The Baby Decision

“A Warmly Empathic, Wide-Ranging Manual” – Kirkus Reviews

"This valuable unbiased book skillfully shows readers how to stop fretting over the choice and take time to make the right one. –Blue Ink Starred Review and Notable Book

Featured in The Washington Post and The New York Times

Baby or Childfree? Which will it Be?

Is this decision keeping you up at night? Do you feel terrified you will regret your decision? Are you paralyzed by this high-stakes choice?

Now you can get off the fence and get on with your life. Imagine your relief when you discover the right choice and break free from obsession. Picture yourself enjoying the pleasures of parenthood or the freedom and spontaneity of living childfree.

The Baby Decision is a powerful, unbiased guidebook by a professional coach/psychotherapist who has specialized in the topic for forty years.

With wisdom, depth and humor Merle will help you take this overwhelming decision and break it down into a digestible sequence of five steps.

During this discovery process you will:

• Dissolve fear and doubt.
• Use thirty visualization exercises and thought experiments to uncover your answer.
• Have deep talks with your partner, even if you disagree.
• Resist pressures from family and friends, and fully consider the rewards of the childfree choice.
• Learn the latest on one-child families, single, LGBTQI+ and older parents, fertility and adoption.
• Steal a few benefits from the opposite choice.

Merle Bombardieri, MSW, LICSW is a psychotherapist, coach and workshop leader. Although she enjoyed raising her daughters, she has been a childfree advocate since 1978. She has contributed to Our Bodies Ourselves, The Boston Globe Magazine, Glamour, Self and Brides and has appeared on national news, talk show, and documentaries.

Please see her Author Page for more information and to visit her blog for free advice and resources.

Discover your personal answer to the baby question. Click “Play” on the Audible sample or “Look Inside” to preview the book.

Merle (Malkoff) Bombardieri, is a clinical social worker/ psychotherapist who specializes in parenthood decision-making, infertility, adoption, and making the most of a childfree life. Although she enjoyed raising her daughters, now grown, she has also been an advocate for childfree people since 1979. She has been in private practice for 30+ years in Lexington, MA. In 1981, she published the first edition of The Baby Decision based on interviews and reviews of scholarly research. Then in 1982 she became Clinical Director of RESOLVE, the national infertility association. There she wrote guidelines for infertility patients who were making decisions on new techniques such as in vitro fertilization and donor egg, as well as adoption and surrogacy. Around that time, she founded the support group Boston Single Mothers by Choice.

This revised second edition of The Baby Decision, is based on 35 more years of work guiding decision-makers in educational workshops, long-distance coaching for people around the world and psychotherapy. Merle brings a sense of humor and compassion to her work. She helps clients and readers get curious about themselves and about making new discoveries that make life more fun.

Merle’s writing has appeared in Our Bodies, Ourselves, Brides, Glamour, Self, the Boston Globe Magazine, Boston Magazine and psychology blogs. She has lectured at Harvard Medical School, M.I.T., Wellesley College, and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. She has appeared on national radio and television news shows, talk shows and documentaries, including the Leeza Show. Merle has been quoted in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Huffington Post. She has also written medical journal articles and a chapter in a medical textbook.

Merle is married and the mother of two grown daughters and the grandmother of a two-year-old boy. She enjoys creative writing, yoga, hiking, and travel.

She is working on a novel, Don’t Ask, about two sisters and a surrogate pregnancy.

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