Do women start feeling an overwhelming urge to have children at some point during their lifetime?

Scientifically? Biologically? Neurologically? I have absolutely no idea.

But my personal experience says: YES.

When I was very young—say, 4 or 5—I wanted to grow up and be a mum. Which is to say that I wanted to grow up to be like my mum. By the time I was eight, that desire had completely vanished. I found children (including my younger siblings and, yes, even myself) to be annoying, and the last thing I wanted was to have children of my own.

I didn’t want children as a teenager. I didn’t want children in my early twenties. I was in a stable relationship from the time I was 24, and I had absolutely no desire for children.

Then I turned 27, and it was like a switch flipped in my head.

All of a sudden, the sight of an infant made me feel warm and tingly and immeasurably sad that I didn’t have one of my own. I couldn’t walk past baby clothes without shedding a tear. I felt a literal tugging on my heart and gut every time I thought about babies, as though something was trying to pull me “home”. In fact, homesickness is pretty much the closest feeling I can get to it—it was overwhelming and all-encompassing. I even wrote terribly bad poetry about the existential angst of not having a baby.

After a few months of discussions with my then-husband, we decided to try to get pregnant. Six weeks later, I was officially expecting. I was overjoyed to know that I would soon have my own little bundle of joy. I read books, and prepared a nursery, and told anyone and everyone.

When I was twelve weeks pregnant, I had a miscarriage.

I lay in a hospital bed in agony as my body haemorrhaged blood so badly I came within a whisker of needing a transfusion. I was bereft. I still feel the pain of that loss, some twelve years later.

By the time my body had healed, my desire of children was completely gone. The process of being pregnant (however unsuccessfully) had apparently satisfied my biological clock, and I no longer felt any desire for babies. I’d returned to my pre-27 days of thinking children were messy, annoying, and boring. I decided I didn’t want any children after all, and life went on.

So, yes, I do think there’s something to the whole “ticking biological clock” that people talk about. But I do wonder whether my urge to have babies would have faded away after a couple of years, even without the pregnancy and miscarriage.

Post-script

If you read my credential at the top, you would have noted that I’m the mother of two children. Both of them were conceived years ( 2 and 6 respectively) after the miscarriage mentioned above. I had no desire for children, and spent both pregnancies in tears, distraught that my life would be “ruined”.

As it turns out, you don’t need to be desperately craving babies to fall deeply, madly in love with a child the moment you see him. Biological clock or no biological clock, my life was forever changed for the better by the birth of my sons, and I’m so proud I get to be their mother.

I was content with my life but anytime I saw a baby I had this aching so deep inside me it hurt. It was like an insatiable hunger. I was melted over any cute baby I saw. Even though I wasnt ready. I was selfish still, wanted to travel, finish my degree but the urge overtook me. You are never truly ready but you got 9 months to figure it out.

And no matter what happened in my life I could not get babies off my mind. I'm pregnant now and even though I tried to get pregnant I still panicked, and am continuing to panic daily for everything to be just right. It's s kick in the butt I needed in a direction I wanted. I quit smoking that day, drinking, caffiene, partying. If a baby was never born into stress the human race would have died a long time ago…. I now see a baby and feel impatient for mine. It's definitely instincts. This happened when I turned 28 like a freight train, before that I said later in my 30’s maybe, and that's when our fertility starts to decline. Makes sense.

Notice how there are more older mothers, fertility treatments, surrogates, now more than ever. Because woman are putting off their instincts for money and careers and then, boom, it's too late naturally, but that yearn is there or why would they bother with painful, costly fertility treatments.

I am 41, and I never felt an urge to be pregnant or have biological children. I did, however, feel an urge to adopt. The following tells my story, which I described in another answer:

I truly believe that adopting our daughters was a vastly superior option to undergoing infertility treatments to have a biological child. Keep in mind, I am not telling anyone what to do or not to do. Also, I am not speaking hypothetically because fourteen years ago, my husband and I were faced with this choice. We were surrounded by family, friends, and acquaintances who assumed that we would go through infertility treatments so that we could have our “own" children. The medical odds were completely in our favor and we were basically guaranteed to conceive through in-vitro fertilization.

However, my husband and I never gave infertility treatments more than a moment's consideration. For the four years previous to our infertility diagnosis, I had already felt called to my core to adopt. It truly was a longing of my heart, so when we learned we had infertility challenges, I saw that as a door opening to adoption. I never spent a moment grieving that I would not have a biological child.

I usually don't mention my lack of grief over infertility to other people, but when they find out our daughters were adopted, many people immediately assume that I was “heartbroken” over our infertility when we adopted our daughters. When we first decided to adopt, many people would even say, “Well, now you will probably get pregnant,” as if that would make me forget about the adoption nonsense. Medical facts and our joy over being able to give a loving home to a child who had nothing and no one wasn’t even a consideration. Instead, I was “supposed” to want “my own” child or I was some strange version of womanhood and perhaps an impostor in my desire to be a mother.

I am not claiming that people who make these assumptions are trying to be hurtful. In fact, I know that they are trying to be empathetic; however, their empathy grieves me because it communicates that my two daughters were second best options. Additionally, people will also remark that my daughters are so “lucky” that we adopted them. OH MY GOODNESS! There are not enough words to describe how abundantly thankful we are to have been “blessed” with our two daughters. My husband and I consider ourselves to be the lucky ones. Every single day, I look at them and realize what a miracle their lives are. I see their kindness and their love for each other, and it frequently brings tears to my eyes. I see their care and concern for me and their daddy, and I thank God again for sending them to us.

Therefore, I am absolutely convinced that adoption is profoundly meaningful and the love I have for my daughters could never be superseded by my love for a biological child. The only sad thing about our adoptions is that the fact that some people will never see our daughters for what they truly are: the greatest gifts we could EVER receive. Our daughters are the lights of our lives, and the only regrets we have is that we could not adopt more children

Some of us, certainly.

I remember it hitting me shortly after I turned 16. I remember my naive calculations about how many months along would be OK at the end of year 12 to be allowed to finish school at my exclusive, expensive, conservative Christian school. Fortunately I didn't have so much as a boyfriend to follow through on this notion, because I had no idea what morning sickness would be like, and the few years I spent failing at Uni actually taught me a lot about life and adulthood that I might not have learned otherwise.

I eventually had my first when I was 22. For 18 months after her birth, the craving was stilled - I was completely occupied looking after this wonderful new person. Then it came back, and it hasn't gone away since - through four more pregnancies, I was thinking I wanted another one as soon as this one was born, and hoping my fertility would come back quickly so I could maybe have another one before this one was walking, wouldn't that be easier than being pregnant and chasing after a toddler?

I haven't had easy pregnancies. One gave me blood pressure of 60/40 for several months, I couldn't drive and was basically semi-conscious through that time. Two others gave me pelvic instability so I couldn't walk, just shuffle along with crutches and *lots* of pain. The youngest I had an induced labour a week before he was due because of incipient liver failure, one of my enzymes was at thirty times the normal safe maximum. They all gave me pretty bad morning sickness in the first 20 weeks, and reflux in the second. But my oldest is a legal adult now, the most amazingly wonderful young adult I've ever met, I'm in my forties, my youngest is a toddler, and I still want another baby.

I think this is one of the parts of the brain that gets hijacked by really addictive drugs. So I'm addicted to my children. I can live with that.