Kyra Hailey remembers “caring” for a fake baby on the night of her 16th birthday. The common high school assignment is meant to discourage teen pregnancy but, according to one study, might actually encourage it. That wasn’t the case for Hailey. “I failed because I shook the ‘baby,’ because I was so mad that it was taking away my sleep,” she tells Yahoo. “That was the day I knew that I didn’t want kids.”
For the next 12 years, her mother, friends and doctors insisted she would change her mind about having children when she was older, when she met someone. They warned her against having sterilization surgery to permanently prevent pregnancy. But two weeks ago, at age 28, Hailey got a full hysterectomy — a sterilization procedure that involved removing her uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes. She says she has no regrets about her life-altering decision. In fact, Hailey thinks it may improve her dating life in the future.
Before her surgery, Hailey was petrified of getting pregnant, so much so that she avoided dating and sexual intimacy for years. When she finally did start dating a coworker at age 23, she told him she didn’t want kids. But he ignored her wishes. Twice, she caught him taking off the condom while they were having sex — a practice known as “stealthing,” which is a civil offense in some parts of the U.S. and is a crime in some countries. When Hailey’s period was late, she panicked and took a pregnancy test. She wasn’t pregnant, but her boyfriend found the test and got excited. “That’s when I realized he was purposely trying to impregnate me, even though I had told him that I did not want kids,” she says.
In the past 20 years, the share of Americans who don’t have children and don’t want them has doubled, according to recent research: In 2002, only 14% of adults without kids said they didn’t eventually want children. By 2023, that figure had risen to 29%, a Michigan State University study found. The main reason cited by people under 50 in a 2024 Pew survey was simply that they don’t want to have children (57%). A desire to focus on other things (44%), concerns about the state of the world (38%) and the expense of raising a child (36%) were also commonly reported reasons among under-50s.
The choice to be child-free is becoming more common, and so are elective procedures to permanently prevent pregnancy. The subreddit “r/childfree” has 1.6 million members. Between June 2022 — when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned federal protections for abortion — and September 2023, sterilization procedures soared among adults 30 and under. Female sterilization procedures doubled in that time period, and male sterilization procedures ticked up too. Rates of sterilization were already climbing before the Supreme Court’s decision, increasing by about three additional procedures per 100,000 women each month. After the Dobbs decision, that monthly increase jumped to nearly 60 per 100,000, according to research done by the University of Pittsburgh.
Undergoing sterilization solves one problem for those who know they don’t want kids. But it can open the door to new ones — especially when it comes to dating and social interactions. And, like Hailey, many people who tell friends, family and potential partners that they don’t want (or can’t have) children are met with reactions that range from dismissive to plain weird and even offensive.
Sterilization: A quietly common form of birth control
It’s easy to assume that oral contraceptives, which revolutionized women’s place in society, are the most common form of birth control. But it’s actually female sterilization — and it has been for a long time. Permanent contraception is the method chosen by 11.6% of women using any birth control (though oral contraceptives are close behind and are taken by 11.5% of women using any method). Most women who undergo these procedures are older and already have children. While mothers still make up the majority of sterilized women, the number of young women choosing permanent contraception is growing. So is the number of young, childless men having vasectomies (male sterilization procedures).
“I think that social media has a lot to do with that,” ob-gyn Dr. Franziska Haydanek, known on TikTok as “Paging Dr. Fran,” tells Yahoo. “People share their life choices, and [other] people are like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize that that was OK to say out loud that I don’t want to have children.”
‘You’ll find the right person’
Many assume that people, especially women, don’t have children because they haven’t met the right partner yet. But the Pew survey found that only 24% of people under 50 cite that as their reason.
Still, it’s why Hailey’s mother told her to wait to be sterilized — and the reason that at least four doctors turned Hailey away when she asked for the procedure starting at 19 years old and up until she turned 28. Their insistence that she’d change her mind made Hailey question herself. She was even nervous to tell friends and people she dated that she didn’t want children. “It was hard to say it directly, because, when I was younger, everyone was telling me, ‘You’ll change your mind when you get in a relationship,” she says. Maybe they were right, Hailey thought. Maybe she shouldn’t risk scaring off a man too soon by telling him.
But in reality, “I was so scared of getting pregnant that I practically ruined every relationship that I’d been in” before getting sterilized. “Instead of talking about it, I kind of avoided having intimate contact as much as possible until I kind of gave up on the relationship,” she shares. More importantly, says Haydanek, no one should have children for their partner’s sake if they don’t want kids themselves. “I’m in the newer wave of doctors who are trained to really believe that patients have autonomy over their own bodies, and it doesn’t matter what their partner thinks,” she says.
As Haydanek says — and many echo on social media — the right partner for someone who wants to be child-free is a person who feels the same way. “A lot of people say that when they’re counseled by doctors, their doctors will say, ‘Well, what about if your future boyfriend wants children?’” says Haydanek. “People [on social media] always comment: ‘Then that person’s not my future boyfriend.’”
‘I watch the mouths drop’
Alyssa Luckey feels as though she’s already had as much parenting experience as she needs. “I’m an eldest daughter, and there’s a lot of lore to that,” the 26-year-old tells Yahoo. She became the primary caretaker for her three younger siblings when she was just 10 herself. “That was a huge burden on me, and I don’t think I was the best parent,” she says. “I knew that once I was done making sure those guys were taken care of, I didn’t want kids of my own, because they were my kids.”
Then, at age 14, she was raped. “The fear that instilled in me of having to raise somebody’s child that I do not want, that was daunting — and that was a major driver” of her choice to later be sterilized, Luckey says.
While surveys like Pew’s ask people their reasons for not wanting children, which might include options such as “I just don’t want to” or “medical reasons,” they can’t really get at the complex truths underlying Hailey’s or Luckey’s decisions to be sterilized and not have kids. Neither woman ever really wanted kids of her own, and each survived traumatic sexual experiences (as do more than half of American women). There’s no way to know what share of women who decide to remain child-free are survivors of sexual assault. But it’s noteworthy, if nothing else, that both women who spoke to me for this story are.
Luckey doesn’t shy away from telling people about the things she’s been through or her 2022 sterilization procedure on her social media platform, in her in-person social life or on dates. Since moving from Wisconsin to Arizona, she says the question of kids comes up earlier and more often than it did in her home state. “Usually, I’m like, ‘I’m voluntarily sterilized’ and watch their jaws drop,” says Luckey. “People are very curious why I would make such a decision.” But most people — including both her current boyfriend and the man she was dating when she underwent the surgery three years ago — though shocked initially, have also been supportive of her choice.
‘Dating was a trip’
More men are also getting vasectomies, which are the only form of permanent male contraception. Rates of vasectomies dipped in the 2010s, but they’ve recently risen just above their 2002 rates, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mike T. and his ex-wife were sure they never wanted kids, so he tried several times to get a doctor to give him a vasectomy, but they were always hesitant because of the couple’s childless status. So his wife had to be on long-acting contraception. Then, when he was 36, Mike needed surgery on a testicle and, with some cajoling, finally convinced a doctor to do the vasectomy while he was under anesthesia.
When he and his ex-wife split up, “dating was a trip,” Mike tells Yahoo. “There were a couple of women who asked about reversing it. The answer was always an emphatic ‘No.’ I literally had surgery about it.” But the women Mike met were at least better informed than his male friends. “The stranger reactions I got were from men,” he says. “There were a few friends who seemed to have confused a vasectomy with castration. And they were pretty unclear what, if anything, was ejaculated.”
Mike, now 48, eventually met and married his current wife, who shares his views about not having children. But dating experiences like his previous ones are common among the single and sterilized — and even the married and child-free. One redditor wrote that her fiancé suddenly decided he wanted kids and broke off their eight-year relationship. In another since-deleted Reddit post, women and men alike wrote of their potential partners getting “so f***ing weird” or even offended over not wanting kids. One woman’s friend called her a spayed cat as a “joke.” Some posters speculated that the biological drive to procreate prompts these reactions, even when it’s impossible. Others suggested that people, especially men, seem entitled to the possibility of pregnancy with their partner, or think of it as a means of control.
Haydanek, who has become a go-to TikTok resource for women who are interested in sterilization, is emphatic that this should never be the case. She asks patients who come to her about sterilization if they’re sure that they don’t ever want kids — and that’s about all. She doesn’t ask if they have romantic partners or anything about their romantic lives “because I don’t want them to feel like I’m asking for permission from someone else,” Haydanek says. “I never want my patients to feel like their partner’s opinion matters when it comes to their body.”
Even though a growing percentage of people want to be child-free, that doesn’t mean that they necessarily don’t want to find love. While the post-sterilization dating world can be strange and daunting, some say it can also be liberating. No matter what anyone else says, the possibility of pregnancy is simply off the table, and that’s a relief for people like Hailey. “I think I could actually start having a bit of a normal dating life for the first time ever,” she says.
