Becoming a single mom by choice

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Becoming a single mom by choice

Kelly always loved kids. Growing up in a rural part of Texas in a conservative, Christian environment, she worked as the camp counselor during vacation Bible school and volunteered to teach classes at her church. She knew she’d be a mother one day, she just had no idea how she would get there — especially once she understood she was queer. When, at 28, she eventually married a trans man, they got as far as making embryos together, but those embryos are set to be destroyed once their divorce is finalized this spring. Now living in Houston and working for an education nonprofit, she pondered how she might pursue her goal on her own. Kelly doesn’t use much social media, but she does use Reddit. About a year ago, she stumbled on a subreddit dedicated to becoming a solo mother by choice and began poring over other would-be parents’ stories.

One afternoon after work, feeling despondent, Kelly — who, like several of the women The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Cut spoke with, asked to go by a pseudonym — sat down in her car and typed out a plaintive post. She was 32, she wrote, living in a medium cost-of-living area, and making $56,000 a year. Her job was fairly stable, but she knew she didn’t earn a lot, and the cost of living keeps rising. Her friends assured her she’d be a terrific mom, but even they worried whether she was financially ready. She needed to hear that her dream was within reach. “Can someone tell me that my situation is not unique? That someone else has felt like this and is now a mother? That everything is going to work out? I’m just losing faith every day,” she wrote. “I want to know if it is possible.”

Having a child in 2026 is a difficult decision for many, but single women come to this decision with unique questions. How do I choose a sperm donor? How much does one cost? What kinds of jobs pay enough and offer the flexibility a single mom needs? When is it time to give up on dating? How does anyone afford child care on a single paycheck? How do you shower when you have a newborn? Is 41 too old? Is 21 too young? How do you talk to a child about the donor? What’s the most manageable age gap between siblings? How do I accept that this was never the plan — and then start to plan for it? For thousands of women like Kelly, the answers to these questions are found on r/SingleMothersByChoice.

The responses she received mixed practical advice (consider pivoting her career to nursing, finance, or accounting; get a second job to save an emergency fund; make a spreadsheet and budget out what your costs would be with a baby) with emotional support (“I don’t have any answers, just wanted to let you know you’re in good company with feeling this way”). One commenter advised her to cut back her expenses and save, but noted that she had “raised a child frugally yet without missing out on anything … we’ve had lots of packed lunches when out to save money and be able to afford to do more.” (“This felt like reading a message from a supportive and loving big sister. Thank you 🫶,” Kelly replied.) She especially appreciated advice from several commenters on how to identify her support network and build community.

“It was so supportive, but also like, ‘Okay, here’s the reality of it. Here is what I did. This might not be enough money. You might not be able to work in nonprofit,’” she said, although she intentionally chose a nonprofit employer for student-loan forgiveness. Thanks to the Reddit thread, Kelly is now considering changing careers — to nursing, which would come with a higher paycheck but would also increase her student-debt burden — while trying to pay down her credit-card debt and her fertility loan payment of $350 per month for the IVF she did with her ex. She had previously assured herself that people have kids all the time without planning for it, but based on the advice she got from other commenters, she now wants to have her finances in a better place first, including building up an emergency fund of $10,000, which could cover two months of her expenses.

“It feels good to have somebody be like, ‘Yes, I have also thought about this, and you’re thinking about the right things, and, yes, it is possible,’” Kelly told me. “Because sometimes having no representation of it feels very, very lonely.”

For a long time, the most prominent representations of single motherhood were either teen moms with unintended pregnancies or Murphy Brown, the TV executive played by Candice Bergen, who chose to carry a pregnancy from a one-night stand to term on the 1990s television show. Years before ”Murphy Brown” ever aired, the social worker Jane Mattes had founded a small organization of single moms by choice called Single Mothers by Choice, or SMC, in 1981. It remains a robust community and one of the top search results for “single mother by choice.” Membership in the group costs $55 a year and includes connections to local in-person chapters; its website says that “over 40,000 thinkers, tryers, and mothers have enjoyed the benefits of membership” since its founding over 40 years ago. Reddit, of course, is free, and the r/SingleMothersByChoice community, which was founded in 2015, now draws over 20,000 visitors each week.

Unlike much of the social-media content geared toward mothers, there’s no spon-con, no filters, just genuine real talk on r/SingleMothersByChoice: anonymous women sharing their fears and hesitations, the ups and downs of their experiences, and nitty-gritty advice on how to get through it, from donor selection to balancing a budget to navigating the day-care pickup-to-dinnertime transition without a meltdown. Kelly prefers the anonymity of Reddit to other social media platforms. “People are more honest. They’re not out for their own ego or followers, so it feels like they are going to tell you the truth,” she said.

Many of the single mothers by choice in the Reddit community appear to have a lot in common with Murphy Brown: They are older, more professionally stable, and better financially prepared. But they still grapple with assumptions and judgments from friends and family, from doctors and neighbors, and even on medical intake questionnaires, which typically presume two parties are participating in fertility treatment. Kelly is somewhere in between — not especially concerned about stigma or judgment (she’s already estranged from her parents since coming out), but not quite where she wants to be professionally or financially before becoming a mom.

“But at this point, I’m like, I don’t want to wait for the perfect, perfect, perfect moment, because it just doesn’t exist.”

Today, nearly 1 in 4 American children live in single-parent households, and 85% of those are headed by women. There is no official data on what share of women become single mothers by choice, not just because government surveys don’t ask this question, but also because women themselves can be ambivalent about whether this decision constitutes a choice at all. “I’m 41 this week and technically an SMBC — but lately it feels less ‘by choice’ and more … by default,” Emily, a chef in New York, posted a few months ago, describing the grief of feeling like she was closing a door on the family life she’d always envisioned. She wasn’t sure if she should go ahead and have a frozen embryo transferred into her uterus or sink more time and money into a round of egg freezing and keep dating in hopes of meeting the right man.

Like Kelly, Emily didn’t have anyone in her life who was becoming a single mother by choice and found the emotional support she needed online. “Reddit was holding my hand,” she said, calling it a place “where you can get into the nitty-gritty feelings of it all.” With her loved ones, she continued, “I don’t feel like I can always get into it, because it can either get too emotional, or family and friends don’t really know how to respond.” One of her friends had recently told her, “You just have to own it — you have to own that you’re doing this.” But that’s not as easy as it sounds, Emily said. “It’s so hard to do that when there’s so many questions, and that’s where Reddit comes in. You can bounce stuff off of random people.”

She worried that dating was already hard enough; the prospect of dating with a child “feels overwhelming,” she wrote. Was she better off moving forward with her plan or “stalling my life for a hypothetical future,” while she and her mom, her main source of support, grow older? Many commenters assured her that all her doubts would disappear once her baby was born. Others noted it was always possible to date as a mom (“I’ve found as I’ve gotten older, there are many people my age who don’t want more kids of their own but are open to dating people with kids,” one person wrote, “so while it may have shifted my dating pool away from people who don’t want to date people with kids it’s also probably going to open the door to date people who are fine with kids but don’t want more of their own”). Many commenters chimed in to remind her that being a solo parent was infinitely easier than having a useless partner.

“I could have written this post,” one wrote, before adding that she now feels that, with her baby, she has perhaps become “a more complete version of myself” for when she tries dating again. “When someone else validates how you feel and they feel the same exact way, it’s like, ‘Oh God, thank you,’” Emily said.

She is now moving forward with a frozen-embryo transfer. “Enough people said, ‘Your doubts disappear when you have the kid,’” she said. “I’m not going to regret it once the baby is with me, and so knowing that, and feeling like other people who have had the kid already, despite however hard it is — everyone seems to feel like they wish they had done it sooner.”

For a growing share of the online community, romantic relationships either take a back seat or are out of the equation entirely. Mary, 25, lives in Washington D.C., with a roommate and works for the federal government. She has always wanted to be a mother, and, after some soul-searching, recently concluded that she is aromantic/asexual. Mary recently helped out a friend and her husband with their new baby, joining them at the hospital for the birth and then moving in with them to help for the first 10 days of their baby’s life. “I came out of that feeling like, Okay, yeah, I’m ready,” she said. But nothing about her lifestyle in D.C. was conducive to that. She started to think that the only way she could be a solo mother was to move back to her hometown in Texas to have the support of her parents and friends. Being a solo parent in a big city on a single income “feels so hard and unrealistic,” she wrote to the group. Moving back home “feels like such a personal defeat,” she continued, “but it also feels like the first of many sacrifices I will make in this motherhood journey. I’d love to hear your thoughts/perspectives/advice.”

Mary was aware that, as a 25-year-old with no interest in a relationship, she was coming from a slightly different place than other women in the subreddit, but she still felt they understood her in a way that her friends and family couldn’t. “It’s like, just by posting, there’s the assumption that we all have that same base knowledge of this is what we’re here to do,” she said. Soon after she posted, the answers came rolling in; she refreshed the page every few minutes. Commenters reminded her that she may not want to be pregnant in Texas given the current state of access to reproductive health care (“I hadn’t even thought about that angle,” Mary admitted), while others advised waiting until she was pregnant to move, since the process of getting pregnant could take years.

Each objection or possibility that commenters raised gave Mary a chance to double-check her assumptions; it was like pressure-testing her various options for any potential holes. One person asked whether she could definitely rely on her parents; another suggested there might be a way to move to a suburb of D.C. and still be close to friends. Responding to the commenters allowed her to “have those arguments with myself and think through multiple perspectives before launching it on the people who this would actually impact, like my friends and family,” she said. She has since come to the conclusion that there’s no reason to wait and has already had her bloodwork and an ultrasound done while she applies for Texas-based jobs.

Abigail often counsels younger women in the subreddit to wait. “My response always is wait till you’re almost 25 or about 25. There really is something to your brain developing,” she said. She is 26 with a 3-month-old boy from a prior relationship and is planning to have a second and, eventually, a third on her own. She works in tech in Washington State and relies on her grandparents at the moment for child care. “I do not think you need to make buckets of money” to become a single mom, Abigail said, “but this is also what I tell people: You need to have a plan.” For Abigail, mapping out her career trajectory is more important than reaching a specific milestone before growing her family. “Society is damaging to women when it tells them they need to have it all figured out. They wait too long and they can’t, or they don’t want to, spend $40,000 on IVF. I’m a big believer in you can be figuring it out and have a baby.”

In 2019, the investment bank Morgan Stanley forecasted that 45% of prime-working-age women, aged 25-44, would be single by 2030. Astute readers will notice these years also overlap with the bulk of women’s reproductive lives, which suggests that this community of single mothers by choice is poised to grow. One of the subreddit’s current moderators told me that it took a couple of years for the group to reach its first thousand members, but it grew quickly from there. She’s also seen a shift from women in their late thirties to younger people for whom single motherhood by choice is Plan A rather than a backup plan. “The overall interest in this path to parenthood seems to have increased significantly, and that’s reflected in how quickly the community has grown,” she said.

This demographic shift struck Olivia, a 39-year-old academic in upstate New York, as she read through the subreddit. “It’s fucking insane that here we are, so many women, taking on the burden of raising this generation alone,” she said. But that insane scenario, this growing army of single mothers by choice, she added, “weaves interesting new relationships between women.”

Olivia had posted about struggling to choose a sperm donor: not just the choice, but her resistance to the very idea of it — of having the genetic material of some anonymous man in her body, of choosing someone for such a monumental event without knowing whether she would ever be drawn to him in real life. Some commenters deeply related to her feeling, some were dismissive, and one woman chimed in that she also had an aversion to using a donor because only “whores and women who are raped” don’t know the name of their children’s father, a comment she found loaded and stigmatizing. That jarring comment reminded Olivia that she and the others in the community had been “brought together by a shared experience, not by shared values.” Still, she understood that these remarks, along with several others she felt were slightly dismissive, were intended to validate her discomfort and offer support. Overall, she said, “It actually really has made me feel accompanied.”

Hannah, a nurse in Portland, Oregon, had sought advice for how she should spend the next two years preparing for single motherhood (“Honestly, mainly the thing is money,” read the top reply on her Reddit post; others urged her to check her health-insurance benefits). Just seeing the sheer number of women who had taken this step and were sharing their hard-won wisdom was already “so empowering.” They’re “offering financial advice and emotional advice and being honest and vulnerable,” she said. It felt to her like something “natural,” where “women just want to support other women, you know?”

That sense of community left Olivia wondering whether all of these women could be found somewhere in real life. Spending time in the subreddit has left her “really impressed by women” in general, she said, “and just, like, wishing that I could see all these women in a room.”

Co-published by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Cut.

This story was produced by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Cut, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.