ot everyone plans to have children.
Having a child is a very personal decision and not everyone wants to do it alone. For years, our favorite celebs have discussed whether or not they’re planning to have a baby one day, but there are plenty of stars who have decided they have no plans to do so.
We’ve rounded up a few celebrities who have publicly said they don’t plan to have children. For some reason (financial, social or lack of interest) they abandon this practice.
Jennette McCurdy
“I do not feel in any way shape or form like I want kids. I cannot imagine a world in which someday I want kids,” she said on her podcast in November 2023.
She did say, however, that she’s freezing her eggs in case she changes her mind: “I am also open to my mind changing. I have changed a lot as a person in my years so far and I hope to continue changing. What I don’t want to happen is for me to turn 40 and realize, ‘F–k, I want kids now,’ and I don’t have enough eggs to make it happen.”
Patricia Clarkson
On iHeartPodcast’s Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi podcast, the 63-year-old star called herself a “single, straight Southern woman who never married and never had children.”
“I have so many sisters who have beautiful children, and they now have beautiful children. I love being an aunt, I love it more than— probably more than acting, which is odd. They’re on par. But I’m telling you, these are gorgeous children, but that doesn’t have to define every woman.”
“I made a big choice, but I knew it when I was young…I had a window to have a child, but [at] the end of the day I loved working, and I grew up with great parents who sacrificed everything for me. And you have to really be committed to having children. You have to be a great parent, and I was afraid I couldn’t be.”
“My mother said, ‘Patty, I just don’t want you to wake up at 50 and be unhappy.’ I woke up at 50 in stilettos and a thong…I’ve had a great sexy-ass life,” she added.
Jennifer Coolidge
“I’m very, very immature, I think that has kept me from having children, because I’m sort of a child. Maybe if I had kids, I would’ve had to have grown up,” she told British GQ in June of 2023.
Seth Rogen
“It doesn’t seem that fun. People describe having kids as like brief glimmering moments of beauty amongst a sea of pain. Whereas not having kids is just lovely all the time. There’s none of that. It’s just great all day. I’m never like ‘I wish I had kids and I’m missing not having them,’” he told Kelly Clarkson in a March 2023 interview.
“I look over at my wife and she looks at me, and we’re like ‘if we had kids, we couldn’t do this! This wouldn’t even remotely be on the table! We couldn’t do any of this stuff if we had kids!’”
Stevie Nicks
“It’s like, Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don’t want to go to PTA meetings,” she told InStyle.
Stevie Nicks
“It’s like, Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don’t want to go to PTA meetings,” she told InStyle.
Miley Cyrus
“We just take and take and expect it to keep producing. And it’s exhausted. It can’t produce. We’re getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child. Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that,” she explained to Elle
Rachael Ray
“I don’t have time. I work too much to be an appropriate parent. I feel like a bad mom to my dog some days because I’m just not here enough. I just feel like I would do a bad job if I actually took the time to literally give birth to a kid right now and try and juggle everything I’m doing,” she told People.
Jared Leto
“I think it’s really important to be present if you have children. I have a lot of… things to take care of,” he told ES Magazine.
Anjelica Huston
“I would probably have been miserable. When I talk about my mother and not wanting to echo that relationship, I think it would’ve probably been very much the same way. I would have been a stay-at-home mum, and he’d have been off, doing what he did. And that’s never really been me, either. I’m too noisy. I suck up too much air, myself,” she said to The Guardian.
Tracee Ellis Ross
“I’m constantly asking myself questions, reminding myself, ‘Are you making that decision for you or someone else?’ The husband and the babies are the expectation of what’s supposed to happen at a certain point, and people fall back on, ‘Well, that’s the point of the human species, procreation.’ And I’m, like, ‘I think there are a lot of babies, isn’t that part of what’s going wrong, there’s too many?’ Some people could be working on the world being a better place, or just being happy,” she told The Sunday Times
Chelsea Handler
“I don’t think I’d be a great mother … I don’t want to have a kid and have it raised by a nanny. I don’t have the time to raise a child,” she told The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet.
Helen Mirren
“It was not my destiny, I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn’t care what people thought … It was only boring old men [who would ask me]. And whenever they went, ‘What? No children? Well, you’d better get on with it, old girl,’ I’d say ‘No! F*** off!’” she told British Vogue.
Mary J Blige
“I have nieces and nephews forever and I’m always watching how people are scrambling for babysitters. I don’t want to go through that,” she told E!’s Daily Pop.
Keanu Reeves
“I’m too… it’s too late. It’s over. I’m 52. I’m not going to have any kids,” he told Esquire.
Aisha Tyler
“When we found out that [getting pregnant] was going to be difficult to impossible, it really was a choice to stop. I wanted families [and] couples to know that it was a valid choice not to get on this crazy merry-go-round of IVF and tens and tens of thousands of dollars…I wanted people to feel — men and women — it’s okay to say, ‘I love my marriage, I love my life, I choose not to have children.’”
Oprah Winfrey
“If I had kids, my kids would hate me. They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them,” she told THR.
Allison Janney
“I think if I’d found the right guy at the right time and wanted to have kids, I probably would have with the right partner. Because I wasn’t ever really confident that I wanted to have kids, and I would rather regret not having kids than have kids and regret it,” she told Drew Barrymore.
Ellen DeGeneres
“Honestly, we’d probably be great parents. But it’s a human being, and unless you think you have excellent skills and have a drive or yearning in you to do that, the amount of work that that is and responsibility — I wouldn’t want to screw them up! We love our animals,” she told People.
Lily Tomlin
“I really do like kids, but there wouldn’t have been room in my life to raise children. I was so involved with my career and I would have had to give up the career in large part because I could not possibly have shortchanged the child…It’s hard to raise children and to do right by them. There are too many kids anyway. There’s too many people,” she told Metro Weekly.
Alison Brie
“I don’t really want to have kids. It’s great because I don’t worry about when I should get pregnant—between seasons, while we’re shooting the show [Glow]—I don’t think about it every day. It would be nice, but I think of all the things that would be so stressful. I think about how much we’re involved in our cats’ lives. Oh my God, if it was a child!” she told The Times of London.
Jon Hamm
“I’d be a terrible father. I see my friends who have children and I’m like, ‘Dude, how are you even upright, much less here at work at 6 a.m.?’” he told Us Weekly.
Sarah Silverman
“As a comic always working & on the road I have had to decide between motherhood & living my fullest life & I chose the latter,” she tweeted.
Sex & The City author Candace Bushnell
“There are women who do it. On the other hand, there are a lot of women writers who never get married and don’t have kids. I am married, but I didn’t marry until I was 43. I knew when I was young that if I had to make a choice between being married and being a writer, I would have chosen to be a writer. I think it’s a career where you have to put the career first. I don’t have kids but—and luckily everyone isn’t like this—I think if you have that passion, in a way, your career is your child,” she explained in an interview.
Megan Mullally
“I never had a burning desire to have children. But then I met Nick [Offerman], and I thought ‘This is the only person I’d do this with.’ So we tried, but I was a little long in the tooth for that sort of thing. But we didn’t turn it into a soap opera. We tried for about a year or so, and it didn’t happen, and took that to mean it wasn’t meant to be,” she told GQ.
Fiona Apple
“I have a thing about, like, wanting to learn about parenting myself. I don’t want to have kids, but I tend to buy a lot of books about parenting. So I think that if there’s something like, I have a problem with a work ethic, say, and maybe if I read a book about the new way to teach your kid about how to form a good work ethic, maybe I can do that to myself and maybe it’ll work, you know?” she told NPR.
Gloria Steinem
“I’m completely happy not having children. I mean, everybody does not have to live in the same way. And as somebody said, ‘Everybody with a womb doesn’t have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer,’” she said on Chelsea Lately.
