Should we have a baby? Four couples across Canada navigate the question | Canada Voices

How do couples decide whether or not to have children?

For decades now, economists and policy makers have debated Canada’s declining fertility rates. In 2024, that figure plunged to 1.25 births per average woman, placing Canada among the ranks of “ultra-low fertility” countries.

Over the past year, The Globe and Mail has been looking at the myriad factors that go into young people’s decisions to have fewer kids, or no kids at all. When asked individually, younger women and men cite a range of considerations – everything from housing affordability to career concerns, and fears around the state of the world.

In Canada’s major cities, fertility rates are in steep decline. What happened?

But for most families, it takes two to come to that decision – at least here in Canada, where about three-quarters of children are raised in two-parent families.

So what happens when the question moves from individual to couple? How do couples make the decision, together, on what shape their families will take? And what happens when their views don’t align? Or, as is often the case, when things don’t go as planned?

It’s a discussion that, for many couples, is a complicated one. A discussion that’s deeply personal, and tightly woven with so many other values – from how we feel about our work, our own identities, to our attitudes about the world around us.

“When those values are activated, couples get emotional,” said Patrick Hay, a Vancouver-based registered counsellor who works with families. “Emotional isn’t a bad thing. It just means that it’s personal and very, very important.”

The Globe spoke with four couples across Canada who let us in into the complicated, ever-shifting, and, yes, emotional conversation they’re having around kids.

The beginning of the relationship was like a whirlwind.

After Cassandra and Steve met online in 2017, things progressed quickly. Within a year, they were living together. And by the following year, they were engaged.

“We’re like mirror images of each other,” Cassandra said. “Our personalities and senses of humour are kind of one and the same.”

They had ideas of what their lives would look like together. A big wedding, a honeymoon in New York, more travel in the future. Kids – maybe? – sometime in the future.

But then COVID happened. And then Steve’s dad was diagnosed with cancer. On top of that, his mom, too, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“Everything just exploded,” said Cassandra. “The whole plan.”

The couple instead got married in a small ceremony in 2021. And in the years following, Steve would travel between Toronto and his parent’s home, about an hour away, to care for them. Cassandra, meanwhile, was dealing with her own health challenges, including several chronic conditions. Both of Steve’s parents died last year.

Since then, the conversation between the couple has turned, once again, to their own future.

Cassandra: Truthfully, we waffled a lot. We could see a future that had kids 50 per cent of the time, and then I think 50 per cent of the time it felt too overwhelmingly scary.

There was climate change. We lived in a teeny apartment. And I had student debt at the time. The idea of having a child with that suffocating level of debt seemed impossible. We just didn’t feel ready. It felt like systems were not in place for us.

Steve: Also, in our minds, we figured we’d get married, do a bit of travelling, and then in a year, maybe two, we’d start talking about family stuff. In my mind I thought we had a bit of a runway to make those decisions, to have those conversations. And then the whole world just decided to stop [when COVID-19 hit].

There were a lot of ups and downs. There would be points in time where I would have to be gone for one week, two weeks, living up at my parents’ place, taking care of them.

Cassandra: Steve and I are known as two people that have weathered storm after storm, and the kinds of storms that no one else that we know has had to deal with in the same way.

It’s been over half of our relationship, and that’s been really tough.

Steve: There was just never a point where Cass and I felt comfortable to say, “Hey, let’s take that plunge and also throw in an extra human into this equation.’ It felt like whenever we had a slight window, something else would transpire. Another hurdle for us to try to overcome.

But more recently, we’ve started to realize we’re not getting any younger.

Cassandra: It definitely feels like 2025 was shit or get off the pot. It was like, ‘five years just disappeared. We need to make a decision.’

Steve: We needed to start focusing on us. Let’s do something for us.

Prior to all this, we weren’t really sure whether that was our path. But then, as we started to grow our lives together, we would look at each other, and be like, ‘You’d be such a great dad,’ or ‘You’d be such a great mom.’

Cassandra: It was like, let’s throw it to the wind. We love kids. We have nephews. We have friends with kids.

Steve: So now we’re starting our path. I’m now 43. So we already feel like we’ve lost time.

Cassandra: Going through that level of adversity, in a way, has brought us closer. And we’ve been better able to communicate, and better able to utilize the time we have together meaningfully.

We feel emotionally ready. We’re moving into a two-bedroom apartment. We have everything in place. Now it’s just a race against the clock.

When they first started dating, Brenna and Brendan would talk about one day having a big family together.

Brenna had grown up in a family of three kids. And Brendan had grown up as one of four. “I wouldn’t have married somebody who didn’t want kids,” she said. The couple, who both work in finance, married in 2017, and bought their townhome together.

They already have two kids – a daughter, 3, and a son, who’s six months old – both conceived via IVF. They have one remaining frozen embryo, and are now debating whether to use it.

Brenna: We’re on two opposite sides on this, I think.

Brendan: It’s pretty early days right now. Our [younger] kid is not even six months. And it’s not easy.

Brenna: Our second-born, he’s very colicky. For the first three months, I was like, “What have we done? I’m never doing this again.’

Brendan: When it’s great, it’s great. But when it’s hard, it’s hard.

Brenna: But, as time progresses, I’m thinking that when we’re 60, 70, 80, we’re going to look back on this time, and we’re not going to remember how hard it was having babies. We’re just going to love our children and love our family.

I think that I could suffer through the short-term pain in order to have that long-term goal.

Brendan: For me, the question is: How much difficulty do we want to go through? How much do we want to go through? Because it’s not going to be easy.

Brenna: It was so much easier with one. We had more time for ourselves. It was easier to be like, ‘I’ll leave her with you for a couple hours. I can go out.’

Brendan: With one, you can actually carve aside some alone time. You can’t with two. And it would be even less with three.

Brenna: People talk about the freedom – that once your youngest kid is five, you gain back so much freedom. And I think what Brendan’s saying is that right now we’re four and a half years away from that. If we have another one, we’re going to be six, seven years away.

Brendan: Do we really want to go through all of that again for another eight months, six months, whatever it is? Do we want to go through that again?

Brenna: It’s going to be a mutual decision. Honestly, in a year from now, I think if I sat down with Brendan and said, ‘Absolutely I want to try. This is very important to me.’ I think he would.

But if he was like, “I absolutely don’t think we can do this,’ then I think I would be fine. We have two beautiful children. Maybe we get a dog. Either way, I think I would be okay.

Brendan: We’d have to figure it out. We’ll have to figure it out.

For David and Alon, it was never a question of whether to have kids, but rather, when.

The couple, who were married in 2023, are planners. They wanted to be established in their careers – in the case of Alon, who’s a pediatrician, to be finished with residency and all of his other medical training.

But since early last year, the couple has been settled in their own home in Ottawa, with a dog and a cat. Now they’re looking at growing their family. For the past year-and-a-half, they’ve been working with Anova, a fertility clinic, and successfully produced 10 embryos. They’re now in the process of trying to find a surrogate.

David: I grew up in a big family in Edmonton. I just loved having, like, that full house, the chaos of 10, 15 people in the kitchen, where everybody’s passing each other dishes to take out or bring back, or locate chairs, and someone’s spilled something on the carpet.

Alon: And I grew up in a smaller family, with one sibling. So it was always very important for me to grow our family. A bigger family, a big, busy, happy, loud, chaotic family was sort of always my dream.

I think it’s just having a sense of having people in your corner in this world. Just having a bit of a crew to lean into.

David: I wanted two kids. Somebody else in this room [points to Alon] wanted three kids. We’ve compromised on ideally having four kids [laughs]. But we will see how child one goes.

Alon: As much as we talk about these numbers – we can make whatever draft plan we want. And then life serves up whatever life serves up. I think our real answer is that we would love to have as big of a family as we’re able to, which in our situation is really not in our control in many ways.

David: Alon was much more active in terms of doing the initial research and understanding the timing. I thought we were going to have a little bit more time. So it was an educational process for me to understand that just because you’re going to start the process doesn’t mean it’s going to happen tomorrow.

Alon: We explored different ways, and ultimately wanted to go through a gestational surrogacy journey. From some very preliminary research, I understood that that can really take anywhere from three, four, five years – sometimes more.

David: It’s really hard to learn about same-sex couples going through surrogacy in Canada. And really hard to find resources in a way that is digestible.

Alon: We sort of flip flop between different feelings. On one hand, there’s immense gratitude because we live in a country that allows people like us to get married and to build a family, which is very special to Canada and definitely not the case in most of the rest of the world. And to have family and friends who are celebrating us in this journey.

At the same time, it’s a really complicated, emotionally draining and expensive journey. [They’ve had to pay out of pocket for most of the costs, which typically run well into six figures.] We just have to call it what it is. I think oscillating between those two emotional extremes is what the last year and a half has been.

David: We’ve very much been on the same page. This is the life that we’re building together. This is the family we’re building together. And this is going to continue being our priority until we’re there.

For Ruchu and Atindra, having their first child seemed easy.

The couple, originally from Nepal, moved to Canada together in 2015 as newlyweds. As new immigrants, they took some time getting settled before talking about starting a family. “Like every woman out there, I was looking for the ‘perfect time,’” said Ruchu.

A couple years later, they realized the timing would never be perfect. And, within two months of trying, Ruchu was pregnant. Their daughter was born in 2018.

Around 2020, they began trying for a second child. “We tried, and we tried, and we tried, we tried many times, and it didn’t work,” said Ruchu. They’ve visited four different fertility clinics, and still haven’t been able to get clear answers.

Ruchu: I had horrible experiences in the fertility clinics. Everyone would say, ‘You need to do this. You need to do that.’ But no one could tell me why I wasn’t getting pregnant.

Atindra: Having to go to IVF, it was my idea, to be honest.

Ruchu: I didn’t want to do IVF.

Atindra: We decided, ‘Okay, we’ve tried everything. And the only remaining options are to either forget about it, or try IVF. I wanted to try the last option we had available.

Ruchu: I was like, if you really think we can, we can try. But at the same time, I thought, ‘If it’s meant to be, it will happen.’ We can’t keep forcing this.

Atindra: So we tried IVF.

Ruchu: And I did fall pregnant. I was pregnant for six weeks.

Atindra: She was excited. But for me, it was like I was in a soccer game, waiting for the referee to blow the whistle. And suddenly, one day, she started to bleed.

Ruchu: After that, the conversation became, ‘do you want to keep going?’

We stopped going on vacations because I had to be monitored all the time. And with all the medications, I was starting to gain a lot of weight, and seeing a lot of mood swings. I didn’t like the kind of mom that I was becoming to my daughter.

I see the conversation as more to be present for the kid who is already here, rather than to push for something that’s not here

Atindra: You have to stop at some point. Otherwise we won’t have time to live life. We would be miserable.

Ruchu: When people see that we like kids, they tell us to keep going. They say, ‘why are you giving up?’ I know that they mean well, but it doesn’t feel right.

I feel like I didn’t get a choice. I didn’t get to see how I wanted my family to look like.

Atindra: People think it’s super easy to have a baby.

Ruchu: Today, I think the conversation’s closed completely. Realistically, I don’t want to put in more effort. We don’t want to grow our expectations.

Atindra: For me, mentally, I’m done.

Ruchu: Still, I think, as humans, the hope never really goes away. We’re always hoping.