Childless Women Band Together, Confront Future of Empty Arms : Families: They are twice as likely as their mothers not to have children. Many face public misconceptions.

For 25 years, Dorothy Schlegel worked hard, amassing a resume most baby boomers would envy. She rose to senior management, worked in Europe and lived a life her mother only dreamed about.

Now 46, Schlegel has two regrets. Their names are Susan and Jonathan. They are the children she never had.

“Back in the ‘80s, I remember seeing a cocktail napkin with a cartoon of a young woman saying, ‘Oh my God! I forgot to have a baby!’ ” she recalls. “ ‘Oh yeah,’ I thought. ‘There I am.’ ”

For Schlegel and others reaching the end of their childbearing years, a door long left ajar is closing, a long-held dream slipping away. Among those born between 1946 and 1955, nearly one in five is childless. For college-educated women in their 40s, the rate is one in four. Overall, compared to their mothers’ generation, baby boomers are twice as likely not to have children.

Social scientists say more effective birth control and greater opportunity for women are the reasons so many aren’t having babies. But the stories behind the statistics are seldom that simple.

Time ran out. Careers got in the way. Visions of motherhood were preempted by anxieties about overpopulation, finances or parenting skills. Marriages crumbled while biological clocks ticked. Some never found the right partner. Among those who did, one in six battled infertility, half of them unsuccessfully--a bitter pill for a generation that came of age believing births could be controlled and families planned.

Women who long for babies they cannot have say the sadness can linger on for a lifetime. “It’s the major regret of my life. A part of me will never feel complete and whole,” says Kathy Rees, 48, of West Hartford, Conn., a psychotherapist who tried for a decade to conceive.

“I don’t think people who have babies can ever really understand what it’s like not to have them. People who have enough to eat can never really understand what it’s like to be starving.”

Those who do understand are coming together.

In one New York suburb, a woman who has endured nine years of surgery, hormone injections and artificial inseminations trying to overcome infertility quits her real estate job. The problem: She weeps uncontrollably each time a prospective home buyer asks if she has any children.

Another dreads the arrival of warm weather, when she can no longer leave her house without encountering the mothers and toddlers who congregate on her street all summer long.

A third spends holidays alone with her husband; now that her brothers and sisters have babies, family gatherings are too hard.

Rees recalls when she couldn’t bear the sight of a pregnant woman. Jayne Burgess recalls when she couldn’t watch a diaper commercial on TV. Robin Secord remembers when it took every ounce of strength to go buy a gift for someone else’s baby.

There is often the added pain of being perceived as selfish, as not wanting or liking children.

In Old Greenwich, Conn., Burgess, 34, looks forward to visits from her neighbor, a precocious 4-year-old. “I say hello to his mother whenever I see her. But she will always call him away if she sees him talking to me. ‘Stop bothering the lady,’ she says.”

“You’re definitely not one of them,” Rees says of people with children. “They have this information, this experience they all share, and you don’t have it and you can’t get it. There’s a barrier between us.”

Women who choose not to have children sometimes feel even more maligned. “People look at them askance, like there’s something strange about them,” says Linda Hunt Anton, 51, a clinical social worker in Kentfield, Calif. “The standard belief is that women should want what’s the cultural norm.”

Those who don’t may spend years agonizing over a decision they fear they’ll one day regret.

“Having children was something I always assumed I would do,” says Laura Reiter, a clinical social worker in private practice in Hartford, Conn. “To realize I had a choice was a burden as well as a relief. It taps into some very difficult feelings about what it means to be me. What kind of person am I? Can a woman be a good person and still choose not to be a mother? It was a terribly difficult decision. I wrestled with it for a long time.”

For Teresa Gubbins, 37, the decision was easier. A free-lance writer and music critic now learning pastry-making at a four-star Dallas restaurant, she is happy with her marriage and her life.

Still, “Any firm closing of any door, any choice eliminated, always feels uncomfortable,” Gubbins says. “I think I’m going to have a lot of reckoning to do down the road.”

She won’t be alone. Martin O’Connell, chief of the Fertility Statistics Branch of the U.S. Census Bureau, predicts the childlessness rate will hold steady for women born through 1960. “Once past 25, a considerable number of women who say they’re uncertain are really saying, ‘No, I’m not going to have a child.’ ”

Women who thought they had come to terms with childlessness when they were younger often find old feelings resurfacing at midlife. Once again, they’re on the sidelines, watching friends and siblings become grandparents. The chances of having a child, however remote, truly end with the onset of menopause. New worries develop: Who will care for me when I’m old? Who will miss me when I’m gone?

For Robin Secord, 41, of Bennington, Vt., the future hit home after her grandmother died. “The five grandchildren were going through her apartment, divvying it up, and it struck me: I have no one to pass my stuff on to. There’ll be no one who’ll want it.”

Twice divorced and the youngest of three sisters, Dorothy Schlegel envisions having to ask nieces to disburse her estate. “It’s sort of overwhelming to think about.”

But as the numbers of childless women grow, so do the resources to help them.

Thousands of such women gather in coffee shops and living rooms from coast to coast, linked by the national infertility organization Resolve, to discuss matters of mutual concern: How to respond when asked how many children they have. How to survive yet another baby shower. How to cope with the holidays--not Thanksgiving and Christmas, but Mother’s Day and Halloween.

Society’s attitude toward childlessness may be changing, however slowly, says Judy Calica, a Chicago social worker and national board member of Resolve. Mirroring that change, the organization now offers public education seminars on child-free living as an option for couples who can’t conceive.

Mardy Ireland, a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, Calif., agrees that society is beginning to accept childlessness. “But we certainly don’t open our arms to childless women as a genuine, alternative identity,” says Ireland, whose upcoming book, “The Other Women,” looks at 100 childless women between the ages of 38 and 50. “We don’t go around saying ‘childless men.’ ”

Social worker Linda Hunt Anton also bristles at the word “childless.” “It’s a negative definition--it’s what we are not. There’s not really any way to describe us without making reference to that which is missing.”

Anton has created a 10-step program for women struggling to “end the pain, move beyond the loss and get on with the business of living.” “Never To Be a Mother” hits bookstores this summer. Like Ireland, Anton is a former infertility patient who began her project after finding a lack of support.

Childlessness isn’t a new phenomenon; women born after the Civil War through the first decade of the 20th Century had childlessness rates in excess of 20%. But in the past, “Women who didn’t want to become mothers often didn’t become wives,” says Barbara Katz Rothman, a sociologist at City University of New York and author of “Recreating Motherhood” and “The Tentative Pregnancy.”

By contrast, says Rothman, “A very high percentage of women are married now. There are women who are childless and married and they capture attention differently.”

They are also better situated to bring about change. “Now there are more women in public positions able to make issues heard outside of the kitchen.”

The issues--female identity, mortality, self-esteem--run deep. “The thing about motherhood is that it’s so close to central identity issues,” Rothman says. “If you were making a major job change--say, going back to school to become a botanist--you’d start hanging out with a new group of people and stop seeing some of your old friends. But who says, ‘It’s because I’m not a botanist, isn’t it?’ ”

In America, sociologists say, 95% of all women intend at some point to have children. “As a little girl, I never thought about Prince Charming and a big wedding,” Robin Secord says. “I just thought about the kids.”

The role of motherhood in female identity became apparent to Alfred University sociologist Arthur L. Greil during the two years he spent interviewing infertile couples for a book, “Not Yet Pregnant,” published by Rutgers University Press last August.

“Despite 25 years of the women’s movement, men still get more of their identity from work,” Greil says. “Women still get more from family. They’re still more apt to be asked whether they have children. And they’re still more apt to work around other women, in environments where children are what people talk about.”

Some infertile couples adopt. Others find the process intrusive and unnerving. As Secord says, “No one goes to a pregnant lady’s home and says, ‘Why are you doing this? Have you thought this through? Is it the right choice? Can you afford it? How will you pay for college?’ ”

It took Jean Carter, a Raleigh, N.C., obstetrician, and her husband, Michael, an English professor, two years to choose childlessness. They formalized their decision by resuming use of contraception and becoming more involved in community, church and careers.

“We always have a choice how we deal with the rotten things life gives us,” says Jean, 40, who battled her own infertility while delivering other women’s babies. “I knew I had to take back control of this part of my life. The process of doing so was healing.”

A mourning period followed, but once it was over, “It was like an empty place that water flowed into and filled up. Things that had hurt didn’t hurt as much anymore. Other kids became neat. I embraced nieces and nephews as my own. That distance didn’t have to be maintained as a protective thing.”

In the six years since they stopped trying to be parents, the Carters have written a book, “Sweet Grapes: How to Stop Being Infertile and Start Living Again.” Michael is doing more writing. Jean has learned to make quilts.

She anticipates some sadness at menopause, “but I don’t see big regrets on the horizon. Regret comes from unmade decisions.”

For Dorothy Schlegel, letting go of the dream is easier said than done. That would be giving up, and giving up runs counter to baby-boom thinking.

“I could still adopt,” she says. She envisions finishing the basement of her Medfield, Mass., condo, or shifting the rooms to accommodate a child.

In her latest fantasy, “I meet a widower who has children, and . . . I can enjoy raising his children.”

Most likely, she says, she’ll do neither.

“Given my past pattern, it appears I’m going to just keep letting it slip by. I think about how I never would have been able to go to Europe and live for 15 months, how that would have been very hard, if not impossible. But that’s intellectual head stuff.

“The essence of it is about missed opportunities that are irretrievable. I am thinking a lot about loneliness.”