Merle Bombardieri, MSW, LICSW, has been a private practice clinical social worker and psychotherapist for over 30 years. She specializes in parenthood decision-making, infertility, adoption, and making the most of a childfree life. The first edition of her book The Baby Decision was published in 1981.
Although she enjoyed raising her daughters, Bombardieri has also been an advocate for childfree people since 1979. Another advocacy project was founding the support group Boston Single Mothers by Choice in the early 1980s. In 1982, Bombardieri became the Clinical Director of RESOLVE, the national infertility association, where she wrote guidelines for infertility patients who were making decisions on new techniques such as in vitro fertilization and donor egg, as well as adoption and surrogacy.
Bombardieri’s writing has appeared in Brides, Glamour, Self, the Boston Globe Magazine, Boston Magazine, and Our Bodies, Ourselves; she has also written medical journal articles and a chapter in a medical textbook. She has lectured at Harvard Medical School, M.I.T., Wellesley College, and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. She has appeared on national radio and television news shows, talk shows and documentaries; and was quoted in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Huffington Post.
The revised second edition of The Baby Decision is based on 35 more years of Bombardieri’s work in guiding decision-makers in educational workshops; long-distance consulting for people around the world; and psychotherapy.
Bombardieri is married, the mother of two grown daughters, and the grandmother of a three-year-old boy. She enjoys creative writing, yoga, hiking, and travel and is currently working on her first novel, Don’t Ask, the story of two sisters and a surrogate pregnancy. She is in private practice in Lexington, Massachusetts and lives in an orchard town west of Boston.
