At The Dispatch, I’ve got a piece on how complicated people’s fertility desires can be:
One pilot study contrasted how women answered a stark question about whether they were currently trying to get pregnant, offering the options “yes,” “no,” or “don’t know,” and found that only 2 percent of women picked the ambivalent answer. But when they offered the same women a broader set of options (“trying to get pregnant,” “wouldn’t mind getting pregnant,” “don’t know,” “wouldn’t mind avoiding pregnancy” and “trying to avoid a pregnancy”) 10 times as many women (22 percent) picked one of the middle three ambivalent options. […]
In practice, most fertility questions are more complicated than yes or no. It can be helpful to talk about fertility intentions in the aggregate, but not so helpful to ask a friend, “So, are you done, or do you want another?” when she’s holding a newborn in her arms. The answer she may give immediately postpartum isn’t necessarily the answer she’ll give by the time her cycles resume, or when this baby becomes a toddler.
There are some contexts in which “how many children do you want?” is a helpful question. If you know you hope for three or more, then, realistically, you’d like to try to get started sooner. If you want a larger family, then advice that presumes babyhood is a brief, passing interruption of your real life won’t be helpful to you. High attachment parenting has a very different cost for a mother of one than a mother of four. But, for the most part, you only have to make choices about one baby at a time. You can’t decide whether you feel ready for baby N+2 until after you’ve had baby N+1.