Three women in San Francisco, the childless city, on why they opted out of parenthood | Canada Voices

Fertility rates in the U.S. dropped to a new all-time low last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week, with the latest data showing the general fertility rate falling by 1 per cent in 2025 – and down about 23 per cent since 2007.

This follows decades of falling fertility rates in Canada, too. Our fertility rate dropped to a record low in 2024, to about 1.25 children per woman – well below the replacement rate of 2.1. This has raised questions about the country’s economic future, as well as the changing demographic makeup of our cities and communities.

Earlier this year, The Globe and Mail visited San Francisco, which has the smallest child population of any major U.S. city at just 13 per cent. Residents increasingly choose to leave if they want to have a family, or they forgo having children altogether.

Experts cite a range of factors for this shift, from housing affordability and lack of access to child care to concerns about overpopulation and climate change.

Below, three women in San Francisco explain why they’ve made the decision to opt out of parenthood and live child-free by choice.

Jennifer Liu, 37

For decades, Ms. Liu assumed that she would one day have kids.

“You date. You get in a relationship. You talk about the future,” Ms. Liu said. “And marriage and children were just the end goal.”

But in her late 20s, shortly after getting engaged, she and her fiancé sat down and thought through what they wanted their future to look like.

“I realized there were only a few reasons why I would ever want to have children, and none of them were good reasons,” she said. “And I could think of an infinite amount of reasons of why I didn’t want kids.”

A big part of it, Ms. Liu said, is the state of the world – not wanting to bring kids into what she considers an especially dark time. She worries about the political climate in the U.S., and the future of the country under Donald Trump’s presidency. About families who refuse to vaccinate their children and school shootings. About climate change and the future of our planet.

“There’s just so much uncertainty.”

The other part of her decision, she said, is more personal.

“I don’t think I have the patience,” she said. “I just don’t think I’d actually be a good parent.”

Not having kids opened up a world of potential options for their future. It’s allowed them to travel and to live and work in different cities. They lived in Chicago and Boston before San Francisco and hope to experience other cities in the future.

And it allows them to spend time giving back in other ways, she said – through volunteering and building a chosen family with friends and neighbours.

”I care about the community I live in,” she said. “I care even though I don’t have kids.”

Brette Fitzgibbon, 33

Ms. Fitzgibbon’s decisions have been shaped in large part by the current political context.

The graduate student has always known she didn’t want to have kids. The world is already filled with too many inequities, she said.

“I don’t want to contribute life to this world that’s already so unequal between men and women.” And many of those inequities, she said, are exacerbated in parenthood – in the workforce, women are still punished for becoming mothers, while at home they’re still expected to take on the lion’s share of caregiving duties.

After 2016, Ms. Fitzgibbon said she watched with distress as the Trump administration put in place policies to restrict access to abortion and limit women’s reproductive rights.

The idea of not having autonomy over her body, she said, is intolerable.

“I don’t think about it just as a matter of the body. I think of it as a matter of your life – your circumstances,” she said. “Pregnancy is nine months. But then there’s the rest of your life.”

So in 2022, right around the time Roe v. Wade was overturned, Ms. Fitzgibbon chose to undergo a surgical sterilization procedure.

“The fact that they could overturn Roe v. Wade means anything can become law,” she said. “So I need to protect myself.”

Cynthia McKelvey, 36

In many ways, Ms. McKelvey’s story is the typical millennial one. She graduated from college amid a financial crisis. She moved to the San Francisco area for grad school and since then has built a career mostly from short-term jobs and contracts.

“I’ve never felt like I was really getting a strong financial foothold,” she said. “Just surviving.”

In her professional life, first as a journalist and more recently as a medical copywriter, she’s had to navigate precarious freelance work, layoffs and career changes.

Ms. McKelvey and her husband, a speechwriter, have been married since 2023. For the two of them, buying a home in one of the most expensive cities in the world seems unfathomable, let alone trying to do that with another dependent.

As it is, they’re finally in a place where they can indulge in a few luxuries, she said, such as a meal out or the occasional vacation. Having a kid would throw that balance out the window.

Still, she made clear that choosing a child-free life wasn’t entirely about finances. It’s also about freedom.

“I like that my life is not those things: not about sending the kids to school, and thinking about how to afford daycare and hobbies,” she said.

She emphasized how much thought has gone into her decision. Many of her friends who do have kids, she said, aren’t able to articulate their decision in the same way.

“What I’ve noticed is that people who are child-free have usually thought a lot more about what having a kid actually means,” she said. “Both for them and for the child.”