Anna Richards
February 04, 2025 10:00 am (Updated 1:45 pm)
Anna Richards says you don't have to deliver a child to be a mother, and wants to give a loving home to a child - but is facing criticism from friends and family
‘I want us to raise a child equally, without it affecting either of our careers, pay or even sleep schedules more than the other’s,’ says Anna
My partner Val and I had the “kids chat” drunk at 4am, only a month or two into our relationship, after meeting on Hinge. That’s what happens when you’re 30. Anyone you’re dating wants to know if you want kids, how many you want and how soon.
I’d broken things off with the last guy I’d been seeing when he told me he wanted a large family, at least four biological babies, and he’d like to start it soon. I told him that while I wanted kids one day, I was in no rush, and I didn’t have to be. I was dead set on adoption.
“You’ll change your mind one day,” he said. “All the women I know have.”
If I had a pound for all the times I’d heard that, I’d have enough for at least a week’s worth of overpriced UK childcare.
My partner Val, who wants nothing more than to be a father, listened patiently to the long list of reasons I’d rehearsed and mulled over for almost a decade. At the end of my slightly slurred rant, he opened his phone with the seriousness of the inebriated and put on the music video of Taylor Swift’s song “The Man”. The song’s lyrics delve into the sexism and societal double standards that women face in everyday life, work and relationships.
“I want to be a dad, but I don’t care how,” he said. “I don’t need to pass down my genes to be a father.”
It hasn’t been so simple explaining my choices to everyone else. The birth rate in both the UK and France, where I now live, is declining, and women seem to be presented with two choices.
Choice one: have babies, but do it quickly, because your biological clock is ticking and over 35 is still considered a “geriatric pregnancy” in the medical world. Many of the 35-year-olds I know haven’t even got their first grey hair yet.
Choice two: (rightfully) reported on more and more, is the decision to be child-free, and ignore our parents’ generation when they say “you’ll regret it one day” or “I so wanted to be a grandmother/grandfather.”
Meeting ‘the one’ has even more cemented that Anna wants to adopt rather than have biological kids (Photo: Supplied)
In the UK, the adoption rate is actually falling year-on-year, and it had always seemed to me that people considered adoption a last resort after years of gruelling IVF programmes. Fortunately, that’s not the case.
“People choose to adopt for many different reasons, and it’s not just fertility issues,” says Kate Patel, the head of adoption at Diagrama Adoption, a non-profit to match families with children that have waited the longest.
“We also have lots of people for whom adoption is their first choice to start a family, lots of members of the LGBTQIA+ family, and parents with older children that want to parent again.”
Without wanting to create a generational divide, as this sort of thing always pits millennials against boomers, when I speak to the older generation about my choice, they assume that it’s out of vanity: a fear to gain weight, to get stretch marks.
Like anyone born in the 90s, I’d imagine I have a fair amount of entrenched toxic diet culture, and very few people relish gaining weight, but this is the most minor of my concerns. The closest concerns to vanity are actually medical concerns: things like prolapsing, incontinence, or not being able to get pleasure from sex for years after the birth, like one personal story I heard.
I did my research, not the scaremongering kind, but from people around me. My friends that are, or have been, pregnant, have had to deal with a deluge of questions about how they felt during the pregnancy, how long their body really took to recover from giving birth, and when they were able to enjoy sex again. Spoiler: it varies.
Most people my age are very understanding, but I once had a friend’s girlfriend say, “what kind of a woman doesn’t want kids, that’s what we’re designed for.”
The other thing I heard all the time was how I’d change my mind about having biological kids once I met “the one” (this came from my mum). Chronically single for most of my 20s, I dated frequently and liberally, but only had one serious relationship of a little over a year during the decade.
A little over a year after Val listened to me and played me “The Man”, we got PACSed (like a French civil partnership). We live together in Lyon with a badly behaved Irish Setter and another puppy on the way. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ve met “the one”, but far from sending my ovaries into frenzied somersaults asking to be fertilised, I’ve only become more certain that I want to adopt.
Straight women in the UK earn 7 per cent less, on average, than men. Lesbian women, however, earn roughly the same as men. It might be partly due to the division in household chores (in a 2023 survey organised by Starling Bank, 72 per cent of women said they did the bulk of domestic tasks), but a huge factor in the pay divide is having children.
Women mostly take more leave, logical when you’re the one bearing the child, but often the balance is never fully restored post-birth. Although men are taking a more active role than their fathers and grandfathers, women with young children spend on average 161 minutes per day looking after them, compared to 71 minutes for men.
I don’t want to go into a partnership where Val and I aren’t equal. We split household chores equally, and bills and expenses too (our salaries aren’t vastly different which makes this easier). I want us to raise a child equally, without it affecting either of our careers, pay or even sleep schedules more than the other’s.
Were I to carry a child, we wouldn’t be equal. Everything from hormonal imbalances to post-partum depression could significantly affect my career and earning potential for an indefinite amount of time.
That’s without even touching on physical repercussions, and my job is regularly extremely physical – as a travel and outdoor writer, I hike, ski, run, cycle, kayak for work. I’ve even spent a month hiking with all my gear on my back for a feature before.
If you haven’t had fertility issues, most people assume you’re choosing not to have biological kids due to environmental concerns. The birth rate in the UK and France may be falling, but world population growth is rising, set to increase from 8 billion to 9.7 billion in the next 20 years.
I’m a vegetarian and I don’t fly short haul, so of course the environmental impact of having kids hasn’t passed me by, but I’d be lying if I said my decision not to have babies was to save the planet. It’s a bonus rather than the reason.
People love to play devil’s advocate. Everyone has a horror story of an adoption gone wrong.
Some of them are real-life case stories, some of them are scaremongering pieces they’ve read in the news, or heard from a friend. But I’ve got news for you: parenting biological children also goes wrong all the time. We can’t fully control how our child turns out, whether they share our genes or not. Apparently the parents of the Yorkshire Ripper were very nice people.
The potential effect of pregnancy and childbirth on my mental and physical health terrifies me, I’ll admit. I’m rarely ill, but when I am, I go down like a pricked balloon, needing man-sized boxes of tissues and man-sized levels of sympathy.
The best, and only, way I know to keep my mental health in check is through sport, and the idea that I might not be able to run, cycle and jump about for however short a time fills me with fear. I don’t believe I’ve ever spent a full day inside, and even a duvet morning can leave me in crisis mode.
Adoption can take a long time. It currently takes an average of 21 months in the UK, and 24 months in France, but given that it takes many women six to 12 months to conceive, and then the baby’s got to spend nine months cooking, it’s not so different. Adoption also comes with a lot of paperwork, and it’s not something I look forward to, but it can’t be worse than the French visa process.
As it stands, we’d ideally like to wait until after I’ve got French citizenship to start the adoption process, which should be in about four years. That’s another advantage to adopting – I don’t feel the pressure of a “ticking biological clock”.
It baffles me that so many people see adoption as a last resort, when I see it as a win-win. There are countless children around the world in need of a loving, stable home, and I want to provide this. You don’t have to carry and deliver a child yourself to be a mother.
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