“Wanting to remain childfree meant not putting my health at greater risk.”
Knowing I didn’t want kids was much like knowing I was female: it felt like something I just always knew.
In many ways, it presented challenges to me – judgment from others, the loss of two romantic relationships that devastated me. But no matter what I stood to lose, I knew I would never be happy as a parent.
I knew it wasn’t the life I wanted. It wasn’t so much that I just didn’t want kids – it was that I wanted a life for myself in which I was not a parent. That life has been exactly what I’ve wanted – I’ve traveled around the world. I’ve focused on my career, spending nearly a decade as a television news reporter and now a career in communications/public service. I recently moved 3,000 miles from where I grew up, a lifelong dream. I know none of this would have been possible if I’d had kids.
Nine years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer while still in my 20s. I was put into early menopause for five years.
The first thing people asked me was, “Can you still have kids?” Because of the type of cancer I had, having kids would have been risky for me. Wanting to remain childfree meant not putting my health at greater risk.
It also meant not having to worry about freezing my eggs while navigating the physical and emotional minefield of a cancer diagnosis. It was one less thing to worry about in an otherwise difficult time in my life.
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