Cognitive scientist and podcaster Maya Shankar opens up about infertility, surrogacy and the radical act of questioning whether every dream is meant to be pursued.
This piece is part of an ongoing series, “Redefining Power: How Indian American Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership, Identity and Care.” The series explores what it means to modernize without losing our roots—through candid conversations with Indian American women reshaping culture, power and possibility.
Over 70 percent of Indian Americans support abortion access and reproductive rights. But you wouldn’t know it from the public conversation. We’re not testifying at hearings, writing op-eds or speaking openly about the messy, painful realities of our own reproductive lives. In a community that prizes privacy and propriety, the body remains one of the last taboo subjects—especially when it doesn’t cooperate.
Maya Shankar didn’t plan to break that silence. But then again, Shankar—a cognitive scientist, best-selling author and host of the award-winning podcast A Slight Change of Plans on fertility, reinvention and finding joy—has built her entire body of work around what happens when life refuses to follow the plan.
“I never anticipated sharing this part of my story,” she tells me. “But it felt imperative because I do know that there’s a stigma attached to this whole sphere in the South Asian community. And I wanted to do my part, however small, to try to chip away at that stigma and to humanize the problem.”
… The space of fertility will humble you instantly—because there is no such thing as working harder. The universe is indifferent toward how much you want something.
Maya Shankar
Shankar has a rare antibody that can prevent a baby’s heart from developing normally. She and her husband, Jimmy Lee, pursued surrogacy—two rounds of egg retrievals, each followed by ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome that left her body reeling. Then came the relationship-building with a surrogate, which Shankar describes with a kind of tender bewilderment: the vulnerability of trusting a stranger with your deepest hope, the anxiety and the gratitude tangled together.
When their surrogate became pregnant, they were overjoyed. When she miscarried, Shankar found herself up against something her considerable intellect and work ethic couldn’t solve.
“I am so used to just hustling my way through challenges in life,” she says. “I’m really good at being creative and finding solutions and just outworking problems. And the space of fertility will humble you instantly—because there is no such thing as working harder. The universe is indifferent toward how much you want something.
For many of the Indian American women I’ve interviewed for this series, the formula of hard work plus sacrifice is almost sacred—it’s what powered our parents across oceans, what we absorbed before we had language for it. Shankar isn’t critiquing that formula. But she’s honest about what happens when it meets a wall that effort can’t move.
And then she goes somewhere I didn’t expect. Rather than ending her fertility story with resilience—the tidy arc her book tour audiences might anticipate—she turns the lens on desire itself.
“I’ve been asking myself whether sometimes the things we want in our life aren’t always compatible with who we are as people,” she says.
She describes a lifelong sensitivity to suffering—a tendency to absorb the world’s pain that she traces back to childhood. “I sometimes worry that seeing my own children in pain would paralyze me. And I thought it was important to talk about that—which is, even though emotionally I desperately wanted kids, sometimes you can ask yourself whether you have the right temperament for your dreams.”
“Society often says, ‘Always chase your dreams, never accept failure, keep going,'” she adds, “and there are limits on that.”
It’s a question most people never let themselves ask. In a culture where motherhood isn’t questioned, asking it out loud is its own kind of courage.
Shankar knows the weight of that silence. She describes growing up hearing aunties and uncles say, of childless women, Well, what’s the point of anything? “There’s a special stigma reserved for childfree women,” she says. “And certainly that stigma holds in the South Asian community.”
When I ask whether her parents were supportive, she nods, but then says, “My parents want more grandkids.” Both families—hers Indian, her husband’s Chinese American—come from cultures where having children was never really framed as a decision.
“I don’t think either set of parents ever thought of having kids as a choice,” she says. “As a real choice to make.”
It’s not a complaint. It’s an observation—the kind a cognitive scientist makes about the water she swims in.
“It’s just an ongoing conversation,” she says. And then, without prompting: “I’m childfree today. And I feel more joyful and happy and peaceful than I ever have.”
Society often says, ‘Always chase your dreams, never accept failure, keep going,’ and there are limits on that.
Maya Shankar
To understand how Shankar arrived at that peace, you have to go back to the beginning—not to the violin story that has been told many times (the prodigy at Juilliard, the hand injury, the reinvention), but to the woman who made that reinvention possible: her mother.
Uma Shankar came to America 50 years ago after a whirlwind courtship—she and Maya’s father, the Yale physicist Ramamurti Shankar, met on January 1st and married 20 days later. What struck Uma about her new country wasn’t the wealth or the freedom. She was enchanted with the liberal arts college.
“In India, you just study one thing,” Maya explains. “My mom went to school and studied physics. You go down a single track very quickly. And I think when she was exposed to this idea—’oh my god, students get to study Chinese literature and art history and take physics classes’—it was so astonishing to her.”
That astonishment became a parenting philosophy. Uma enrolled her four children in everything: swimming, soccer, acting, speech and debate, music. Not to build résumés, but to let them discover what they loved. And there was a gendered intention behind it, too. “She wanted to make sure that my sister and I had all these opportunities that she might not have had as a young girl growing up in India,” Shankar says.
This is not the Indian childhood we expect. In a series where I’ve spoken with women who have navigated prescribed paths, familial silence and the weight of collective expectation, Shankar’s story is the counter-narrative—and it’s instructive precisely because of that.
Her parents weren’t permissive about everything. The household was strict. Deviance, she laughs, was “watching MTV after school.” There was no question about doing homework, excelling at what you took on, coming home by a certain time. But “in terms of what it is that we pursued, they were agnostic,” she says. “They definitely cared about the work ethic though.”
“I never felt like I ever had to push against that expectation of excellence,” she adds. “I was just running alongside it.”
It’s a distinction worth pausing on—not freedom from standards, but freedom within them. The expectation of excellence was non-negotiable. The direction was up to you.
Maya’s mother wasn’t the only force shaping her. Her father, the theoretical physicist, played a different role: perspective-giver. Even before the injury ended Maya’s violin career, he was trying to remind her that the world was bigger than Juilliard’s practice rooms. “He was always just taking a moment to give me the bigger picture,” she says, “and the perspective that I needed in order to have a healthy relationship with music and with my ambition.”
Two parents, two complementary gifts. Her mother gave her both breadth and depth. But her father gave her distance and freedom. Together—and Shankar says she hadn’t made this connection until our conversation—they gave her something she would need for the rest of her life: a nimble sense of identity.
“Had there been too much prescription—you’re going to be a doctor, you’re going to be a lawyer—I would have maybe had a harder time knowing how to pivot from that,” she reflects. “It would have felt like I was really on this single track and there’s no other options for me.”
So Uma’s gift to her daughter was not just exposure, it was flexibility. The permission to change shape. And that permission echoes forward across Maya’s entire life—from Juilliard to Stanford to the Obama White House to a podcast studio—all the way to the hardest reinvention of all: releasing the identity of mother.
Shankar is quick to clarify that she doesn’t see herself as a cautionary tale or a role model. “That’s at least one data point,” she says of her own experience, with the precision of someone who has spent her career studying how single stories can shift the way people think.
It’s working. Since the publication of The Other Side of Change, she’s heard from Indian women around the world—women who saw themselves in her story, who told her the book led them to realize something about themselves and their families. She screenshots every message and keeps them in a folder on her phone.
“Human connection is a huge reason why I wrote this book in the first place,” she says. “So I love that it’s making people in my culture feel more connected.”
Ending our conversation, I asked, what comes after this. The book tour ends. The press cycle moves on. What stays?
“I feel extremely grateful that I can keep the conversation alive through my podcast,” she says. “Because when you write a book, you have all sorts of new ideas and new insights. I’m already a better interviewer as a result of writing it.”
And then she says something that stays with me: “One of my most joyful experiences as an interviewer is when someone is having an insight or an aha moment in real time. There’s nothing like that. I get to see it unfold in front of me.”
I know what she means. I watched it happen to her, too—the moment mid-interview when she connected her mother’s parenting to her own capacity for reinvention, a thread she said she’d never pulled before.
Maybe that’s the real other side of change: not the peace you find at the end, but the willingness to keep being surprised by your own story.
Maya Shankar’s The Other Side of Change is available now wherever books are sold.
