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help with childcare. Now, her husband is working in
a hospital where he might be exposed to the virus, so
her plan is on hold. Asking her mother to babysit is
out of the question, and Ogden knows she’d likely be
left to juggle childcare and work on her own. “As a
lawyer, you can’t really work part time, and full time
is a lot more hours than some other professions,” she
says. “I have friends who are honest and vulnerable
about what’s happening, and they feel like they’re
not being good parents or good employees.” Even
before the corona virus, she saw high-powered fe-
male lawyers forced to take on less ambitious work
when they had children. The ones who stayed dem-
onstrated grit difficult to emulate. “Choices for
working couples were never great to begin with,”
she says. “They’re impossible now.”
The situation is worse for would-be parents who
don’t have the option of working from home. Aaron
Jarvis, 33, has an endometriosis diagnosis that could
make getting pregnant difficult, so she and her hus-
band Marty discussed starting their family soon. But
Jarvis, who works in human resources in
Detroit, and her husband, who works at
Chrysler, were told they must come in to
work despite the pandemic.
Even if she felt comfortable going to an
office while pregnant during a pandemic,
Jarvis had to wonder how the family would
manage after the baby was born. Taking va-
cation days to care for an infant would be
financially risky: “With everything being
so iffy and businesses closing and layoffs,
would I have a job to go back to?”
And then there’s the issue of accessi-
ble childcare. The childcare industry has
been slammed by the pandemic, according
to a July survey from the National Associa-
tion for the Education of Young Children.
It predicted that without substantial gov-
ernment investment, 40% of childcare pro-
grams surveyed would be forced to close
because of low enrollment and higher op-
erating costs. “We decided we’re probably
not going to have a kid until corona virus is
gone gone,” says Jarvis. “And that might be
a few years. And that’s O.K.”
But demographers say that if women
delay having babies at any point in their
lives, it’s more likely that they won’t have
children at all or won’t have as many as they
originally planned. “Women see a major
crunch. They have to complete their educa-
tion, get their careers started, find a partner
and have babies—if they plan to do that—in
just a 10-year span,” says Dowell Myers, the
director of the Population Dynamics Re-
search Group at the University of Southern
California. Even as advances in health care
have allowed women to delay pregnancy,
women are having fewer babies total than
their mothers and grandmothers did.
Millennials, the 24- to 39-year-olds most
likely to consider having a child right now,
already had their life plans delayed because of the Great Recession. They’re
achieving career milestones later, buying houses later and having kids later
than previous generations. Myers says that if hundreds of thousands of
millennial women choose to delay pregnancy even longer, “we’re look-
ing at a fundamental and unprecedented change to our population.”
Many women are asking existential questions about whether they
should bring a child into such a scary world. Haley Neidich, a 35-year-old
therapist in South Pasadena, Fla., has decided not to get pregnant until “the
pandemic is over,” but she’s still trying to figure out what “over” means.
Her previous two pregnancies—one of which ended in miscarriage shortly
before she began to quarantine—were tough. She experienced debilitating
nausea that, if she were to get pregnant again, would make it hard to care
for the toddler she already has. She has nightmares about the possibility
of another miscarriage and of being forced to go to the doctor alone for a
heartbreaking surgery if that came to pass.
^
Aaron and Marty Jarvis
must both go in to
offices to work, risky
for a pregnancy
ELAINE CROMIE FOR TIME
