years to get pregnant. "It was supposed to be the most uplifting day, but it wasn't. I'd go home depressed." Church is "one of the worst places," agrees Becky Skolmoski. All of a sudden, she says, she'll look up and there will be a little girl stroking a mom's face, the kind of tender moment she always imagined for herself.

Learning the lingo
      IUI, IVF, HSG, donor eggs, fragmenting eggs, egg retrieval — Resolve meetings have their own lingo, a language that blends science, disillusionment and hope. A Salt Lake Valley chapter of Resolve (also known as the National Fertility Association) meets once a month at Alta View Hospital.
      On a recent evening, several Resolve members sat around a table and shared tips and gripes. They fretted over the fact that most insurance plans in Utah don't cover infertility treatments (but do cover Viagra), and that the waiting list in Utah to see a reproductive endocrinologist is six to eight months. They noted that women in Utah find out they're infertile at a younger age than in many other states, which means their eggs have a better chance of being healthier. The downside, they said, is that some doctors here aren't as well-versed in treating older infertile couples.
      Over the course of the three-hour meeting the mood bounced back and forth between lighthearted and sad, sometimes within the same sentence, punctuated by both tears and jokes. ("Apparently he impregnated a hamster," one woman reported about her husband's "sperm penetration assay" procedure. "You'll never have to get your kids a costume for Halloween," said the woman next to her, laughing.)
      "What I hate about Utah is what I love about Utah," says Susanne Schmutz, who heads up the Resolve chapter. "I love the families and the good values. But I'm so jealous that they have so many kids. I feel like an outcast."
      Schmutz mentioned statistics she had received from her reproductive endocrinologist, Dr. Harry Hatasaka, who said that the proportion of infertile couples is smaller in Utah than in other states — partly because of the lower incidence of sexually transmitted disease but more likely because when women marry younger their "ovarian reserve" has not diminished yet.
      Hatasaka also told Schmutz that "innumerable young infertile women have complained to me that the pressure placed on them by their families to conceive is unbearable."
      Schmutz, 27, has been trying to get pregnant for six years. One by one her friends have stopped calling, she says. Instead, they call other mothers to talk about mother things: pacifiers and soccer games and Halloween costumes. "The phone doesn't ring, except for other infertile women," Schmutz says. "I feel so alone."
      "My friends in Texas aren't like that," says one of the women around the table, who moved to Utah a year ago. "They don't just think about their children. . . . If I can't get pregnant, I wouldn't want to live here. I'd want to live someplace where I'd have support."
      Schmutz, who teaches kindergarten, recounted a recent night at a nice restaurant, in celebration of her birthday. There, at the next table, was a mother and father and little baby. "I started bawling," Schmutz admits. "I had to put the napkin in front of my face." What scared her, she confessed, was that she and her husband were spending all their money on infertility treatments that might not work, making sacrifices that she worried might hurt their marriage. "We had to leave," she reported. "We had to leave our food on our plates."

Ready-made family
      Sally Barfuss has 26 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, whose pictures line the hall of her Midvale home. These are technically her stepgrandchildren; their parents are the stepchildren who became her instant family when she married their widowed father 26 years ago, when she was 42.
      "I've got a good life. I've got people who love me," Barfuss says. "But there's something in the back of my mind that says, 'There's something I've missed by not bearing a child.' " At 43 she suffered a miscarriage, and all these years later her voice still breaks when she talks about it. "Every time I hold a newborn grandchild, my arms feel empty."
      Across the street, Becky Skolmoski knows how she feels. After six years of trying and $10,000 spent, out-of-pocket, on infertility treatments, she finally got pregnant last winter — and miscarried eight weeks later. "I feel like a failure," she says.
      The Skolmoskis decided this fall that they would stop the infertility treatments and would adopt, but then Mark was laid off from Evans and Sutherland so now those plans are on hold.
      Adoption will bring its own trials, says Stott of Families For Children. Stott herself was once married to a man with impaired fertility. "You feel so second-class," she says. "Other women can so easily get pregnant. Teenage girls can get pregnant. One-night stands. But you have to fill out forms, be evaluated, have strangers invade your life. It's so humiliating," she says about both the adoption processes.
      And there are the questions and assurances from well-meaning friends and family, she says. Questions like, "Don't you have enough faith?" and statements like "Now that you've adopted a baby, maybe the Lord will bless you with some of your own."
      As for Skolmoski — who is LDS, who has always wanted to be a mom, who in grade school decided she wanted to be the first woman to have a baby in space — she's stopped going to baby showers, at least for now. But sometimes, just to test herself, she'll wander through the baby aisle at Wal-Mart or the grocery store. "To see if I am strong enough to walk through it without feeling sad," she explains. "And when that does happen, I feel like I can get on with my life. You know, quit waiting for something that might never happen and focus on who I want to be outside of being a mother."
      "Lord," pleads a sign on the inside of her front door, "grant me patience. But hurry."

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com

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