American Sociological Association Annual Meeting Conference Paper Submission.

This research explores the lived experiences and life choices of voluntarily childfree women in the United States. The purpose of this study is to investigate why women choose voluntary childlessness as well as to examine how they come to make a childfree decision. Drawing on indepth, semi-structured interviews with voluntarily childfree women, this paper discusses the selfreported reasons women decide not to bear children. Although this is a working paper in the early stages of data inquiry, preliminary analyses suggest that one of the ways voluntarily childfree women account for their childlessness is by the means of trauma narratives. As the women discuss the experience of traumas throughout their life course, they underscore conceivable reproductive risks and uncertainties--physical, social, and psychological ones. Moreover, they describe beliefs of untenable sacrifice and loss of self with regard to having children. The childfree women's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors emphasize how childbearing and childrearing affect personal well-being. Their reproductive decision-making processes are related to a variety of past and ongoing social, cultural, and psychological experiences, all of which inform the women's resistance to circumstances that accompany the possibility of, for example, dependency, loss, instability, or unpredictability. Grounded in a social psychological and social constructionist framework, I argue that the childfree women talk about, negotiate, and justify contested identities to self and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]