With no Mr. Right in sight, time for plan B

Women pursuing parenthood without a partner have also become something of an economic force, Mattes notes. “We are a big consumer base of the sperm banks. They’re advertising in [the SMC] newsletter; I think they’re looking at our growth — and we don’t represent half of the number of women who are doing this.”

In 1998, California Cryobank, the biggest sperm bank in the United States, had about 60 percent couples and 40 percent singles as clients. Today, that figure is reversed: About 60 percent of their customers are single women and/or lesbians. Xytex, a bank based in Atlanta, sees a similar trend. “At least 50 percent, and probably closer to 75 percent of our patients, are single women, meaning unmarried, whether heterosexual or homosexual,” says Sheridan Rivers, a supervisor of customer service and sales at Xytex.

Women’s — and, arguably, society’s — comfort level with single motherhood has come so far that more single moms are having a second child with donor insemination or adoption than in years past. “One child was the norm for the first 10 to 15 years [of SMC]," says Mattes. "Now it’s very common to have more than one. They say, ‘If I had one child, I can have two.’ It’s much more normalized.” In March, Anne-Marie gave birth to her second son, Henri.

More women who've hit a roadblock to motherhood owing to infertility are turning to adoption. Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and author of "Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America" (Basic Books, 2001), says current trends include more single African-American women adopting children from foster care and more single women adopting a child of a different race or ethnicity, or an older child.

Difficult choices
Single motherhood by choice may be a sizeable and still-growing trend, but it is the result of a series of personal and often very painful decisions made by every woman who considers it.

When she was about 30, Holly Vanderhaar decided that if she hadn’t met the man she thought would be her husband by 35, she’d start thinking about going it alone to become a mother. “I thought I had to meet someone — or go into a potentially bad marriage for the sake of having kids,” says the Mesa, Ariz.-based mother. “I said to myself, there is another option and that took the pressure off me for a while and I put it on the back burner.” (Mattes notes that more older women and younger women are coming into SMC as members. “We used to see a lot between 35 and 40. Now we see more women in their mid-40s and late 20s. Some people are very clear that they don’t want to wait until their fertility might be at risk.”)

At 35, with no husband material is sight, Vanderhaar began eight months of treatment for a fibroid and an ovarian cyst so she could start trying to get pregnant; her first insemination, using donor sperm, took place two months before she turned 36. “It took five tries and I got pregnant on my only unmedicated cycle,” says Vanderhaar. “It was twins — identical.”

At 15 weeks of pregnancy, she found how she had twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a rare, high-risk condition that required Vanderhaar to fly to Florida for surgery — but not before making the excruciating choice about whether to continue the pregnancy. “It was really, really hard to hear the news and be by myself and feel this huge, incredible responsibility and not have anyone to share the decision with,” she recalls. Fortunately, the surgery went very well and daughters Sian and Sophie were born in April 2003.

In weighing the pros and cons of having a baby alone, a woman naturally looks at traditional families, in part to see what she would miss out on as a single mother. Some women "grieve the dream," says Mattes. “The majority of women who become single moms by choice did want to get married."

But others who opt to go this route don’t think they’re missing much. “With a lot of the relationships I see with my friends, you have a couple of kids and a husband you need to manage — it’s a lot of work to have a great marriage,” says Anne-Marie. “Am I working harder as a single mom than a married mom? I don’t think so. In some ways, I’m working less hard because I don’t have another adult to work around and manage. In some ways it’s simpler.”

It takes a village
For women considering getting pregnant and raising a child on their own, single moms have one piece of advice that rises above all others: “You need a support system,” says Mattes. “When you’re married it’s built in — you have him and his parents — but when we’re alone, we have to create it.”

Anne-Marie moved to New Jersey to be near her parents; her neighborhood also includes two other single moms by choice.

Vanderhaar also moved towns in the Phoenix area to be closer to her mother and sister. “They’re so much help to me on a day-to-day basis,” she says.

Local SMC chapters can be a boon in finding other single moms, as well as women who are thinking about single motherhood or trying to get pregnant.

“You can do this single, but you really cannot do it alone," Mattes says. "Without a support system, it’s 10, 20 times as hard.”

Lorie A. Parch is a freelance writer based in Scottsdale, Ariz.

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