When one partner wants kids and the other one doesn't.

In the next 15 years, Australian couples choosing to remain child free are likely to outnumber those with children.

Even so, men and women — particularly women — who articulate their desire not to have kids are often met with disbelief, and worse, outright hostility for their choice.

One such woman is Sydney-based artist and high school teacher Yang-En Hume who says the thought of being a mother “horrifies and repulses” her.

“The thought of being pregnant fills me with disgust,” the 30-year-old explained on last night’s episode of Insight, when asked how she felt about having kids.

“I hate the idea of having a human living inside my uterus, I hate the idea of birthing a human being, you know, through the natural process. I hate the idea of breast feeding, the entire biological process makes me feel very anxious,” she said.

Hume said that growing up she felt the societal pressure to one day reproduce and struggled to explain to boyfriends that perhaps she didn’t want to.

She and her husband Jeff have been married for five years, and while he says he has no strong opinions on the issue, she said she made her position clear from the outset.

“As I got older I thought, actually I don’t have to do anything I don’t feel comfortable about,” she said.

And she is not alone. The ABS predicts that the number of child free households will increase from 1.4 million to 3.5 million by 2031.

Even so, people continue to characterise the choice to opt out of the baby game as a selfish one.

“My driving passion is to have children, I found it hard to reconcile Yang-En’s womanhood and Yang-En’s ability and I thought ‘well you’ve got a husband now, that’s a gift, go and have a child’,” said Hume’s her friend of eight years Angela Benisch, who was seated beside her in the Insight studio.

“I was really excited when Jeff and her got married and I was looking forward to the prospect of her having a family.

“Yang-En is beautiful and Eurasian and I was looking forward to seeing quarter Asian babies.”

It’s not that Yang-En doesn’t like kids — she works with them everyday — she just doesn’t want any of her own.

“I feel like in our culture women want to have children and their achievements mean nothing, they’re reduced to their roles as mothers.  I very much hate the idea of, you know, my friends and my family just see me primarily as mother, very much upsets me,” she explained.

Sharing her sentiments was Kate Murray, who as a teenager vowed never to have children of her own.

“I’ve lied before, yeah. But yeah, I’ve said not everybody can and that’s enough. I don’t have to say I can’t,” Murray said.

“I think still society projects an imagery of like if you’re going to become a mum, if you’re going to be a good mum you need to be at home, you need to be dedicated to your children, you need to want to give up your life, and if you don’t want to do those things, then you’re not maternal.

“I didn’t want to give up my life and I did see the generations. I felt very lucky to be born into a generation that had the choice not to do that and had the opportunity to travel and have an education and have a career.”

Her partner, however, was more of a family man and the pair kept the issue on the back burner for four years, each convinced the other would change their mind.

When Murray fell pregnant, despite using contraceptive, they were forced to confront their differences of opinion.

The result can be seen in their 10-month-old daughter Winnie.

“I’m very, very, very, very tired. I feel like I’ve been tired for ten months, but it’s wonderful as well,” Murray told the audience.

While she loves her daughter and doesn’t regret her change of heart, she lamented the lack of honest dialogue about just how difficult parenting can be.

“I find like a lot of language I see used before and after is very sickeningly sweet, like every smile is a miracle and every day is a joy and I don’t know like why we have that rhetoric, I don’t know why we don’t have a more honest dialogue amongst women because it’s not, it is messy and it is hard, it’s also joyful but I don’t regret my decision at all and I do still think that, I do sometimes still think that breeding is a very egoistic decision to make, but it’s an egoistic decision that I decided to make. When I made that choice I wanted to do it because I wanted to see what, what my baby would look like.”

And this is the crux of the issue: not selfishness, but choice.

A woman has the right to choose what to do with her body and her life, in spite of cultural norms, and without being labelled self-obsessed, non-maternal or being told she is missing out.

That said, what happens if you change your mind down the track?

Further into the episode, host Jenny Brockie posed this question to the audience and addressed Yang-En’s husband Jeff directly.

Jeff revealed that despite having no strong desire for children growing up (in fact, he had expected to adopt), he could feel that changing.

“I still don’t feel very strongly one way or the other, but if I’m honest with myself, the desire to have kids has grown,” he said. “Probably because of our, our friends and my sister now has four kids, so seeing them grow up is kind of nice.”

For Yang-En, the final say, as it should, lies with the person who has to give birth to the human being.

“I guess if Jeff feels one day that he can’t continue to be in this relationship unless he has children, I think well, we’ll have to sit down and have a number of long conversations about what we want to do,” she said.

If you missed the episode you can watch it in full on the Insight website.