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The day after my boyfriend proposed, his mother asked me, “How do you want to raise your kids?” My boyfriend wanted five children. I was ambivalent. But in the face of his declaration that he wanted to marry me — and start procreating ASAP — the baby question became urgent. I deferred his proposal, and we spent the next six months arguing, often about our possible children. At some point, I went online in search of help, where I discovered a book: The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life, by the therapist and “baby decision coach” Merle Bombardieri.
Originally published in 1981, The Baby Decision is a thinking person’s self-help book. It pairs existential musings on regret with workbook-style prompts — less airport paperback, more in the tradition of the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom with a dash of The Artist’s Way. In our fraught moment of diminishing reproductive rights and demographic panic, this book has become an unlikely cult bible for the baby ambivalent, a group whose ranks have been growing among 30-something millennials in the U.S. Reasons for my generation’s protracted decision-making are, by now, common knowledge: Some worry about housing and health-care costs, others about the environment and political climate. Thanks in part to egg-freezing, which became commercially available in the U.S.
