Article in Yesterday's Irish Times

My apologies - just thought the article might be of interest.
Esp the below excerpt:

While infertility continues to cause a host of issues in relationships, including marital conflicts and emotional distress, according to Dr Rita Glover, assistant professor in psychotherapy at Dublin City University (DCU), problems can also arise in a relationship where a person is at odds with their partner about the decision to procreate.

Dr Rita Glover says there has to be an acknowledgement for women’s ‘innate wisdom’ when it comes to making this lifelong decision.

“When a woman chooses to be voluntarily childless, she’s actually beginning to make a decision very much for the relationship as well,” says Glover, “and what you don’t want to happen is that there would be resentment build-up from the partner who gave up the choice to have children.”


In 2019, Dr Glover supervised a research study on voluntary childlessness to gain some insight into the lived experiences of women who were deciding to be childless. Conducted by Deirdre O’Keeffe, during her final year in the MSc psychotherapy programme in DCU, the qualitative research study examined women in the 30-48 age group.

Using a phenomenological hermeneutical method– which focuses on the lived experiences of participants – the analysis uncovered four common experiences for the childless women in the study, one of which was being fearful.

“Sometimes having a fear or being concerned about something is a good pointer to one’s psychological and physical survival,” says Dr Glover, “and for some women, the bit about being well in their mind and their body is tied up with being voluntarily childless.

“That is not seen to be a deficit,” she says, “and that is what we found in our study, that it’s not a deficit to really be prepared to look after your mental health and your physical health by choosing to be childless.”

Dr Glover also says there has to be an acknowledgement for women’s “innate wisdom” when it comes to making this lifelong decision.

“There can be some kind of an innate wisdom in that [choosing to be childless] for some women who on some deep level know that this is not the right choice for them, that it’s not the right thing for them to have children. So it’s almost like we need to acknowledge women’s innate wisdom by these things, and to be fearful that it [having children] might compromise your mental health or your physical health can be a good decision for women,” she explains.

Deirdre O’Keeffe, who is now a psychotherapist with TCD Student Counselling Service, was the lead researcher in this study, one of the first of its kind.


“The literature that’s currently available on voluntary childlessness – and there’s very little in terms of an Irish experience,” she says, “but the literature that is available currently doesn’t really speak to what emerged in this study because it was about the physical and psychological fears that women had around it.”

This fear was an existential warning within these women’s systems saying motherhood is not the right path for me, I will lose my life if I become a mother
She says some women in the study don’t believe being a mother is a completion of their womanhood, and the fear experienced by these women is far beyond any fear felt by first-time mothers.

“This fear was an existential warning within these women’s systems saying motherhood is not the right path for me, I will lose my life if I become a mother. I will lose my identity if I become a mother. There is nothing to gain at the end of this for me. It’s not that common story of natural fear of first-time mothers and then the baby being the reward that changes their life. That’s not how these women felt about motherhood,” explains O’Keeffe.

However, O’Keeffe says there is great freedom in this choice for these respondents: “This particular cohort of women were actively looking forward to the ageing process and the onset of menopause because that would represent being free first of all of the physical capacity to become pregnant and also being free of the intrusive questioning that people in their lives, well-meaning, nice people, but people being maybe a bit nosier than they should be.

“These people insist that ‘it’s not too late, you still have time’ but science has widened that gap between when women stop getting told what they want biologically in terms of their fertility,” she adds.