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No one tracks the number of women who actively choose single motherhood, but their ranks, while still small, seem to be increasing quickly. According to 2004 census data, about 150,000 women with college degrees have children under 18, have never been married and are the only adult in their household, triple the number recorded in 1990. Family sociologists say women in that group are likely to be single by choice, not chance.

"Women who order sperm are engaged in a kind of agency that is new and is gaining momentum," said Rosanna Hertz, a sociologist at Wellesley College who is working on a book called "When Baby Makes Two." "It's different from women who adopt, who are not breaking sexual norms."

Regrets haunt some

Historically, far fewer women with high incomes and college educations have had children out of wedlock than those with less money and schooling. But some high-achieving women may be shifting their behavior based on the lessons of a generation that precedes them.

Professional women in their 50s regret not having had a child far more than not having gotten married, said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist whose 2002 book "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children" found that more than a third of women with high-status jobs were childless at 40.

"When push came to shove, the child was more important than the partner," Hewlett said of the women she interviewed. "It was an ever-present source of regret, where they were not so actively mourning the absence of a husband."

The boom in high-tech fertility treatments for women over 35 has raised women's awareness of the limitations both of their bodies and their demographic. But some women in their 30s who have seen friends divorced or in unhappy marriages say they are not willing to settle for "Mr. Almost Right" to have a baby.

Making decisions alone

Many single women still find the choice to get pregnant met with incomprehension or even hostility from friends, family and some strangers. The most common accusation is that they are selfish, because of the widely held belief that two-parent homes are best for children.

Mothers who choose their solo status say the problems that have traditionally burdened families headed by a single mother -- poverty, abandonment by fathers, teenage motherhood, parental conflict -- do not apply to them.

But some suspect that what makes people uneasy is not so much their status as single mothers but that they achieved it by short-circuiting the traditional act of procreation. Experts on nontraditional families say the use of anonymous donors without a more conventional reason, like infertility or homosexuality, may seem more threatening to men's role in the family.

Some single mothers do relish their autonomy, which they say can more than compensate for not having a partner to help change the diapers. Every decision, from what to name their children to how to discipline them, is theirs to make without negotiation.

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