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  • The Paris Review

    The Most Selfish Choice

    by Jessie Greengrass Aug 20, 2018 4 minutes

    Justine Siegmund, Diagram of a Fetus, Lying on Its Side, in an Opened Womb, 1723.

    I am not by nature a decisive person. Anxiety freights each choice with the potential for disaster, and where possible, I defer. It ought to come as no surprise, then, that I struggled with the decision to have a child—except that even to acknowledge the existence of such a decision is routinely considered a sign of failure. We talk about clocks. We talk about cycles. We talk about diminishing fertility, the prioritization of career over family, the horror of having left it “too late,” as though it were possible that half the population might

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