Like many other childless couples and singles, they report that once their friends had babies, those friends suddenly had no time for Fred and Cindy. And like some other childless couples and singles, they think of their home as "a safe haven for other people's kids."

What about someone to take care of you when you're old yourself, the reporter asks. "That's a Third World reason to have children," Gottlieb says.

One woman's story
Joanne Siekierski never wanted children either. Can't even stand the smell of disposable diapers. Is not one of those women at work who rush toward a visiting baby, eager to get her hands on its pudgy cheeks.

Siekierski is a warm, enthusiastic woman who has a standing date every weekend with an elderly woman from her old neighborhood. Maybe some women just don't have the urge to be a mother, she says — although once, near the end of her marriage, she and her then-husband nearly adopted a 13-year-old girl.

She wonders if her disinterest in babies began when she was 5, when her own mother told her, "Don't have kids 'cause they're not worth it." And there was that birthing movie in high school, one of those awful movies where the mother is screaming. And then her marriage to a man who had a child from a previous marriage and told her that "kids mess up a marriage."

For five years, Siekierski has been a foster mom to puppies from the Humane Society. The dogs aren't a substitute for children, she says, but are definitely a place to focus her desire to nurture. "Dawgmom," her license plate says.

Jenny Peterson is single, LDS and 30 — and jokes that "that makes me an old maid around here." She has traveled, has a good job, paints watercolors, takes tai chi, is always busy. It's a fulfilling life, she says, but she still wants children.

"I decided I'll give myself 10 years — if I'm not married by then, I'll look into adoption." About a quarter of adoptive parents who adopted last year through the agency "Families For Children" were single women, director Suzanne Stott says.

Peterson is relieved that her church is, in her view, "trying to be more aware of single members. . . . I hear a lot now, 'You can still be a mother, even if you don't have kids.' . . . I've been happy to see that focus."

She and her single friends admire Sheri Dew, who until recently was a leader of the LDS Relief Society and is single. "Motherhood is more than bearing children," Dew told women gathered for the annual Relief Society meeting in 2001; it's about "loving and leading." Still, she added, the inability to bear children for any reasons is difficult for "righteous women."

"I don't know of many devout, practicing Mormons who are voluntarily childless," demographer Smith says. "It has to be a rare thing." 

And for women who want children but can't have them, going to church can be a painful experience.

"We stopped going to church," says a woman who has tried for years to get pregnant. "It was supposed to be the most uplifting day, but it wasn't. I'd go home depressed." Church is "one of the worst places," agrees Becky Skolmoski. All of a sudden, she says, she'll look up and there will be a little girl stroking a mom's face, the kind of tender moment she always imagined for herself.

Learning the lingo
IUI, IVF, HSG, donor eggs, fragmenting eggs, egg retrieval — Resolve meetings have their own lingo, a language that blends science, disillusionment and hope. A Salt Lake Valley chapter of Resolve (also known as the National Fertility Association) meets once a month at Alta View Hospital.

On a recent evening, several Resolve members sat around a table and shared tips and gripes. They fretted over the fact that most insurance plans in Utah don't cover infertility treatments (but do cover Viagra), and that the waiting list in Utah to see a reproductive endocrinologist is six to eight months. They noted that women in Utah find out they're infertile at a younger age than in many other states, which means their eggs have a better chance of being healthier. The downside, they said, is that some doctors here aren't as well-versed in treating older infertile couples.

Over the course of the three-hour meeting the mood bounced back and forth between lighthearted and sad, sometimes within the same sentence, punctuated by both tears and jokes. ("Apparently he impregnated a hamster," one woman reported about her husband's "sperm penetration assay" procedure. "You'll never have to get your kids a costume for Halloween," said the woman next to her, laughing.)

"What I hate about Utah is what I love about Utah," says Susanne Schmutz, who heads up the Resolve chapter. "I love the families and the good values. But I'm so jealous that they have so many kids. I feel like an outcast."

Schmutz mentioned statistics she had received from her reproductive endocrinologist, Dr. Harry Hatasaka, who said that the proportion of infertile couples is smaller in Utah than in other states — partly because of the lower incidence of sexually transmitted disease but more likely because when women marry younger their "ovarian reserve" has not diminished yet.

Hatasaka also told Schmutz that "innumerable young infertile women have complained to me that the pressure placed on them by their families to conceive is unbearable."

Schmutz, 27, has been trying to get pregnant for six years. One by one her friends have stopped calling, she says. Instead, they call other mothers to talk about mother things: pacifiers and soccer games and Halloween costumes. "The phone doesn't ring, except for other infertile women," Schmutz says. "I feel so alone."

"My friends in Texas aren't like that," says one of the women around the table, who moved to Utah a year ago. "They don't just think about their children. . . . If I can't get pregnant, I wouldn't want to live here. I'd want to live someplace where I'd have support."

Schmutz, who teaches kindergarten, recounted a recent night at a nice restaurant, in celebration of her birthday. There, at the next table, was a mother and father and little baby. "I started bawling," Schmutz admits. "I had to put the napkin in front of my face." What scared her, she confessed, was that she and her husband were spending all their money on infertility treatments that might not work, making sacrifices that she worried might hurt their marriage. "We had to leave," she reported. "We had to leave our food on our plates."

Ready-made family
Sally Barfuss has 26 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, whose pictures line the hall of her Midvale home. These are technically her stepgrandchildren; their parents are the stepchildren who became her instant family when she married their widowed father 26 years ago, when she was 42.

"I've got a good life. I've got people who love me," Barfuss says. "But there's something in the back of my mind that says, 'There's something I've missed by not bearing a child.' " At 43 she suffered a miscarriage, and all these years later her voice still breaks when she talks about it. "Every time I hold a newborn grandchild, my arms feel empty."

Across the street, Becky Skolmoski knows how she feels. After six years of trying and $10,000 spent, out-of-pocket, on infertility treatments, she finally got pregnant last winter — and miscarried eight weeks later. "I feel like a failure," she says.

The Skolmoskis decided this fall that they would stop the infertility treatments and would adopt, but then Mark was laid off from Evans and Sutherland so now those plans are on hold.

Adoption will bring its own trials, says Stott of Families For Children. Stott herself was once married to a man with impaired fertility. "You feel so second-class," she says. "Other women can so easily get pregnant. Teenage girls can get pregnant. One-night stands. But you have to fill out forms, be evaluated, have strangers invade your life. It's so humiliating," she says about both the adoption processes.

And there are the questions and assurances from well-meaning friends and family, she says. Questions like, "Don't you have enough faith?" and statements like "Now that you've adopted a baby, maybe the Lord will bless you with some of your own."

As for Skolmoski — who is LDS, who has always wanted to be a mom, who in grade school decided she wanted to be the first woman to have a baby in space — she's stopped going to baby showers, at least for now. But sometimes, just to test herself, she'll wander through the baby aisle at Wal-Mart or the grocery store. "To see if I am strong enough to walk through it without feeling sad," she explains. "And when that does happen, I feel like I can get on with my life. You know, quit waiting for something that might never happen and focus on who I want to be outside of being a mother."

"Lord," pleads a sign on the inside of her front door, "grant me patience. But hurry."