Affluent, educated and autonomous -- why are more women enjoying motherhood on their own?
Pagination
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Nestled among happy birthday cards, wedding and anniversary congratulations, and get well soon wishes, there's a new "life event" category in the aisles of your local card shop: Birth Single Mother. It's now official -- being a single mom is in.
According to Statistics Canada, there are more than 1.6-million female-headed households in Canada, an increase of 63 percent in 20 years. A growing number of these women are single moms by choice -- not your stereotypical bitter divorcee or accidental teenage pregnancy struggling to get by. The majority of these new single moms are university educated, in their 30s or 40s and have well-established careers. They're breaking out of the conventional life pattern -- go to school, fall in love, get married, buy a house, have babies …. Instead, they've skipped some steps and added others. In the process, they've taken control of their lives, not to mention that infernal, nagging internal clock.
"It's a stronger force than me,"says Jill*, a 33-year-old editor in Vancouver who is considering donor insemination (DI). Since she started thinking about DI, Jill says she feels calmer. The pressure to find a mate, chiefly to mate, is gone. "You get into your 30s and you want to be this baby machine and you're not meeting anyone,"she says. "Then there's this generation of women in their 40s who find out they can't have children." Jill vows she won't be among them. "As much as life is about destiny or fate, this gives me something to grasp onto. It makes me feel much more sanguine about not meeting someone. I feel somewhat sorry for men; they don't have this choice."Jill is not alone in taking advantage of that option. According to Dr. Sam Batarseh, director of IVF [in vitro fertilization] Canada, the number of single women coming to him for DI has tripled over the last 30 years.
The biggest shift for single women who plan to become mothers is in separating having children from being married. "You can marry anytime, but it's not always possible to have a child or adopt a child. So for practical reasons, women need to separate the two things,"explains Jane Mattes. A New York psychotherapist and single mother, Mattes founded Single Mothers by Choice
(www.singlemothersbychoice.com) in 1981 after she accidentally became pregnant at age 36. She wanted the child, but the dad opted out. Of her estimated 3,000 members, only a small minority become moms unintentionally. Seventy-five percent choose insemination, and 25 percent go the adoption route.
