You knew it had to hit a nerve, didn’t you? The title alone – “Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not To Have Kids,” edited by Meghan Daum (Picador, $26, 282 pages) – is bound to be a scab that many will have to pick.

Apparently, childlessness is a growing trend, with many of those feeling they are childless by circumstance rather than by choice. For women in particular, it’s a case of going entirely against the grain. Despite some horrific stories of child abuse and murder by mothers – and examples in the animal kingdom that give lie to the idea of “maternal instinct” – we as members of the human race expect women to become mothers. (Men, always granted more freedom, are given a pass on fatherhood, but then their role in reproduction is over quickly. Indeed any gynecologist will tell you we could continue the human race without men at all. Figures that men would invent the technology that has made them obsolete. Talk about shooting yourself in, well, not the foot.)

For myself, I can only say that it was a no-brainer. I wanted to be free to be a writer, and I realized early on that I would never be the writer I wanted to be if I had children (or, for that matter, a husband). ...