At 46, Helen Reimer knows she may never become a mother. But she still holds out hope it will happen.
“We assumed, hoped, prayed, believed we would have kids,” the Ottawa resident said.
She and her husband were both older when they married in 2015, so they knew it would be harder for them to become parents. But they also thought it was possible. So they tried. And tried.
Medical tests came back with no concrete reason for their infertility, labelling it as “unexplained.” When multiple fertility treatments did not work, they chose not to adopt.
Still, Reimer’s life is full. She works two jobs, volunteers and spends a lot of time with her friends’ children.
But she, like other women with an unfulfilled desire for children, carries a long-lasting grief — one she says few people acknowledge or understand.
“This is a topic that’s not often talked about in society,” she said.
It’s about alignment
According to Statistics Canada, most Canadian women of childbearing years who do not have children want them.
In 2024, just over half of women between 20 and 49 were not mothers. Slightly more than half of these women said they wanted children.
According to the data, most women who want children do ultimately become mothers, either through childbirth or adoption.
By their 40s, only 24 per cent of women do not have children. Of these, 13 per cent say they want them. This means just three per cent of women in their 40s have an unfulfilled desire for children.
Most women who want children will have them, says Shelley Clark, a sociologist at McGill University in Montreal who studies fertility and fertility intentions in Canada and the U.S.
In general, fertility rates have declined in many countries since the 1850s, she says. In Canada, that trend began before Confederation, she says.
Declining fertility does not concern Clark. “We’ll continue to make changes to our economies and to our infrastructures that reflect the changes in fertility,” she said.
What does concern here is if women have either fewer or more children than they want, when they want.Â
“What I think is important is allowing people to align their fertility outcomes with their fertility goals,” she said.
“We’re not seeing a lot of evidence that there are massive amounts of women who are not able to do that.”
Several government policies, at the federal and provincial level, exist to help women meet their fertility goals.
The national pharmacare plan, introduced under Justin Trudeau’s government, covers both birth control pills and long-lasting contraceptive methods, such as intrauterine devices (IUDs).
Provincial governments also increasingly fund fertility treatments, commonly known as IVF, for couples who struggle to conceive.
But women who want children and do not have them can struggle to find support.
These women often feel socially out of place, says Tanya Hubbard, a grief therapist in Vancouver.Â
Hubbard, who does not have children and has experienced infertility, often works with women who are processing the pain of not having children.
Often, the grief over not having children causes women to withdraw from society. They may struggle to maintain friendships with women who become mothers. Even pictures of mother animals with their young can spark anger at missing out on an experience known to most of the animal kingdom.
The grief of wanting children is “immense,” she said. But it is rarely acknowledged.
“Part of how we heal grief is by having it witnessed and processing it,” said Hubbard.
“We’re not only entitled to grief if we’ve had a stillborn baby,” she said. “We’re not only entitled to grief if we’ve tried IVF. We’re entitled to the grief if we’re experiencing grief.”Â
Letting go
Catherine-Emmanuelle Delisle learned as a teenager that she would never be able to have children.
Still, the 49-year-old from Montreal says she was taken off guard by the grief she experienced in adulthood. In her mid-30s, she went searching for resources to help her — and came up largely empty-handed.
So she created for others what she had hoped to find for herself.
In 2021, she became a therapist to help women without children navigate their grief. In 2025, she started running online support groups for women.
She has also led retreats, in French, for women without children. She wants to do more retreats. As far as she knows, she is the only person in Canada offering them.
During the retreat, women write — then burn — letters to the children they never had. The goal is to help women let go of the ideas they had about how their life would be, so they can embrace the life they have.
“It’s just one step in the grieving process,” she said. But women need to know that they can make meaningful lives, even if their grief about not having children never fully subsides.
“It’s not like a file that you put on your shelf and your grief is done,” she said. “You just don’t move on from it. You grieve around it, like a scar that is less tender with time, but it’s still part of you.”
Frustration, encouragement
In Ottawa, Helen Reimer’s grief over not having children changes.
She typically avoids baby showers, so she is not the only “sour face in the room.” But she is genuinely happy for friends and relatives who become pregnant after struggling with infertility, she says. And her family and friends support her well.
She and her husband volunteer with Rinnah, a Christian-based support organization for people struggling with not having children. People of any religious background, or nonreligious background, can attend.
According to Statistics Canada, religious women who do not have children are more likely to want children than nonreligious women, which makes faith-based supports for women without children particularly important.
But church can be a source of both frustration and encouragement, Reimer says.
On one hand, its emphasis on family and parenting can make it hard to feel included. But her faith also reminds her she is loved regardless of whether she becomes a mother.
And her life is full of children: her nieces, her friends’ children, children with disabilities whom she teaches to ski.
Mothers are not the only women with instincts to nurture and protect children. “I think we all have it,” she said.Â
But she wishes people would not assume women are not mothers because they prioritized education or careers, or because they dislike children.
“There’s a richness and depth in everybody’s story,” she said.
”Everybody is unique.”
