Actually, never mind me -- even I find my own existential dilemmas a little tedious. But what about you? If you've read this far, it could be because you are or think you might be one of the quarter of American women who, according to Hanson, will never have children. The numbers are similar in other developed countries. According to an article published last year in the Guardian, 41 percent of British women born in 1969 don't have children. Some of these women can't have kids, but others simply have other priorities. Hanson says that of the quarter of American women who don't have children, three-quarters are physically able.

They won't always be. Fertility starts declining in your mid-30s. Sylvia Ann Hewlett's 2002 book "Creating a Life" may have been shoddy, irritating and smug, but it was accurate in its assessment of the dismal odds stacked against women who seek fertility treatments in their 40s. After a certain age, having a baby is no longer an option. So will women who choose not to have children regret their effrontery in defying the whole history of the human race? Are they -- or we -- setting ourselves up for a lifetime of barren desolation?

The answer, happily, is no.

When I started writing this story, I would have described myself as ambivalent about childbearing. Yet when experts told me I was unlikely to suffer debilitating psychological fallout if I spared myself motherhood, I felt enormous relief, as if I'd been let off the hook. It turns out that people who choose not to have children (as opposed to those who desperately want to have children, but can't) tend to have better marriages, better finances, less stress, and are no more likely to be unhappy in old age than parents. Most people, and especially most women, have a physiological yearning to reproduce, whatever the costs, and are glad they did. Yet being born free of that desire can be a gift.

"Some women really do love mothering," says Madelyn Cain, author of "The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today." "I happen to be one of them. I love being a mother. It's the greatest joy of my life, but what makes me happy and brings me fulfillment doesn't necessarily make everyone else happy."

The notion that different people have different desires shouldn't be a difficult one, but when it comes to motherhood, many people can't get their heads around it. Even Cain had trouble at first. She began "The Childless Revolution" in part because she was angered by the dismissive way her childless friends were treated, and because she was struck by the newfound social acceptance she experienced when she had her first baby at 39. Yet part of her still believed that "deep down every woman wanted to be a mother," a misconception undone by the more than 100 interviews she did for her book.

What she discovered was that choice, not motherhood, is the real key to happiness. Cain divides the women in her book into three groups -- those who affirmatively decide not to have children, those who can't have children, and those for whom circumstances never align to make motherhood happen. Citing her own interviews as well as books like Elaine Campbell's "The Childless Marriage: An Exploratory Study of Couples Who Do Not Want Children," Elaine Tyler May's "Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness," and Marion Faux's "Childless by Choice: Choosing Childlessness in the Eighties," Cain says, "The ones who decide they don't want children, they don't regret it."

Cain has come to believe that lack of interest in childbearing might be biological, like being gay. "Researchers have found that within mice there is a gene, the Mest gene. When it was in place in mice, and the mouse gave birth, it was a nurturing mother. When the mouse was Mest-deficient, it was a non-nurturing mouse. I think down the line we're going to discover that just as homosexuality is something that's physical, the same thing will be discovered about women. Why do some women melt at the sight of babies while other women are indifferent? It would seem to me it's something innate."

That's why Cain says women who don't want kids should ignore the well-meaning advice they're often bombarded with. "Don't second-guess yourself," she says. "Trust your instincts."

That might seem obvious, but the strange thing about being a woman without much interest in mothering is that many people you love and admire will tell you not to trust your instincts. Motherhood, they say, is, for all its struggles, an experience of such ineffable joy that those who've done it can't imagine life without it. Motherhood evangelists have a store of conversion stories. Either they, or someone they know intimately, had once been like me, cherishing their independence and impatient with children. But when bathed by the blissful hormones that accompany procreation, they saw the light and now their lives are richer and more meaningful than they ever thought possible. They say those who haven't parented can't even begin to comprehend its radiant satisfactions.

People do not behave this way about other pleasures. I enjoy sex with men, but don't go about badgering lesbians to see what they're missing.

That's why some defiantly childless women insist that maternal proselytizers are expressing an unconscious insecurity. "I don't know why people have to take this so personally," says 35-year-old Shauna Wright, a San Francisco woman who runs the Web site and mailing list Childfree.net. A decade ago, Wright called off an engagement when she realized her fiancé was determined to be a father, and she was sure she didn't want to be a mother. She's never wavered from that decision. About those who try to cajole her, she says, "They're jealous. They have a lot of self-doubt, otherwise they wouldn't feel the need to trumpet their decision and try to talk me into doing the same thing."

Yet Hanson insists that there's often authentic passion behind preaching mothers. "For most people, that switch flips and they are besotted because this extraordinarily intense biological process kicks in, hormones start to flow and people become smitten with their kids," he says. "Often those happy, goofy smiles you're seeing are genuine. They really do think it's fantastic, even though before having kids they weren't sure it would be that great."

And that's what makes the decision to breed so hard. There are few experiences in life that come more highly recommended than parenting, so how can you ever know if you're making a mistake by rejecting it? It's fairly easy to find stories of those who regret not having children, but it's difficult to find a mother who will say she wishes she'd made a different choice.

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