On childlessness

My decision never to have children is something I get asked about a lot. My explanation goes something like this:

I always assumed I would have children, in the same way that I assumed I would get good grades in school (tick), get a university degree (tick), get married to a man (tick), buy a house (uh…), have two children (um…), and have a fabulous job involving books somehow (tick! hooray! although in a form I could not have imagined and indeed have trouble conceptualising now, even as I’m doing the work). And then I hit my late twenties and realised that the childbearing would have to start soon.

That was when I looked inside myself for the desire to become a mother and found that it just wasn’t there. Its absence was total, clean. I felt surprised, but calm: the decision was made. I was also surprised by the lack of metafeelings: I felt neither conflicted nor guilty about the decision to not have children. It wasn’t one of those what-if, who-even-am-I, pros-and-cons-list decisions. It was quiet, simple, and permanent. (At about the same time, my husband had reached a similar decision. We are both happily committed to a childfree life together.)

There’s been a lot written online in the last few years about being childfree, ranging in tone from defensive to earnest to evangelical. At first I found this writing helpful; to know I was part of a growing demographic, and to help clarify my thinking. But I find the us-and-them mentality less than useful. There’s no sense in waving the “It’s ok to be childfree” flag if it means denigrating parents.

Women who decide to remain childless are often accused of selfishness (men, much less so). Partly, I think, this is due to parents who are very invested in their identity as parents lashing out at those who are taking a different path. Partly too it is an expression of the sexism that is still woven deep into the fabric of our culture. Women who make decisions based purely on their own needs and wants, without reference to anyone else, must be punished.

The other thing that happens to women who declare their decision not to have children is that they’re confidently told they’ll change their minds. This happens to me — in one case it was one of my whānau (who is herself a mother). It’s an extraordinarily patronising action, to set yourself up as an authority on someone else’s personal decisions. I’m not even sure what she thought she would achieve: that I would believe her and reverse my decision now in order to save time?

Logic, though, doesn’t seem to come into these discussions much. Children, fertility, parenthood, whānau — these are visceral themes. Although it’s annoying to have to cope with other people’s emotional reactions to something that should be unremarkable, it’s hardly surprising. I also wish I didn’t have to keep explaining that being deliberately childless doesn’t mean hating children, but c’est la vie.

The place where others’ reaction to my decision has done real harm, though, is in my medical care. For about a decade now I have suffered from severe dysmenorrhea (menstrual pain). Eventually it got so bad that painkillers weren’t even making a dent, and I sought help from my GP. For years she put me though a series of variations on a theme of hormonal contraception. None of them solved the problem; all of them had unpleasant and significant side effects.

Throughout the process she managed to give me the impression that dysmenorrhea was just something to be endured. That made me angry. I don’t buy the idea that repeated acute pain is the price of being a woman, any more than I buy the idea that rape threats and bullying are the price of using the internet while female. I find especially toxic the idea our culture has inherited from Christianity that uterine pain is some kind of divine retribution, natural and just — that pain is something women deserve. Fuck that noise. Pain is something medical science can solve — although, again due to our lingering sexist ideas, dysmenorrhea is under-studied proportionate to its occurrence in the population, and women reporting pain are less likely to be believed.

I told my GP I definitely never wanted to have children. At every appointment, she would check whether I’d changed my mind. I found it so frustrating that she seemed to be starting from the assumption that my stated position was probably wrong and couldn’t be trusted. Eventually, years later, she referred me to a gynaecologist.

I told the gynaecologist about the pain, about my need for permanent contraception, and about my desire to never have another period ever again. She suspects I have endometriosis, and booked me in for a diagnostic laparoscopy, during which the surgeon will also clip my fallopian tubes. Partly depending on the outcome of that operation, she will then grant my request to have a hysterectomy.

I burst into tears. Being believed and taken seriously, having the permanence of my decision not to have children respected instead of challenged, having proof of ‘my body, my choice’ — it was such a startling relief.

Again, though, the people around me have all kinds of feeling and opinions about my body and my fertility that they want to share with me. The news that I will probably have what is essentially a voluntary hysterectomy has caused widespread consternation, and I’m fielding a host of “are you sure?”s even from people who had previously been cool with my childlessness (or possibly, I suppose, who had previously kept their reservations politely to themselves). It’s the difference between making a passive decision to maintain the status quo by doing nothing (to continue to not have children), and making an active decision to permanently erase that avenue of possibility. Humans have a strong cognitive bias in favour of keeping all possible options open, so, even though I have no qualms, I can understand why others do.

I know that my childlessness is something I’m going to have to keep explaining, possibly for the rest of my life. Although it can get irritating, overall it’s a price I’m willing to pay, because conversations about why I choose to be childfree are also conversations that contain the question ‘why do you want to be a parent?’. I’m glad to live in a society that is beginning to examine the assumption that parenthood is the natural state of all adults (and particularly the idea that motherhood is an essential part of womanhood). I’m glad to live in a country with subsidised healthcare that supports a woman’s right to choose. I’m glad to live at a point in history where I have the benefit of feminism and medical science. I’m glad that parenthood is something I can opt out of safely and with confidence. I’m glad that you have children. I’m glad that I don’t.

Originally published at elizabethheritage.co.nz on March 7, 2016.