Friday 19 July 2013

The Choice to be Childless

I don’t hate children, at all. Babies are adorable once you get over the fact that they poo and have oversized heads that look kind of extraterrestrial. Toddlers provide hilarious entertainment by trying to walk and continue the general trend of adorableness. New mothers might not have realized, but you can now get all these kicks from watching cute animal videos on YouTube rather than having to go through the inconvenience of pushing a baby out of your vagina.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistic’s 2000 estimates, a quarter of Australian women in their reproductive years will never have children, which is slightly higher than estimates of 20% and 22% in the United Kingdom and United States respectively. These are sizeable portions of the population, yet there is still cultural hang up over childless women. If you have trouble conceiving and IVF doesn’t work then we pity your plight. Though if you choose to not have children, you’re either a lonely spinster or oddball. Looking at cultural messages around children, it is clear that our society just cannot accept the reality of women not wanting to be mothers.

Rejection of motherhood goes against everything that we’re traditionally taught to think about children. Firstly, that women are naturally maternal and nurturing. Females of the human species are fair and delicate, said the patriarchy last century. These gender norms are still reflected by the fact that women dominate in professions of teaching, child care, nursing, and hospitality. Secondly, unless you have aggressively feminist (or just sane) parents, most girls grow up with something akin to a ‘Baby Born’ or Barbie Doll with Kelly in a pram which instills these ideas of motherhood being their destiny from a young age. Alongside the overwhelming number of female characters in popular culture who are desperate to have a baby. What to Expect When You’re Expecting stands out among the other shitty blockbusters as a whole movie dedicated to showing us that even though life is tumultuous, women will always be comforted by the joys of motherhood. According to media buzz, Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer’s split was apparently because Aniston was too desperate to have a child. This leads to thirdly, the imposition of a timeline onto when you fulfill your destiny and have that child. Among my twenty-something tertiary educated friendship circle (who are statistically speaking far less like to have children, and will do so later on average) I still hear “I want to have kids by the time I’m 35”, “No way, 35 is too late! If you’re not dating the father by the time you’re 27 you’re in trouble town”. Apparently these self imposed reproductive time limits are such a problem that men need to be warned of these ‘undateable women’ flooding the dating market, according to Australian website ‘Ask Men’, which published an article on how to identify and avoid these female desperados. Quick tangent: it is a truly humorous, if not scarily stupid, piece. Apparently having pets can be a sign of desperation, and men are advised to leave the room immediately if she refers to her pets as children. I don’t care what you call your budgerigar. Instead, I want to know why we are always told women are desperate to have kids when the truth is that the majority of women expend a lot of time and effort trying not to fall pregnant.

The problem is also obvious when you evaluate prominent women who have chosen not to have children. Julia Gillard was called “deliberately barren” by Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan, who claimed that she therefore “had no idea what life’s about”. Whilst his comments were widely criticised, they have also been echoed by the likes of Tony Abbott and Mark Latham. More recently, the labelling of Gillard as a ‘witch’ plays into these notions that she is not a good and proper woman; that she has done something evil by not being maternal. Gillard chose not to have children to pursue her career as a politician, because having a child impedes career progression. Sheryl Sandberg questions the motivations of women who lock themselves out of certain career paths if they want to have kids, years before its even a reasonable prospect. If a man prioritises his career over children, that’s perfectly normal, but if women do so that decision comes under extensive scrutiny. It’s often described as a selfish choice, ignoring the fact that people choose to have kids for selfish reasons too, and moreover the planet simply doen’s need more gluttenous and resource-draining first world babies. In contrast to the selfish career driven likes of Gillard, politicians like Sarah Palin play the mother card to garner popular support. Palin brought out her line up of children for each photo, and marketed herself as the hockey mum that other women could identify with.

It seems that a key issue is the fact that women are taught to connect with other women through the common fact of being a parent, in ways that men generally are not. Baby showers are normally for female friends only, and mothers groups meet up to share the joys of breastfeeding and compare the best brands for prams. The fact that men now take on greater parenting responsibilities is great, but only a very recent development. Newsagents are full of magazines on motherhood, but I’ve never seen a magazine on fatherhood.

This message that the female destiny is motherhood implies that there is something wrong with those women who choose not to have children. All the discussion around the need to have children as a biological issue (because your body clock is ticking, and its chemicals in your body that make you maternal) makes it seem that there is something biologically deficient with those who don’t want kids. This harms women in general because it encourages the idea that women should be defined by their role as a mother. Many women enjoy motherhood, but Betty Draper from Mad Men is a great example of an intelligent woman driven to unhappiness by feeling trapped in a role she did not choose. Not matter how great it might be, someone’s identity as a person should never be subsumed by another (as a mother, or wife or carer for that matter). Rather than accepting the early stages of motherhood are difficult, there is a huge stigma attached to women with post-natal depression. New mothers are expected to be glowing and overjoyed with their newborn, despite its drastic discord with most women’s real life experience.

This isn’t just a historical problem stuck in the 60s before the Women’s Liberation took off. The ongoing obsession with parenting ‘correctly’ and staying up to date on the proper method of parenting can be a powerful regressive force if it is so systematic as to take over your life. Mothers are made to feel guilty if they don’t breastfeed for long enough, because studies claim extensive health benefits from natural milk. Only dreadful mothers would cause their baby to have a lower IQ, asthma and other ailments by lazily supplying them with synthetic supplements.

I’m not trying to discourage anyone from having children, or begrudge the great work most people do raising children – but we need to stop thinking that there is something wrong with women who choose not to have children. If men are able to choose a life of independence and solitude, women should not be damned for doing so as well.

Christina White

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