Carly Pearce and More Celebrities Explain Why They Don’t Want Children

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Carly Pearce and More Celebrities Explain Why They Don’t Want Children

Not every woman — celebrity or otherwise — wants or feels called to be a mom. Plenty of stars, including Miley Cyrus, Ashley Judd and Carly Pearce, have been vocal and unapologetic over the years about why having children isn’t their top priority — or a priority at all.

“We’re getting handed a piece-of-s*** planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child,” Cyrus told Elle in July 2019. “Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that. [We millennials] don't want to reproduce because we know that the earth can't handle it."

Judd explained in her 2011 memoir, All That Is Bitter and Sweet, that her decision to be childless is “a big part of who” she is.

“I do not need to go making 'my own' babies when there are so many orphaned or abandoned children who need love, attention, time and care," she wrote. "I have felt this way since I was at least 18."

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Carly Pearce

“I always feel bad saying that I actually don't want children,” Pearce confessed via a July 2026 TikTok video. “I love children. I love my friends' children. I'm a great aunt. But it was never my dream.”

The Grammy winner explained, “My dream was to pursue country music and live on the road. I know that some people do that and they're great at it. But it has never been my dream.”

Pearce added that she thinks “we should normalize people that truly know they don't want kids,” saying that parenthood shouldn’t be “for everyone just because society tells us to.”

“So, I don't want children and I'm totally OK with that,” she concluded.

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Leslie Bibb

“I don’t want kids. It’s not a chip I have, and the mom I would want to be, I’m not sure I can be,” Bibb shared during a November 2025 episode of Jenna Bush Hager’s “Open Book” podcast. “My dad died when I was 3, and my mom had a really hard time with it, and then she was working all the time because she had four girls and she had to.”

The actress continued, “I really felt the loss of her presence because she was hustling. All I wanted was her there, but she was providing for us. I knew how important that was for me — if I had a kid — to give that to them. I don’t remember playing with babies as a kid. I would cut their hair. I never did. I have it toward dogs, like, you put a dog in front of me and I’m, like, ‘Ahh!’”

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Gabby Windey

“We don’t want kids,” the former Bachelorette revealed during an August 2023 episode of the “Just B with Bethenny Frankel” podcast, referring to girlfriend Robby Hoffman. “Both of us didn’t want them separately.”

Windey, who started dating Hoffman five months earlier, added that her position was never addressed during her Bachelor Nation tenure.

“It’s, like, we both had tumultuous childhoods [and] we’ve both been through so much as kids,” she explained. “Like, we want to be kids now. … We want to be able to have room for ourselves and really treat our relationship like our child, like, that is our priority and we want to throw all of our resources into it and growing it and protecting it."

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Mary J. Blige

“I have nieces and nephews forever and I’m always watching how people are scrambling for babysitters,” the “Just Fine” songstress told E!’s Daily Pop in March 2022. “I don’t want to go through that. I like my freedom to go and move and do what I want to do. I don’t want to have to tend to someone all the time.”

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Zoe Kravitz

“I don't feel pressured to have kids by a certain time, if I ever have kids,” the actress told Elle in her March 2022 cover story, explaining that she “hadn’t even thought about” freezing her eggs when her gynecologist offered the procedure. “I still want to go on adventures, have fun nights and see the sunrise. It's been an interesting journey of remembering that there's no finish line that I have to get to by a certain time. Playful, mischievous behavior is something I always hope to have, even when I'm 70 years old. The point of being alive is to experience life and play with it. There's still so much fun to be had."

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Steve-O

"Neither of us want to have kids,” the stunt performer exclusively told Us of fiancée Lux Wright in February 2022. “In lieu of that, what we want to do is just pour ourselves into helping animals. So we’ve got a plan to buy a big property and open up our own animal sanctuary.”

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John Cena

“It's hard work to balance the time I need to run myself correctly,” the professional wrestler told Drew Barrymore in January 2022 when asked about having kids. “It's work to be the best partner and husband I can be to my loving wife, [Shay Shariatzadeh]. It's hard to keep connections with those in my life that I love. And it's also hard to put in an honest day's work. … You have to have passion for [parenting]. You have to have fuel for it. It's like saying to someone, ‘Man, you know, you're pretty good with your hands, you'd be a great carpenter,' but if I want to be an actor, I'll be an actor."

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Seth Rogen

“I don't know anyone who gets as much happiness out of their kids as we get out of our non-kids,” the actor told Howard Stern in May 2021. “Like, [my wife, Lauren Miller, and I] are f--king psyched all the time! We're laying in bed on Saturday mornings smoking weed, watching movies naked. If we had kids, we could not be f--king doing this."

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Miley Cyrus

When the Hannah Montana alum dated Cody Simpson in 2020, he said on the “Kyle and Jackie O Show” that they didn’t want kids “yet.”

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Marisa Tomei

“[I don't] know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings,” the King of Staten Island star told Manhattan Magazine in December 2019.

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Chelsea Handler

The Chelsea Handler Show host is “just not interested” in being a mom, she said at a November 2018 Goop summit. “I just don't think it's the best use of my time. … Becoming a mother is something that I take so seriously. People need to really want to become a mom.”

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Ashley Judd

In April 2019, the Harvard University grad told Katie Couric that she was a three-time rape survivor and one of them had led to conception. Judd reflected on her subsequent abortion, saying, “That rapist, who is a Kentuckian and resides in Tennessee, has paternity rights in Kentucky. So having safe access to abortion was personally important to me."

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Alison Brie

In June 2018, the GLOW star told The Sunday Times that she didn’t “really want to have kids,” calling the possibility “stressful.” Brie said, “I think about how much [husband Dave Franco and I] are involved in our cats’ lives. Oh, my God, if it was a child!”

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Sarah Paulson

The American Horror Story alum didn’t want to be “torn” by children, she told Town & Country in January 2018, explaining, “I don’t want to look at my child and say, ‘You’re the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me, but also the death knell.’ … It’s selfish, but I think the word selfish gets a bad rap.”

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Megan Mullally

The actress “never had a burning desire to have children,” she told GQ in May 2017. While she and husband Nick Offerman tried conceiving for a year, they eventually stopped and didn’t “turn it into a soap opera.”

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Ellen DeGeneres

During a March 2015 Today show appearance, the Ellen DeGeneres Show host said that kids seemed too “long-term,” adding, “It seems like a commitment that you have to stick with. And I just don’t know if I can — it’s too risky. Like, what if I don’t like the kid? What if it turns out that it’s not as cute as I wanted, or as talented? I’m going to compare it to all these kids that I have on the show that are so smart and so funny.”

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Jon Hamm

The Mad Men alum exclusively told Us Weekly in 2012 that he would make “a terrible father.”