Early on in Milton Bradley's board game Life, players graduate from college and get married. A spin or two of the wheel later, and they start adding babies to their little plastic colored automobiles. Soon enough, the money starts piling up (ah, compared to Monopoly money, Life's money is big bucks!), and they add more and more kids. That's the goal of the game: accumulate wealth and populate the cardboard earth.

So it goes in board games, much as it does in real life. If only having children were as simple as stuffing a pink or blue piece of plastic into the hole of your plastic car, spinning the wheel and cashing in.

Newsflash: it's not that easy, and the fact that people are realizing this is starting to show. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 44 percent of American women of childbearing age were childless in 2002. More telling, 18 percent of women ages 40 to 44 were still childless, up from 10 percent in 1976. Why aren't people breeding like they used to?

For many women and their partners, concerns about the cost of having and raising kids, plus a devotion to their own sense of adventure, lead them to not reproduce. There's also the fear that "bad genes" will be passed on to offspring. Some consider the world overpopulated, and some have helped raise siblings and prefer not to have that experience again. Whatever their reasons, couples make their decisions not to breed in the face of societal, familial and sometimes, professional pressures.

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Cyd and David Hill, married 28 years

"Every time someone says, 'A birth is a miracle,'" David Hill says, "it's like, no it isn't. A Mongoloid can have babies."

Hill, an artist, and his wife Cyd, an archivist at SF State's J. Paul Leonard Library, are in their early 50s and have been married nearly 30 years, both of them happily childfree.

From the outset, they both knew they didn't want children. Both come from large families in which they were older siblings taking care of younger ones. “You're consumed with the taking care and raising of children," Cyd Hill says.

David Hill was left to look after a younger brother and sister well into his formative teenage years. "I was working nearly full-time," he says, "going to high school, and I was taking care of my siblings. The pressure of that was adult, and I didn't like it."

"Some people have kids to right the wrongs of their own childhoods," David Hill says. "I think that's the wrong reason to have a kid." Another important reason the Hills didn't breed was a history of mental illness in both of their families.

Mark Schlissel, vice chair of UC Berkeley's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, says that some mental disorders get passed on through genes, but it's not clear why or how. "The problem with forecasting mental illness in offspring is that it can't be traced back to a single gene," Schlissel says. "A large number of diseases aren't predictable."

"Now that we know what we know about our genetics," Cyd Hill says, "the whole world should bless us for not having children."

"I do two things for the earth," David Hill says. "I don't drive a car, and I don't have kids."

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Jenny Parma and Mac Waters, married two years

"One hundred years ago," Mac Watters says, "having a kid was a good move financially." Watters, an accountant, and his wife, Jenny Parma, dated for five years before they were married in 2003. "Kids were an extra pair of hands on the farm," Watters says. "And there wasn't much social security back then, so who's gonna feed you when you're 80? It's not like you can go plow the fields."

Watters tends to think of things in mathematical and economical terms. "I'd say kids have gone from being an asset to a liability," he says.

He and his wife say they are close to 100 percent sure they'll never have kids.

Another big reason the couple doesn't procreate is their love of travel and living in different places. While having kids and moving around aren't mutually exclusive, traveling while raising children would inhibit their personal freedom significantly.

In summer 2005 Google, where Parma is a senior editor, offered to send her and Watters to Dublin, Ireland to work and live for three months. Their only source of hesitation was their preexisting plan to quit their jobs this fall and set out on an open-ended tour of Asia. They would sell most of their possessions, put the rest in storage and take off. They decided to postpone those plans and go to Dublin.

None of this would be likely for this young couple, both 30 years old, if they had children. "We wouldn't be as mobile," Parma says. "We wouldn't be able to do the things we want to do. We'd have to put that kid first, and I'm not ready for that."

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Amber Ingels and Daniel Holloway, dating five months

"I think I can have a really full life without kids," Amber Ingels says. "I can do anything and I am not limited by that choice, which would affect me for the rest of my life."

Both Ingels, 25, and her boyfriend Daniel Holloway, 26, decided early on in their lives that it was their personal choice not to have children.

According to the couple, who have been dating since May, most of the reasons have to do with the responsibility of raising a child. They fear how it would affect their quality of life and the freedom they prize so much. "Financially, it would be nice if I could be completely selfish,” Ingels says. “I like that my life is about me. I can come home and have margaritas or fly off to Hawaii without having to find a babysitter or bring them with me. I like how much choice it gives me."

Holloway and Ingels met in Canterbury, England while both attaining master’s degrees. They believe their level of education may be a contributing factor in their critical approach to the idea of having children. Ingels says with more education comes more knowledge of the endless possibilities out there in the world. But she also has more mundane reasons for her choice.

"I don't want to get fat. It's hard to lose that baby fat,” she says. “And if I get fat, I want it to be because I had too many Twinkies, not because I popped out some fucking kid." A University of Alabama study found that women “retained anywhere from 11 to 20 pounds after giving birth to their first child.”

"It never crossed my mind to have kids or to not have kids," Holloway says. "It was never going to be a part of my life and I didn't see it as a big deal." Friends and family are mostly supportive of their decisions, but some are placing side bets that their minds will change someday. Ingels and Holloway disagree, and so far don’t see a possibility for any regret down the road if they choose not to have kids.

"All the great shit I get to do instead will outweigh any kind of regret I would have about not having kids," Ingels says. Her boyfriend agrees. "The dirty diapers, the screaming 'I hate you mom.' Yeah, I think there's a lot I would miss by not having kids," he says.

Cost of raising a child in the Bay Area:
To raise a child from birth to 18 in the Bay Area, it would cost roughly $250,000 to 300,000.

Things you could buy instead:
47,965 six-packs of Budweiser
283 Gucci Large Classic Totes
300 iBooks
115 years of season tickets to Giants games
14 Toyota Priuses
1,000 pairs of Bvlgari sunglasses
1 one-bedroom condo in San Francisco