No Way Baby!: Exploring, Understanding, and Defending the Decision NOT to Have Children - Softcover

Updated for 2012: Forty years after throwing off the shackles of a patriarchy that required nothing less than marriage and babies from its female citizens, women continue to fall prey to the conventional wisdom that you "grow up, get married and have children." This is just the tip of the melting ice berg. While our planet struggles to maintain the over 6.5 billion humans already ravaging her splendor, women (and men) still encounter resistance by family and friends solely because they have decided not to breed another ravenous consumer. In "No Way Baby!" the decision not to have children is examined and defended so that the choice may be better understood. With ongoing narrative intertwined with insights from 40+ childfrees living on the front lines, Karen Foster makes the case that it is time to stop obligatory procreation and recognize that childfree adults make a valuable contribution to society that benefit everyone - even children.

Karen Foster is a pebble in the shoe of conventional wisdom, shining light on the discrepancies between what we say we should do, what we think we should do and what we do. It all started at the age of 18 when she chucked the traditional college experience and headed to that hotbed of nonconformity, San Francisco. Fortunately, she was too young to know that shouldn't have worked out well, so in her own time, she went ahead and graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in Clinical Psychology. After years of working in both the non-profit and for profit sectors, Karen realized that there was no profit worth the aggravation of gainful employment. So in the midst of the .com craze, Karen headed north to Portland, where she started her own business as a speaker and a coach. Today Karen travels around the US as a professional development trainer where she encounters all sorts of interesting people who continue to be amazed by her unwillingness to breed (or do lots of other things so-called 'normal' people do.) She still lives in Portland.