Couples Who Decide Not to Have Children Face Pressures From Society : Families: 500,000 couples ages 35 to 44 in 1988 were childless by choice. Although they often encounter hostility, they enjoy their lifestyles.

Sandra and Philip Deutchman know the uneasy silence. The conversation suddenly falters, teetering awkwardly on that logical next question: “Why not? Why don’t you have children?”

It’s a question most people refrain from asking.

“But you can see them going through the mental checklist, wondering what’s wrong and whether it’s physical or emotional,” said Sandra, 53, who with her husband decided many years ago not to have children.

“What we made is a choice,” said Philip, also 53, a physics professor at the University of Idaho. “And choices must be discussed to be understood.”

But the conversational pauses persist, largely because people are reluctant to stray into personal, perhaps painful, territory. Half of all childless couples are thwarted by fertility or other health problems; for others, parenthood may be the topic of sensitive, ongoing debate.

Seventy percent of Americans surveyed in a recent Associated Press poll by ICR Survey Research Group of Media, Pa., deemed it too private to ask why a couple married several years has no children.

Yet, even without asking, two out of three people surveyed said they assumed that childless couples have made a conscious choice.

Regardless of circumstance, public judgments are passed in this most intensely private of arenas. The last few decades have seen much experimentation with alternative lifestyles, but the standard scenario still calls for marriage, then children.

“And behavior that deviates from the norm is suspect,” said Marian Faux, author of “Childless by Choice.”

“It’s considered a private matter,” Faux said. “But to the extent that people don’t talk about childlessness, it breeds more suspicion. I’d like to see it become a comfortable choice, a real option.”

Though only a slim number of those questioned in the AP poll said they view childless couples as unloving, three out of five said couples with children are happier.

“There’s still an agenda out there that says in order to be fulfilled you must have children--and if you don’t follow that agenda there’s something wrong with you,” said Susan Ginsberg, editor of Work & Family Life newsletter.

It’s not an agenda everyone accepts. Of 12.2 million couples aged 35 to 44 in 1988, about 1.1 million, or 9%, were childless, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. More than 500,000 of those couples were childless by choice.

And 10.1% of women aged 18 to 34 surveyed in 1988 said they didn’t plan on having children, compared to only 5.7% in 1976, according to the Census Bureau’s most recent figures.

Still, only a handful of books have been published on the subject of childlessness and few support groups have sprung up to guide couples confronting the decision.

Deborah Thomas and Paul Korshin conducted their own haphazard survey of older couples when they began considering the childless option shortly after marrying 15 years ago.

“We asked those who hadn’t had children if they had any regrets and they all said ‘Not for a moment,’ ” said Korshin, 51, an English literature professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“It’s sad when you think of the numbers of unwanted, abused, neglected children that we can’t look at ourselves honestly and say, ‘I don’t think I’d be a good parent’ and then choose not to be one,” said Thomas, 42, director of public information at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia.

But many adults view parenthood as a defining stage, a necessary rite of passage that affirms a woman’s femininity and a man’s maturity.

“A friend of mine who has four children . . . decided that she needed to know what my psychological problems were,” Thomas said. “Her questions were all around the same theme: It’s not normal not to have children, therefore something abnormal must have happened to one of us.”

Korshin and Thomas were stunned when several hostile letters were prompted by a local newspaper article several years ago in which they and other couples discussed their decisions against parenthood.

Though remaining childless hasn’t always been entirely comfortable, Thomas and Korshin say they put their relationship before the expectations of strangers or friends.

“We can afford to have a subscription to the opera, pick up and travel, enjoy things that two-income couples without children take for granted,” Korshin said. “And we’re quite prominent in doing charitable things.”

Their lives are full, but Korshin said still “complaints have come from quite rational adults who recognize reluctantly that children are an enormous responsibility.”

Only about 57% of those surveyed in the AP poll believed that “fulfilled” was a good term to describe childless couples, but 67% said “free” well described such pairs.

Couples without children said they’ve felt undercurrents of envy even among close friends or couples with children who subtly--and not so subtly--pity their “barrenness.”

“You can’t have children to please other people . . . or just to leave a legacy,” said Susan Shank, a personal trust compliance officer at Texas Commerce Bank in Houston. “You have to decide what’s important to you.”

She and her husband, Paul, both 38, are committed to their jobs and to volunteer work. They love the freedom they have to travel and have cherished their unusual closeness over 15 years of marriage.

The Shanks also are DINKs, a perjorative-sounding acronym that stands for dual income, no kids. It’s a married version of yuppie that some associate with a self-indulgent, self-centered lifestyle.

“There is selfishness in deciding not to have kids,” Susan said. “I couldn’t have the lifestyle I have, it’s true. But I also wouldn’t have as much time to give my community.”

Would-be grandparents, whose opinions can strike especially deep, often turn a judgmental eye on their childless offspring.

“That’s where we felt the most pressure, and where I could have felt the most guilt,” said Susan, whose parents and in-laws ultimately supported the couple in their decision.

“We’re a very pro-natalist society,” said Edward L. Kain, author of “The Myth of Family Decline” and a sociologist at Southwestern University in Texas. “Can you imagine Ozzie and Harriet without the kids?”

For the half-million couples aged 35 to 44 who are childless because of fertility or other health problems, such stereotypical expectations can be a stultifying source of great pain.

“We can see it in people’s eyes the moment they ask if we have children,” said Mike Carter of Raleigh, N.C., who with his wife, Jean, wrote “Sweet Grapes,” the story of their unsuccessful struggle to have children.