For some women the ultimate life goal is happily settling down with a family, but for many others it’s just not the case. These celebs are standing up for their choice not to have kids.
#1. Kim Cattrall says, “I try not to listen to the shoulds or coulds.”
“[I] try to get beyond expectations, peer pressure, or trying to please — and just listen. I believe all the answers are ultimately within us.”
“When I answered those questions regarding having children, I realized that so much of the pressure I was feeling was from outside sources, and I knew I wasn’t ready to take that step into motherhood.”
#2. Jennifer Aniston simply says, “I don’t think it’s fair.”
“I don’t like [the pressure] that people put on me, on women — that you’ve failed yourself as a female because you haven’t procreated. You may not have a child come out of your vagina, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t mothering — dogs, friends, friends’ children.”
“This continually is said about me: that I was so career-driven and focused on myself; that I don’t want to be a mother, and how selfish that is.”
#3. “I wouldn’t want to screw them up,” laughs Ellen DeGeneres.
“We’d probably be great parents. But it’s a human being, and unless you think you have excellent skills and have a drive or yearning in you to do that, the amount of work that that is, and responsibility.”
#4. Katherine Hepburn wrote in her memoir, “I would have been a terrible mother because I’m basically a very selfish human being…”
“…not that that has stopped most people going off and having children.”
#5. “If I had kids, my kids would hate me,” Oprah Winfrey told a reporter.
“They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”
#6. Cameron Diaz: “It’s so much more work to have children.”
“To have lives besides your own that you are responsible for — I didn’t take that on. That did make things easier for me. A baby — that’s all day, every day for eighteen years,” said Cameron in an interview.
“Not having a baby might really make things easier, but that doesn’t make it an easy decision. I like protecting people, but I was never drawn to being a mother.”
#7. “I often think it just wasn’t meant for me to have kids so everybody’s kids can be mine,” says Dolly Parton.
“”I grew up in a big old family with eight kids younger than me and several of my brothers and sisters came to live with me early on in my life. I’ve loved their kids just like they’re my grandkids, and now I’ve got great-grand-kids!”
#8. Helen Mirren: “It was not my destiny.”
“I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn’t care what people thought,” she told the Telegraph.
#9. Khloe Kardashian: “People assume I’m desperate for a baby.”
“And yes, I would love to have a baby. But I’m 28, and I’ve been married three and a half years. I love my life, but it doesn’t feel incomplete right now,” she said.
#10. Renee Zellweger, “Motherhood has never been an ambition.”
She told the London Times, “I don’t think like that. I never have expectations like, ‘When I’m 19 I’m going to do this, and by the time I’ve hit 25 I’m going to do that.’ I just take things as they come, each day at a time, and if things happen, all well and good.”
#11. “With kids, your focus changes,” said Stevie Nicks.
“It’s like, ‘Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover?’ I don’t want to go to PTA meetings”, she told one magazine.
Sing it, sisters — your body, your choice.