Why Mother’s Day is not a day for all women
Mother’s Day. One of those Sundays when the world suddenly looks like one giant family commercial. Bouquets of flowers, children’s drawings, Instagram posts saying “Thanks, Mom, for everything,” and restaurants handing out Prosecco to women with strollers. Incidentally, Mother’s Day originally emerged in the early 20th century as a tribute to women’s care and social commitment—not as a capitalist flower hell with a pastel filter. Ironically, its founder, Anna Jarvis, later fought against the commercialization of the day herself.
Today, Mother’s Day is one thing above all else: a social stage. And on this stage, one group of women is almost entirely absent—women without children.
Interestingly, hardly anyone talks about men without children. Men are considered complete even without offspring. Successful. Desirable. Free. No one asks a 52-year-old man over dinner with concern: “So… don’t you regret it?” Women, on the other hand, do. Because female identity is still defined to an astonishing degree by motherhood. As if a uterus were simultaneously a social life mission.
Yet there is no single type of childless woman. There are many stories. Women who have consciously chosen not to have children. Women who have wanted nothing more than a child. And women whose lives have simply taken a different course.
And perhaps these women are missing less than society believes.
“I just didn’t want children”
Women who consciously choose not to have children still irritate our society to an astonishing degree. Even today, child-free women are often met with an unspoken judgment: selfish, career-obsessed, incapable of commitment, or somehow not quite “natural.”
Yet many of these women simply say: I’m happy with my life.
Not in spite of their decision, but because of it.
They want freedom, peace, creative self-fulfillment, or simply a daily life without children. Some love children but still don’t want any of their own. Others never feel this desire. And that is precisely what still seems to make many people uneasy—especially because women are still strongly defined by society in terms of caregiving.
In her book *Regretting Motherhood*, Israeli sociologist Orna Donath describes how taboo honest conversations about motherhood remain to this day—both regarding women who regret their role as mothers and those who consciously choose against it.
Women do not have to have children to be loving, social, or whole.
Fertility clinics instead of nurseries
Then there is the other reality. Women who wanted children. Perhaps more than anything else. Women who have had hormone injections, experienced failed attempts, and organized their daily lives around cycle calendars for years.
According to the WHO, one in six people worldwide is affected by infertility. Nevertheless, involuntary childlessness is often treated by society as a personal failure rather than a profound emotional experience.
What’s often particularly painful is the reaction from those around you. The questions. The advice. The toxic, endless mantra: “Just relax.”
No. Not everything in life happens automatically just because you think positively enough.
While gender reveal parties are exploding on social media, other women sit in the waiting rooms of fertility clinics, simply hoping for a single positive test.
And sometimes life just turns out differently
Perhaps this is the quietest group of all: women who neither consciously choose a child-free life nor have gone through years of fertility treatments. Women whose lives simply took a different turn.
No big decision. No medical drama. Maybe there was never the right time, never the right relationship, or simply too many other things going on in life. And at some point, you quietly realize that certain possibilities are shrinking.
This form of childlessness is almost invisible to society because it doesn’t offer a clear story.
Just one sentence: “It just didn’t happen.”
And yet there is often more ambivalence in it than our society can handle. Because women are supposedly supposed to either actively choose to have children or actively choose against them. The fact that life is sometimes simply more complex doesn’t fit well into societal boxes.
Perhaps we need a new image of femininity
The real problem isn’t Mother’s Day. The problem is the idea that motherhood is the highest form of female fulfillment.
Yet women build lives in all sorts of ways. Some raise children. Others build businesses, friendships, art, communities, or rebuild themselves after difficult years.
Care takes many forms. So does love.
And perhaps it’s about time we stopped constantly judging women by who they’ve given birth to—and started judging them by who they are.
Because women without children aren’t automatically missing something. Perhaps what our society still lacks is the ability to truly view women’s life paths as equal.
Childlessness in numbers
- In Germany, about one in five women remains childless for life. (Federal Statistical Office)
- According to the WHO, infertility affects one in six people worldwide.
- Studies show that childless women face social pressure and stigmatization more frequently than childless men.
- The term “childfree” describes women and men who consciously choose not to have children.
- Psychologists point out that Mother’s Day can be emotionally stressful for women who are childless by choice—much like other socially charged holidays.