Baby Talk? They Don’t Like to Hear It : Orange County Couples Fend Off Friends, Relatives Who Continuously Charge They’re Selfish for Not Wanting Children

Amy Buch and her husband, Chris DiTulio, could be stamped “PRIME PARENT MATERIAL.” They’re 30. Married two years and together for five years before that. They have a condo in El Toro and a nice dog, Sebastian.

They’re stable folks, with good jobs: DiTulio is a field service technician for Minolta. Buch is a health educator with Planned Parenthood and loves her work--teaching teen-agers the dangers of AIDS.

So, family, friends and acquaintances ask, when’s the baby coming?

Never. Buch and DiTulio are “child-free.” By choice.

Their decision amazes, mystifies and outrages people, they said.

“Because I teach, and I do like kids to be around, people assume I want to have hordes of children,” Buch said. “When I say I don’t want them, they look at me like I want to bite the heads off puppies.”

DiTulio and Buch, along with other couples who are childless by choice, sometimes feel like they’re the only ones in America who aren’t wishing they were pregnant, bearing a child or raising one.

They definitely are in the minority. Only 3.3 million women--5.7% of the 58 million women in their childbearing years--were able to have children but did not intend to, according to the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics. The survey did not query men on their childbearing expectations.

The vast baby-boom generation, meanwhile, is busily producing its own progeny and won’t be done until the year 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The post-boomers are now bearing children too. The result: Last year, 4.1 million babies were born in the United States.

Because so many people believe it takes children to make a family, some infertile couples embark on bank-breaking in-vitro fertilizations or gamble on private adoptions or surrogate-parenting arrangements.

The media, meanwhile, reflect the norm and reinforce it. In films and on television programs and in commercials, babies and children are often portrayed as the raison d’etre of love and marriage.

So when childless couples confess that they are able to have children--but have opted not to--they sometimes get treated like traitors to the American Way.

“This whole idea of returning to family values, whatever that means, seems like it’s brought with it a backlash against people who don’t have kids,” Buch said.

Many childless couples--some now prefer to be called “child-free”--say they are tired of being treated like selfish, pathetic second-class citizens.

Some still avoid direct answers to reproductive questions, leaving the impression that they cannot have children. Others--such as Buch and DiTulio--are more assertive.

“We tell people straight out that we’re not planning on having children,” Buch said. “We’re not having any body parts removed, but we don’t see kids in the game plan.”

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And then there are the activists, who are bringing together childless couples for political and social support against “pronatalist” attitudes. At least two national organizations have been founded recently to tell the world it’s OK to be child-free.

Childless by Choice, based in Leavenworth, Wash., wants to make childlessness acceptable to society, without resorting to anti-child rhetoric, said Carin Smith, a writer who founded the organization with her husband, photographer Jay Bender.

Humor is an important tool, and the organization’s newsletters contain such tips as “10 Ways to Tell Your In-Laws You Don’t Want Children” and “How to Be Immortal Without Having Kids.”

The ChildFree Network, with 60 chapters around the country, offers support, but it also tries to point out the inequities visited upon childless couples, said its founder, Leslie Lafayette, a Sacramento-area high school teacher who is taking a leave of absence to work on a book about childless couples.

She contends that childless couples get saddled with higher taxes, fewer perks and additional responsibilities in the workplace. To add insult to those injuries, they are told over and over that they’re “incomplete,” she said.

“It’s a myth that parenthood is the most wonderful thing for everyone,” Lafayette, 48, said. “It’s gone way beyond sanity in the U.S., with everyone saying, ‘You must have a child or you’re not a real woman or a real man.’ ”

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Katey Johansen, a 33-year-old nutritionist and health education instructor at UC Irvine, would appreciate more support in the decision she and her husband, Paul, have made. She said it sometimes seems the world is bent on persuading her to have children.

Friends and family understand, she said, but the pressure from outsiders is nearly constant.

She gets lectures from her female gynecologist, who has told her she has a duty, as an educated, intelligent woman, to have kids. The annual harangue so annoys Johansen that she says she’s thinking of getting a new physician.

She gets second-guessed by strangers: While Johansen was swimming at the YMCA, a woman asked if she was pregnant. A little presumptuous, Johansen thought. But she replied that she wasn’t and did not intend to have children. Oh, the woman said, you’ll change your mind.

“I said, ‘Probably not. If I had a child, I’d probably abuse it,’ ” Johansen said sarcastically.

The conversation came to an abrupt halt. And Johansen was glad of it. She said she might use the line again.

“It’s a great way to express how angry I am,” she said. “Just because I’m female and have a uterus, people think I should have a child.”

Patti Koltnow, 44, also has a way of silencing the persistent questioning about why, after 22 years of marriage, she has no children:

“If I say it’s by choice, people will say, ‘Oh, you’ll change your mind,’ ” said Koltnow, regional program director of the Long Beach-based California American Woman’s Economic Development Corp.

“Now I say, ‘No, I won’t change my mind. I was sterilized.’ People’s reactions range from a huge jaw drop to hysterical laughter.”

Koltnow, who had a tubal ligation 10 years ago, said that she would have done it earlier but couldn’t find a doctor who would do the procedure on a young, childless woman. When her gynecologist agreed to do it when Koltnow was 34, he insisted that her husband, Barry, see him first and agree that he understood what she was about to do.

Koltnow said she has never regretted her decision. “When I woke up, I felt I’d been let out of prison,” she said. “I had a complete feeling of freedom. And after going to zillions of baby showers, I wanted to send out announcements. But then we decided that would be in poor taste.”

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Other childless couples also reject the idea that just because nature has given them child-making equipment, they have to play the parent game. They have myriad reasons not to have children, and they usually involve a blend of factors: Personal, political, economic and even spiritual.

“I’m a pretty impatient person,” DiTulio said. “Kids take a whole lot of patience and understanding, and I’m lacking in those areas.”

Although they’ve explained their decision to them, Buch and DiTulio said their parents are “in denial,” sure that the couple will change their minds someday. Buch said that whenever she visits her infant niece, her mother checks in later for a report of the encounter, hoping some maternal instinct might have been sparked.

But Buch doubts she’ll reconsider.

“I realize how much responsibility parenting is, and I respect people who are willing to take it on,” Buch said. “It’s not something I believe I could do.”

Paul Johansen, 35, said the decision he and his wife have made goes beyond personal preferences. The couple, who live in Long Beach, believe overpopulation is straining the world’s natural and societal resources.

“As an ecologist, I recognize that overpopulation has a lot to do with the problems we have,” said Paul, an environmental scientist who works for the Los Angeles Harbor Department. “We’ve recently joined Zero Population Growth and Planned Parenthood because we want to take a more active role. We feel that people don’t recognize that population pressures cause a lot of our current ills.”

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Debbie Biancardi, 36, and her husband, John, 38, decided not to have children when they concluded that the cost of living in Orange County required two full-time jobs, and they didn’t want to relegate child-rearing to a baby-sitter.

The couple, married 16 years, live in Laguna Niguel. Each works 50 or more hours a week, she as a manicurist, he as program director of dispute resolution services for Community Service Programs and as a marriage, family and child counselor.

“In the nail business, I hold ladies’ hands all day,” Debbie Biancardi said. “They have to work, and their baby-sitters would tell them when their child walked or talked for the first time. Those are pretty important things. I wanted to be there, to put my own values and morals into a child’s life. Since I couldn’t do that, we decided not to have children.

“The mothers I’ve discussed it with say I’m really missing out,” she said. “I don’t see that. I think that they’re the ones who are missing out, because they’re not with their children.”

Faith came first for David Jetmore, 35, and his wife, Christiane, 33, of Anaheim. The Jetmores are Jehovah’s Witnesses and have pledged to spend 90 hours a month doing door-to-door ministry and in-home Bible study. The Jetmores, married 13 years, were in their early 20s when they decided not to have children.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which holds that contraception is a sin, or the Mormon Church, which strongly encourages its members to have families, the Jetmores’ church fully supported their decision to remain childless, David Jetmore said.

Some of the people David Jetmore meets in his wood-refinishing business are “shocked, just shocked” at their choice to be childless.

“Sometimes I feel like we’re from different planets, our views are so divergent,” he said. “And when I discuss our reasons for it, the eyebrows arch even higher. If you make the decision for business reasons, it’s more acceptable to people.”

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Whatever reasons couples present, they don’t seem to stop the people who feel compelled to push the joys of parenthood.

Childless couples hear it all the time: that their marriages are incomplete without children. That there is no greater happiness than parenthood.

For a long time, society and psychology supported those notions, according to Debra Umberson, a sociologist who teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. Classical psychological theory held that parenthood was necessary for maturity and healthy psychological adjustment. Voluntary childlessness was thought to be a sign of immaturity and maladjustment.

But as early as the 1950s, studies began to show that parenthood usually results in less personal and marital happiness, Umberson wrote in a 1989 article for the Journal of Family Issues.

Two sociologists who reviewed a host of studies on parental happiness in 1987 wrote that “no one has found that parents are better off than non-parents on any of the conventional measures of well-being.”

Indeed, in a national sample of parents and non-parents, Umberson and sociologist Walter R. Gove found that parents with children at home were less happy than non-parents, although they did have a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. Simply put, Umberson said, the happiest people were married, without children.

There was one group of parents that did seem to benefit from parenthood, she said: Widowed people with adult children.

Several childless couples said they worry about facing old age without the company of children and grandchildren.

“I probably will have regrets as I get older,” Debbie Biancardi said. “But I think would rather not have had children than go through all the pressures of not being there to raise them.”

DiTulio said he can think of ways to deal with old age that don’t require children.

“We might be a little lonely at times, but we’ve got nieces and nephews and younger family members to pal around with,” he said. “We’ll probably always have a dog in the house.”

And, he said, having children isn’t a guarantee of companionship in old age.

“Take a look around and see how many people in rest homes are getting regular visits,” he said.

If it’s true that parenthood doesn’t necessarily bring happiness, why do some parents work so hard to sell their lifestyle to the childless?

“I think it validates their decision,” Buch said. “And some of it is envy on their part, especially when Chris and I are off taking the dog to the dog park or roller-blading, while friends are at home looking after the munchkins. Sometimes it’s their anger, calling their own decision into question. And sometimes I think people think our decision is passing judgment on theirs.

“It’s not,” she said. “It’s cool to have kids.”

For more information on organizations for childless couples, contact: Childless by Choice, P.O. Box 695, Leavenworth, Wash. 98826, (509) 763-2112; or the ChildFree Network, 7777 Sunrise Blvd., Suite 1800, Citrus Heights, Calif. 95610 (include self-addressed, stamped envelope with 52 cents postage), (916) 773-7178.

Doggy Does Not Make Three in Most Homes

One stereotype that dogs childless couples is that they have substituted pets for children.

Nonsense, says Carin Smith, co-founder of the organization Childless by Choice and owner of two cats and two dogs.

“Really, children are a substitute for pets,” she said.

One study of childless couples, by author Jean E. Veevers in the book “Childless by Choice,” concluded that they actually don’t have pets with any greater frequency than other couples.

In her study, most childless couples’ attitudes about pets had nothing to do with their attitudes toward children. For those who did make a correlation, only a few seemed to have replaced kids with pets.

One middle-aged couple got a puppy, and friends gave them a baby book as a joke. But the couple filled in the statistics and pasted in photos. In time, even they came to see that the joke was quite real, Veevers writes.

Other childless couples in Veevers’ study found that their experiences with pets reinforced their decision not to have children.

That has been the case with several couples in Southern California who call themselves child-free.

When Amy Buch of El Toro was 17, she seriously considered becoming a single mother. Her mother, aghast, took her to the Humane Society and told her to pick out a puppy, which she would raise and thus realize the difficulty of taking care of a helpless creature.

Now 30, Buch has decided not to have children. The dog, Sebastian, 13, is a beloved member of the household.

“I call him my teen-pregnancy- prevention dog,” she said.

Long Beach residents Katey and Paul Johansen got their chocolate Labrador retrievers, Max and Herschel, in part to see whether they were firm in their decision not to have children.

Katey Johansen thought she was too impatient to deal with children. Handling two dogs showed her she was right, she said.

“I really enjoy the dogs,” she said. “But I’ve lost my patience with them a few times and it scares me. I don’t think they’re psychologically damaged, long term, but with a kid, it would be a different story.”