“A woman who hasn’t birthed her own children has no business being President of the United States. How can she possibly care about the future of this country if she has no biological stake in it? Maybe we’ll give her credit if she adopted children. But stepparenting doesn’t count because they’re not her own…”

These messages have come loud and clear from conservative politicians and pundits since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s 2024 presumptive nominee. While not surprising, considering their stance on reproductive rights suggests a woman’s primary value is her ability to carry children, these sentiments are nonetheless concerning.

The assumption that fuels this sentiment is downright false. I am a stepparent and an American woman who chose not to get pregnant. Not having my “own” children allows me to care even more about the children and all humankind around me.

Even when I once planned on getting pregnant and beginning a traditional family, the idea of having my “own” children suggested ownership over them and felt gross. Yet, I still planned to become a parent.

Having grown up doubly religious, having one Catholic and one Evangelical parent, getting married to a man and bearing children was the expectation.

At seventeen, my parents held an intervention over my weight. With intelligence and public speaking talents, I performed well at a state science symposium for gifted high schoolers. Yet, when we returned home from the event, they proclaimed that college would be the time I would find my husband but it would be more difficult if I was fat.

I eventually found a husband— two of them. And I didn’t get pregnant with either, even though I was off birth control for a sufficient amount of time to allow it. If you had asked me at age thirty if becoming a mother was important to me, the answer was a definitive “yes!”

“I have always wanted to be a mother,” I would tell partners, friends and therapists. But then I saw how much the fantasy of motherhood clashed with the reality as more and more of my friends started families.

I began to wonder. Had I always wanted it or had others wanted it for me? Growing up religious, I bought into the lie that my ultimate value was in being a mother, no matter what else I accomplished.

Moreover, what I had thought was a desire to have children was actually a need to correct the wrongs of my upbringing. Therapy and a long healing process helped me to realize that the purpose of children is not to meet our unmet needs.

In addition to therapy, several life circumstances released me from the need to get pregnant or adopt. The first was becoming a stepparent through my second marriage.

Stepparenting is challenging. I was worried I would screw it up and I still wonder if I did my best with the two outstanding boys who I grew to love as my own. Even though their dad and I are no longer married, the boys are still in my life and for that, I am grateful.

Although they gave me a reality check on the rigors of parenting, stepparenting didn’t discourage me from having children. Instead, it caused me to ponder, “Maybe my ultimate vocation is to help parent other peoples’ children?” In addition, my career flourished because of the attention I was able to give it since I didn’t have my “own” children.

I have worked as a mental health therapist for nearly twenty years. I teach people how to re-parent themselves. Having started my career as an educator, I continue to educate others around the world, training a new generation of trauma therapists through my company,