Growing number of couples opting not to have children

"Babies have just never interested me," she said. "My husband and I didn't get married to have children. We got married for us."

This is hardly the first generation of people making such a decision. Over history changes in society, technological breakthroughs and economic hard times have made it possible, and for some desirable, to refrain from producing offspring.

"Childlessness is not new," said Philip Morgan, a professor of sociology at Duke University.

"However, childlessness in the past was more closely connected with non-marriage than now. But even in 1910 (in the) U.S. some women were voluntarily childless within marriage," he said.

During the Depression, he added, many Americans also chose not to have children because they could not afford them. "Childlessness levels now are not higher than those in the 1930s," he said.

There are many factors involved in decision making today, said Morgan and others. These include breakthroughs in fertility treatments that allow women to postpone child bearing until much later in life by which time their lifestyles and other factors may make them decide not to have children after all.

Some even see this issue as a defining one for modern American society, as a line in the sand in the nation's so-called culture wars, a place where science and beliefs clash.

One such person is Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. He sees a decision by a married couple to refrain from having children as a violation of God's will.

"God's purpose in creation is being trumped by modern practices," Mohler said in a phone interview. "I would argue that it (not having children) ought to be falling short of the glory of God. Deliberate childlessness defies God's will."

But not all Christians, even Evangelicals, agree with Mohler's views.

Amy Showalter, 44, and her husband, Randy Boyer, 45, decided not to have children and consider themselves devout and conservative Christians. They attend weekly services at the Crossroads Community Church in their hometown of Cincinnati.

"Nobody has ever told us this is a sin," she said. "It just does not come up."

Showalter, a consultant, said after 11 years of marriage she and her husband had concluded that they would make terrible parents.

"We didn't feel we would be qualified," she said. "It was not that we wanted to be rich or anything like that."

Nicki Defago is a Britain-based author who recently wrote a book titled "Childfree and Loving It." She said that for her and many others like her, the decision not to have children was the result of many factors.