WASHINGTON -- Anne Hare and her husband made a momentous decision three years ago: They would not have children. It's not that they don't like kids, she says. They simply don't want to alter the lifestyle they enjoy.

"With kids, especially young kids, infants and toddlers, you really can't do the active stuff we like to do," said Hare, 43, a fitness program coordinator from Gainesville, Ga.

Hare is among 26.7 million women ages 15 to 44 who are childless, a record number, according to new Census Bureau data from a June 2002 survey. The number of women foregoing or putting off motherhood -- nearly 44 percent -- has grown nearly 10 percent since 1990, when roughly 24.3 million were in that class.

Direct comparisons before 1990 are not possible because the bureau didn't track women younger than 18 until then.

The latest numbers reflect the well-established trend of more women going to college and entering the workforce, then delaying motherhood or deciding not to have children. More also are choosing adoption, said Martha Farnsworth Riche, a demographer and former head of the Census Bureau.

Hare said she and other childless friends often are incorrectly tagged as "kid-haters."

"It's just difficult to explain to people that we don't hate kids, it's just that we don't want our own," she said.

The percentage of women 40 to 44 -- those at the end of their childbearing years -- who have not given birth has hovered around 18 percent since 1994, but that's up from 10 percent in 1976.

Non-high school graduates and those with bachelor's degrees were most likely to be childless. Also women with higher incomes had the highest childless rates, in part a reflection of the increased professional options available to them, said David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project, a research group at Rutgers University.

Amy Caizza, study director for the Institute for Women's Policy Research, a Washington think tank, said society's attitudes about childless women also have changed.

"Economic reasons are part of it, but it's also the effect of the women's movement, that you don't have to be a mother to be a complete woman," she said.

Roughly 23 percent of the 25.8 million never-married women 15 to 44 were mothers in 2002, about the same rate from 1998 but up from 18 percent of the 20.7 million never-married women in 1990. There was a pronounced increase among never-married women in managerial or professional jobs who were mothers -- the percentage has nearly doubled from 9 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2002.

Many women in these occupations can earn salaries that enable them to raise a child on their own if they choose, Riche said.

"In earlier days, you had stigma and economic reasons" for these unmarried, professional women not to have kids, she said. "It's much less so now."

Also, about 8 percent of births were to women in unmarried partnerships, the first time the bureau had tracked such a category in the survey.

The report also showed a birth rate of 61 births per 1,000 women 15 to 44 in 2002, down from 67 per 1,000 in 1990. During the same period, it also found the birth rate for women 15 to 19 rose from 40 per 1,000 to 56 per 1,000.

That's far different from National Center for Health Statistics data, which in 2001 showed the birth rate for 15- to 19-year-olds at 45 per 1,000, declining steadily since 1990 from 60 per 1,000.

Government researchers, academics and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, an advocacy group, said they considered NCHS birth data more accurate because it is based on official vital records from hospitals.

The census report was based on a survey of 50,000 homes.