Not everybody wants to have kids, and that's okay!
Bringing children into the world is a very personal decision, and it's one that not everyone makes for themselves. And for others, it's not an option at all.
Over the years, many stars have revealed whether they're preparing to have children one day - and there are many stars who have said that's not something they're planning to do with their life.
We've put together some of the stars who've spoken out and said they are not planning to have children. For various reasons - be it for money or societal concerns, or just a general lack of interest - they're opting out of the experience entirely.
“I do not feel in any way shape or form like I want kids. I cannot imagine a world in which someday I want kids," she said on her podcast in November 2023.
She did say, however, that she's freezing her eggs in case she changes her mind: “I am also open to my mind changing. I have changed a lot as a person in my years so far and I hope to continue changing. What I don’t want to happen is for me to turn 40 and realize, ‘F–k, I want kids now,’ and I don’t have enough eggs to make it happen.”
On iHeartPodcast's Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi podcast, the 63-year-old star called herself a "single, straight Southern woman who never married and never had children."
"I have so many sisters who have beautiful children, and they now have beautiful children. I love being an aunt, I love it more than— probably more than acting, which is odd. They’re on par. But I’m telling you, these are gorgeous children, but that doesn’t have to define every woman.”
“I made a big choice, but I knew it when I was young...I had a window to have a child, but [at] the end of the day I loved working, and I grew up with great parents who sacrificed everything for me. And you have to really be committed to having children. You have to be a great parent, and I was afraid I couldn't be."
"My mother said, ‘Patty, I just don't want you to wake up at 50 and be unhappy.’ I woke up at 50 in stilettos and a thong...I’ve had a great sexy-ass life," she added.
“I’m very, very immature, I think that has kept me from having children, because I’m sort of a child. Maybe if I had kids, I would’ve had to have grown up," she told British GQ in June of 2023.
"It doesn't seem that fun. People describe having kids as like brief glimmering moments of beauty amongst a sea of pain. Whereas not having kids is just lovely all the time. There's none of that. It's just great all day. I'm never like 'I wish I had kids and I'm missing not having them,'" he told Kelly Clarkson in a March 2023 interview.
"I look over at my wife and she looks at me, and we're like 'if we had kids, we couldn't do this! This wouldn't even remotely be on the table! We couldn't do any of this stuff if we had kids!'"
"It's like, Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings," she told InStyle.
"I'd worry sick about a baby. I have a cat and I worry about that. I check the door three times before I go out. I put food and water in every room in case the door closes and he's peckish for 20 minutes," he revealed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
"We just take and take and expect it to keep producing. And it's exhausted. It can't produce. We're getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child. Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I'm not bringing in another person to deal with that," she explained to Elle.
"I don’t have time. I work too much to be an appropriate parent. I feel like a bad mom to my dog some days because I’m just not here enough. I just feel like I would do a bad job if I actually took the time to literally give birth to a kid right now and try and juggle everything I’m doing," she told People.
"I think it's really important to be present if you have children. I have a lot of... things to take care of," he told ES Magazine.
“I would probably have been miserable. When I talk about my mother and not wanting to echo that relationship, I think it would’ve probably been very much the same way. I would have been a stay-at-home mum, and he’d have been off, doing what he did. And that’s never really been me, either. I’m too noisy. I suck up too much air, myself," she said to The Guardian.
"I'm constantly asking myself questions, reminding myself, 'Are you making that decision for you or someone else?' The husband and the babies are the expectation of what's supposed to happen at a certain point, and people fall back on, 'Well, that's the point of the human species, procreation.' And I'm, like, 'I think there are a lot of babies, isn't that part of what's going wrong, there's too many?' Some people could be working on the world being a better place, or just being happy," she told The Sunday Times.
"I don't think I'd be a great mother ... I don't want to have a kid and have it raised by a nanny. I don't have the time to raise a child," she told The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet.
“It was not my destiny, I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn’t care what people thought … It was only boring old men [who would ask me]. And whenever they went, ‘What? No children? Well, you’d better get on with it, old girl,’ I’d say ‘No! F*** off!'" she told British Vogue.
“I have nieces and nephews forever and I’m always watching how people are scrambling for babysitters. I don’t want to go through that," she told E!'s Daily Pop.
"I'm too… it's too late. It's over. I'm 52. I'm not going to have any kids," he told Esquire.
"When we found out that [getting pregnant] was going to be difficult to impossible, it really was a choice to stop. I wanted families [and] couples to know that it was a valid choice not to get on this crazy merry-go-round of IVF and tens and tens of thousands of dollars...I wanted people to feel -- men and women -- it's okay to say, 'I love my marriage, I love my life, I choose not to have children.'"
“If I had kids, my kids would hate me. They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them," she told THR.
"I think if I'd found the right guy at the right time and wanted to have kids, I probably would have with the right partner. Because I wasn't ever really confident that I wanted to have kids, and I would rather regret not having kids than have kids and regret it," she told Drew Barrymore.
"Of course I wonder what that would be like but, your destiny is your destiny and I can't imagine, if by some miracle I got pregnant…at this point in my life, I wonder, could I even manage that? It would be a lie to say there's not a bit of sadness there, but I don't get caught up in it," she told The Times.
"I really appreciate that other people do, and we will always have friends that have children that we are close to, but it was a choice I made very early. I really felt -- I feel -- that I would have never been able to have the life I've had. And so it's a choice, and that was the choice I made," she told Katie Couric on her podcast.
"Honestly, we’d probably be great parents. But it’s a human being, and unless you think you have excellent skills and have a drive or yearning in you to do that, the amount of work that that is and responsibility — I wouldn’t want to screw them up! We love our animals," she told People.
“I really do like kids, but there wouldn’t have been room in my life to raise children. I was so involved with my career and I would have had to give up the career in large part because I could not possibly have shortchanged the child…It’s hard to raise children and to do right by them. There are too many kids anyway. There’s too many people," she told Metro Weekly.
"I don't really want to have kids. It's great because I don't worry about when I should get pregnant—between seasons, while we're shooting the show [Glow]—I don't think about it every day. It would be nice, but I think of all the things that would be so stressful. I think about how much we're involved in our cats' lives. Oh my God, if it was a child!" she told The Times of London.
"I love kids, but I’m very impulsive, and I was afraid that I would have children and then regret it," she told The Sunday Times.
"I'd be a terrible father. I see my friends who have children and I'm like, 'Dude, how are you even upright, much less here at work at 6 a.m.?'" he told Us Weekly.
"As a comic always working & on the road I have had to decide between motherhood & living my fullest life & I chose the latter," she tweeted.
"I'm not that big a fan of marriage as an institution, and I don't know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings," she told Manhattan Magazine.
"Motherhood has never been an ambition. I don't think like that. I never have expectations like 'when I'm 19 I'm going to do this, and by the time I've hit 25 I'm going to do that,'" she told The Times.
“I don’t know if I could stand that kind of commitment, or if I am really honest, I don’t think that I could handle being that vulnerable to someone else. My child would have my heart completely, and having never truly given that over, in all my relationships in my life, starting with myself, I don’t even know where to begin," she wrote in a blog.
“When I was 5, my fantasy was to have a hundred dogs and a hundred kids. I realized that so much of the pressure I was feeling was from outside sources, and I knew I wasn’t ready to take that step into motherhood. Being a biological mother just isn’t part of my experience this time around,” she told O, The Oprah Magazine.
Sex & The City author Candace Bushnell
“There are women who do it. On the other hand, there are a lot of women writers who never get married and don’t have kids. I am married, but I didn’t marry until I was 43. I knew when I was young that if I had to make a choice between being married and being a writer, I would have chosen to be a writer. I think it’s a career where you have to put the career first. I don’t have kids but—and luckily everyone isn’t like this—I think if you have that passion, in a way, your career is your child," she explained in an interview.
"I never had a burning desire to have children. But then I met Nick [Offerman], and I thought 'This is the only person I'd do this with.' So we tried, but I was a little long in the tooth for that sort of thing. But we didn't turn it into a soap opera. We tried for about a year or so, and it didn't happen, and took that to mean it wasn't meant to be," she told GQ.
"I have a thing about, like, wanting to learn about parenting myself. I don't want to have kids, but I tend to buy a lot of books about parenting. So I think that if there's something like, I have a problem with a work ethic, say, and maybe if I read a book about the new way to teach your kid about how to form a good work ethic, maybe I can do that to myself and maybe it'll work, you know?" she told NPR.
"I'm completely happy not having children. I mean, everybody does not have to live in the same way. And as somebody said, 'Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer,'" she said on Chelsea Lately.
"Neither of us want to have kids. In lieu of that, what we want to do is just pour ourselves into helping animals. So we’ve got a plan to buy a big property and open up our own animal sanctuary," he told Us.
"The fact is that I have chosen not to have children because I believe the children who are already here are really mine, too. I do not need to go making 'my own' babies when there are so many orphaned or abandoned children who need love, attention, time, and care," she said in her memoir.