More kids? After the last two years? No thanks

Slogging through pandemic life, with all its unpredictable setbacks and derailments — not to mention brushes with existential terror — has had a similar feeling to postpartum life, but without the silver lining of an adorable newborn. Adding an actual newborn to the mix? Forget about it, say some, at least for now, and probably forever. (It’s also worth noting that there has long been a gap between the number of children Americans say they want versus the number they end up having.)

There’s another, more straightforward aspect of pandemic birth control: waning fertility. While many aspects of life have felt like they were on hold for two years, time did continue to pass, a meaningful consideration for people who had the tail end of their 30s drip down the drain as they gained dubious new skills in Zoom and sourdough baking. What may have seemed like an exciting possibility to some, at, say, 38, seems, at 40, more like a daunting set of fiscal and, for women, physiological hurdles to clear.

For other older parents, the changes wrought by the pandemic helped clarify their limitations, in ways that were painful even as they brought them something akin to wisdom.

Sarah Balcomb, a writer who has a 9-year-old daughter and lives in Lexington, Va., realized that she was permanently done with reproduction the way that Hemingway once described going broke: gradually, and then all at once.