An old friend wrote to me on Mother's Day this year, ostensibly to wish me a happy first Mother's Day but actually to tell me why she would probably never have a child. It was a long email. I believe it contained the words "happy mother's day" somewhere in there, but the meat of the message was that motherhood isn't all that important.
I replied with qualified agreement—I don't think that motherhood is the most important thing. Having a child is not the only or necessarily the best way to contribute to the world. I did respectfully disagree, however, with the message in general: having gestated a person, very painfully birthed him, and then kept him alive for a few months, I was inclined to think that being a mother was pretty damn important, if not downright miraculous.
I've been thinking about this a lot because there have been a number of articles lately on the growing "child-free" trend, and they all say basically the same thing: the birthrate is not just falling by circumstance, women are choosing not to have children. This is a principled choice, ostensibly not made just for their personal benefit but for the good of the planet. Humans are the world's biggest problem and so having fewer humans is a good thing. Fewer people = less climate change, less suffering, less general mayhem, etc, etc.
For the record: I have no opinion on the procreative choices of these women! I don't care whether or not they have children. What's weird to me is that they spend way more time on this than seems healthy or useful. For many years, I myself was not interested in having children. So I did what most people who are uninterested in having children do: I learned how to avoid getting pregnant, made a plan, and then followed that plan. This did not require me to get my fallopian tubes cut, start a reproductive justice non-profit, or email my friends on Mother's Day to tell them parenthood is unimportant. I just, well...didn't have a kid.
So I say we just let these women get on with their lives and stop spilling digital ink over their choices. Perhaps they will then stop sharing their sterilization surgeries with their 64,000 tiktok followers and we can all just live in blissful ignorance. But, you know, on second thought: I really do love a good overshare story! So maybe let's keep these articles coming. I want to hear next from someone who decides not to have houseplants on principle. (I am available to be interviewed.)
In all seriousness, though: I do care about one thing in these stories, and that is the suggestion that the world would be a better place without human beings in it. If that's true then why just stop at childlessness? What's the case against against suicide, forced sterilization, or murder? If one less person in the world = one less polluter/oppressor, then is the next climate/social justice "solution" going to involve some selective culling of the human herd? What the hell is going on?
7 comments:
Agree about all this, but have you noticed any of the inverse phenomenon - the thing where a woman has a baby, usually a college-educated woman who has waited at least until her 30s and so has had time to create an identity separate from it already, and then proceeds immediately to politicize the experience of having the baby and becomes an activist for lactation liberation and paid parental leave, etc.? I think this is all one phenomenon, the absorption of childbearing and motherhood into a political/activist life narrative where one is endlessly fighting the system for justice, and it almost doesn't matter whether it's the justice of having a baby or not having one, so long as you're FIGHTING. I hate it all.
Ugh, yes, that's so true. I think I might hate the mother activist more than I hate the child-free activist, personally. But they are both pretty terrible.
One of the things I recall seeing at the beginning of my 30s was a spate of essays about how "no one TELLS you how terrible pregnancy and labor are! there is a conspiracy of silence!" And I thought, this info is freely available and you can talk to people who have birthed babies (they are legion), but these women have discovered a social injustice in their own failure to look something up and believe that justice=national discourse constantly tracking their current life stage and its problems.
Yes, this is also pervasive. I am somewhat more sympathetic to it, though, because I do think that no matter how many birthing persons you talk to, there isn't really any way to prepare for the experience of childbirth and pregnancy and baby-rearing. I mean, the articles themselves are dumb, but the feeling of being totally unprepared despite reading the whole internet is sort of familiar and understandable to me. Having a baby is something you need to live through to understand, in my opinion.
Turning every grievance into a social justice project does not elicit my sympathy, however.
I also agree with all of this. I am so bored with these discussions on babies vs climate change. Also that sounds like an annoying email from your friend.
Also what is the no houseplants principle? J is firmly against plants in the house...but I think they would be nice? He thinks it is just an absurd thing to do. What am I missing?
Yes, it was indeed a very annoying email!
I just find houseplants useless. I would love to have a garden, but I don't see the point of plants indoors. Just one more thing to take care of! They can be pretty, though, I don't dispute that. If someone else wanted to take care of them I would be fine with it.
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