Don’t want kids? It’s nobody’s business but yours.
Jacquielynn Floyd says for all the talk about gender equality, we still tend to unilateral view of women as current or future mothers.
Never one to establish — or, for that matter, to follow — a popular trend, I find myself, for once, in the vanguard of a cultural curve: married, no kids.
It is millennials, whom I predate by more than two decades, who have solidified this decision as a decisive shift. As the National Center for Health Statistics recently reported, the U.S. fertility rate reached a record low last year, at 62 births per 1,000 women ages 15 through 44.
Whether that’s good, bad or indifferent news depends on whom you ask. The rate is now below “replacement level” — not enough new babies to offset the oldsters who are dying off — but immigration makes up for the population deficit.
Demographic implications notwithstanding, voluntary childlessness represents a specific choice, an option that women have not, historically enjoyed: the decision not to be mothers.
Having reached an age where inquisitive strangers are more likely to ask whether I’m a grandma than a mom, I don’t have a particular sense of defensiveness about this anymore. But a column by 30-something journalist Anna Goldfarb published this week in The New York Times struck an awfully familiar bell.
She wrote about friends who continually ask when she and her husband plan to start the wheels turning on the procreation machine; about a doctor who keeps urging her to “keep an open mind.”
Well, whaddaya know, I thought: People are still saying this stuff, as if this deeply personal and intimate decision were a piece of public property. For all these decades of talk about gender equality, we still tend to a unilateral view of women as current or future mothers; we identify them as more closely linked to the reproductive and child-rearing process than men.
Political initiatives dealing with parental leave, child care and children’s health tend to get lumped together as “women’s issues,” like lifeboats reserved for the ladies and little ones. It’s biology, people shrug. That’s how it is.
I can’t help but feel that this is a bit of a disservice to fathers who are deeply concerned over their children’s welfare. And it’s a none-too-subtle rebuke to women who have voluntarily passed on maternity.
With the perspective of age, I can supply the responses to all those questions, comments and predictions offered by friends, by relatives, and by near-complete strangers over the years.
“Don’t you like kids?” (Sure); “You’d make a great mom” (Thanks); “It’s different when they’re your own” (I’ll take your word for it); “You’ll change your mind” (I didn’t); “You’ll regret it when it’s too late” (I don’t).
Only two questions still really carry a sting. One is: “Why?”
How come you want to know? Do I owe you an explanation?
In a much-discussed 2015 essay collection titled “Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed,” 16 writers described in oftenminute detail why they elected not to have kids. Many outlined making a carefully calibrated choice, choosing specific priorities — career, travel — over the mixed rewards and obligations of parenthood.
The decision for me was less complicated: I just didn’t want to, not ever. I didn’t imagine myself in the role, didn’t daydream about it. It would be like asking why I’m not a Sanskrit scholar or Antarctic explorer.
And since I strongly believe that every child in this country and in this world should be eagerly anticipated and joyously welcomed, people who don’t keenly want or aren’t able to care for kids have no business making them.
The other question that rasps on the raw nerve, even now, is “Didn’t you want a family?”
Hey, pal, I want to say sharply, I have a family. I have a husband and parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces. Even without ties of blood or marriage, plenty of people have their own intimate networks, their own tribal attachments that feel very much like “family” to them.
It’s nobody else’s business to advise them that these are “not the same as having children of your own.” How do you know what somebody else’s life feels like?
We are fortunate to live in a society that (ostensibly, but often incompletely) affords individuals the opportunities to shape their own lives, to make their own choices. Freedom does not necessarily entail entitlements, but it does entail options.
Which is why I feel a certain solidarity with those millennial women — it’s overwhelmingly women on the receiving end of these pointed questions — who feel pushed to the defensive over their personal reproductive choices.
I feel their frustration. I still get a peculiarly spiteful category of hate mail from people who have noted and squirreled away the fact that I don’t have kids as an explanation for political views they don’t like; they view women who are voluntarily childless as a virulent strain of misanthropic arch-feminist. They unleash the Nuclear Insult: I am “unnatural.”
Well, nature made me, so I don’t see how that can be the case. Millennials, as I see it, have the same reproductive obligation as their elders: Don’t have kids you don’t want, and love and cherish the ones you do.
Let demographers and economists worry about the fertility rate. The human species will persevere.