Are All Women Made To Have Babies?

I’m told it’s rude to ask a person why he or she has kids. Why then is it okay for a person to ask me why I DON’T have kids?

It is difficult for a woman to stand up and say that she doesn’t want to have children. (Trust me, I speak from experience.) It is even more difficult for a woman to stand up and say that she is married and doesn’t want to have children!

What is the big deal? Why is there this misconception that women are made to have children? Biologically yes, they’re anatomically built to carry a child, give birth to it, nourish it – and then what? Just because they can, they should?

Culturally I think we’re obsessed with babies. No, you don’t have to blame yourself. Once again, like you have every other time before this, let’s blame this on the media. Over the last three years, the clichéd ‘rom-com’ happy ending has moved from proposals and fancy weddings to a second blue line on a pregnancy test. The movie Bride Wars ends not with weddings, but with Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway both pregnant; in Waitress, Baby Mama, The Back-up Plan — the longed-for handsome prince arrives in a ‘family’ van. Even bloody Harry Potter – after seven fucking books – ends with all of them ‘grown up’ with kids. Babies are the new archetype for happy endings and not wanting one is like saying you don’t want to be happy!

It seems to be not just a social norm but a biological imperative! Not wanting kids is an admission that invites suspicion (!) and pity (!!). To be a close-to-thirty-years-old woman in 2010 and not want a child (so desperately that you think you might die) is simply not allowed.

Forget the general public that has shocked reactions – ever tried telling a woman with kids or a pregnant woman that you don’t want kids? They seem to take it as a personal insult that I don’t want kids. Like I’m saying that I don’t like their babies. I’m just expressing an opinion – my opinion – that I don’t want to have my (potential) babies!

I think I might just have heard every single response there is to my ‘shocking’ statement that I don’t want to have children. You know what I find shocking? I look around me and see so many people who I would never even entrust with a potted cactus plant, having kids! And they’re so excited about it. Naturally.

And instead of these people having to justify why on earth they have kids, I am asked to justify my decision not to have kids! Ridiculous!

“Oh no, don’t you LIKE kids?”

-          No, not that much. They’re adorable and all (some of them), but most of the time I’m very happy to know they’re going to go home at the end of the day with their parents.

“What happened to you in your childhood?”

-          Nothing! Can you believe this shit? Now I’m pathologised!

“Aren’t you afraid of being lonely when you grow old?” (my mom asked me)

-          No. And if you have children because you think that’s a guarantee for companionship in your old age, I suggest you have a back up plan and book yourself a bed in a retirement home.

“You’ll change your mind once your body-clock starts ticking.”

-          This one seems to be a particular favourite. Predictions are made for me. This is just a phase and I will come out of some ten-fifteen years down the line when it will be too late for me to do anything about it. (Somehow they all seem to forget at this point a little concept called ‘adoption’.)

“You’re just in denial.”

-          Isn’t this one brilliant? When all else fails, just call her deluded! I’m not truly happy and fulfilled in my childless state. (How can I be!) Yuck. Since when is having a ‘maternal instinct’ a sign of ‘sanity’? I’d imagine it was the other way around. It’s all sorts of damaged women that are having kids. There’s a reason there are so many screwed up people in the world!

I love my life. I’m not afraid of growing up. And my decision not to have kids doesn’t make me selfish or deluded or ‘fucked-up’. I might change my mind. Quite happily too. But just because I don’t want kids now, doesn’t mean I’m in denial. Also, I’m only 22 – not hearing any tick-tock!

When you’re on the outside of all this looking in, it seems like complete madness. I accept that most women don’t feel as I do. I accept that many are genuinely compelled to have kids – because they want it, because they forgot to use protection, because their friends are having babies, because their families expect it, because they want some other person who is all theirs to fuck up, because they’re bored, because it’s the ‘right time’, because – I’m happy for those who do, because it’s what they want; and I’m sorry for those who can’t, because that’s horribly sad.

Still, I think as cultural movements go, this one has veered wildly out of control. Also — shhh — it’s kind of boring. Childlessness is going to be a feature in many people’s lives; we need to start seeing it as a choice rather than a failing. We certainly need it not to be taboo. We need to stop making women who choose not to have a child feel like they have a guilty secret.