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In my experience as a woman who has chosen the childfree life, there seems to be two very common ways the unconscious bias of moral disgust toward childfree people tends to manifest itself and shape other people’s interactions with me. I’ll do the best I can to explain these dynamics below.

1. The “curious” people

Their implicit bias tends to show up in the way that they enter into the conversation under the guise of taking interest in your decision to not have children — what you will notice though, is that they are often suspiciously and covertly looking to debunk your stance. I feel like most people who are doing this are not aware of its effects on us, or even aware that they are doing this at all.

Right off the bat, this game is rigged against you. You will be playing the role of the ‘convincer’ to someone who does not believe what you are telling them about yourself, yet this is all happening under the pretence of an innocent conversation. They will ask leading questions with an expectation to eventually uncover an inconsistency in your outlook that will confirm their cognitive bias about your choice being either untrue or ill-informed in some way.

They don’t show a genuine interest in building a nuanced understanding of your particular stance as a valid and equivalent perspective, and they certainly aren’t interested in challenging their pre-existing biases. This requires an open-mindedness and vulnerability that most people find uncomfortable. Instead, it seems they keep a detached distance from the contamination of their beliefs coming into close contact with yours, so you have the experience of being looked to as a kind of freaky science experiment.

They proceed to take you down an eerily predictable journey of patronising, over-personal cross-examination and debate (generally unaware that you’ve been here many times before, with many different people) that often ends in a last-ditch effort at conquering your logic by dismissing your stance as merely a girlish phase you will eventually grow out of. Usually, this will look something like, “oh, you’ll change your mind!” Or, “well, you’re still young!” Or, “I see, but when circumstances change-” Or, “I was just like you when I was your age, and then-”. This approach seems to serve to protect the original bias. It appeases discomfort by rejecting your reality, and instead creating a second alternative-future reality where the bias can still exist.

Some people, having leant too far into their detachment and feeling self-righteous in their moral outrage will end in a covertly contemptuous or outright snarky remark like, “if your parents never had you-” or “that’s selfish!” Or commonly in my experience, a misogynistic comment about the apparent moral obligation of all womb-owners, or how you’ve “technically failed as human being — biologically speaking, I mean.”

2. The “non-curious” people

Their defensiveness shows up as a refusal to acknowledge any personal significance at all in what you are sharing with them.

A lot of childless-by-choice people have arrived at the decision because it feels deeply innate to them. Some people always knew they were destined to be mothers, and some of us knew we weren’t. For all of us, the choice and the underlying beliefs around it will be a part of our identity, whether that part feels big or small. You might self-identify as a kind of “person of yourself” — your choice toward childlessness may be firmly rooted in your highest values as well as your hopes and dreams for life. Even if someone chooses not to partake in something, that opting-out was most likely a deliberate and conscious choice that meant something personal to them — just as opting-in is meaningful to those who consciously choose to become parents. It is a kind of sacrifice to some of us, and a kind of radical act of self-commitment to others. Either way, the choice to not procreate can have inherent meaning about who we are, and can be an important part of our identities. For example, it is my opinion that to ignore the significance of a woman choosing not to have a child is to ignore the significance of the incredible amount of physical and emotional labour that mothers are giving every single day.

The “non-curious” approach tends to show up as a refusal to show or take an interest in your decision at all, ignoring the value in the beliefs and perspectives related to this side of you — your identity as it is related to childlessness becomes an unexplored territory. This can feel very lonely.

It can even show up as a total disinterest in who you are as a person, or what you do with your time — it might be subtly communicated to you that your time and your hobbies aren’t very noble or worth being asked about.

In my experience, this approach most commonly shows up as the minimisation of or unwillingness to notice the cultural oppression that comes with choosing to forgo parenthood as a woman, and in turn, making your experiences of alienation feel trivial or exaggerated.

These people’s remarks or non-engagement might seem to them like acceptance because of the lack of invasiveness or confrontation in their approach. However, their comments can strike as feeling empty of real understanding or intrigue, which leaves you feeling dismissed at their unwillingness to engage at a deeper level. Their unwillingness to really know us.

They tend to use conversation-closers like, “I don’t really care what you do / doesn’t bother me.” Or low-energy rhetorical questions that ignore the social reality of the judgement childfree women face, like, “so what? / who cares?”

There can be an element of gaslighting involved. A person can tell you that they “don’t care” about your decision, which would imply that they don’t hold any negative feelings about it, yet simultaneously, they might show defensiveness by making no effort to show interest in this part of your identity, or choosing to ignore or shut down your attempts to engage with this topic. There is a bit of a crazy-making feeling to this dynamic — you might have the sense that the conversation becomes stifled and constipated, like there are things left unsaid from their side, yet the feedback you are getting from them is that they have no strong feelings.

These parts of your identity may make them uncomfortable, which may be a reason to pretend to themselves and to you that they accept these sides of you. This refusal to engage in the conversation both keeps their belief system safe and they might implicitly feel that by disengaging, they don’t have to risk a rupture in your relationship by disagreeing with you.

A personal anecdote

When I decided to open up to a mental health professional about my choice, it was because I felt eager to fully unpack my thoughts and feelings around it with someone I trusted who could help facilitate that process.

When I did tell them about my decision, I was mortified when they immediately derailed the conversation to being about how rewarding their experience of being a parent had been, and how it was the single most healing choice they had made for their inner child.

I figured that this was surely just a one-off clumsy self-disclosure, so I decided to bring up my stance again on another occasion, hoping for more curiosity on their behalf to help me explore my choice deeper.

The same thing happened again. It seemed that my attempts to revisit this topic were always met with non-engagement with my perspective, yet this person didn’t seem to even notice that they were ignoring a whole facet of my identity that I was continually trying to offer them. Although I’m sure it wasn’t their intent, it translated to me that my perspective was neither valid nor valuable.

Instead of aiding me to explore the deeply self-empowered feelings I felt at the core of my choice, they instead reflected on hurtful experiences from my childhood that seemed to justify the decision, as if my choice was fully reducible to a trauma response, only to be viewed upon with a kind of condolence.

I eventually confronted this counsellor, and with exasperation, they answered, “whether you do have a child or don’t have a child, I really don’t care.” It seemed like an attempt to disarm the conversation by expressing that they couldn’t care either way, as if all I needed from them was only the blessing of knowing that they didn’t mind what I chose.

What did this communicate to me? This person was not open to exploring my childfree perspective or accept the choice as equivalent, and if I wasn’t going to accept their reality as ultimate, it seemed that the other option on offer was that they would cease to care at all. They didn’t seem to be aware that other choices were available.

In conclusion…

These regular experiences of feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, patronised, gaslit, insulted or ignored really can hurt. The accumulative effects of having your intimate beliefs consistently reframed by other people to make themselves comfortable is utterly exhausting. Who we are becomes lost under other people’s agendas about who they need us to be, and it can become pretty alienating.

If we choose to be vocal about the choice to remain childless and seek to be understood, we are guaranteed to spend an incredible amount of emotional labour on the never ending task of “proving” the seriousness of our stances on a common basis. In this way, the childless-by-choice life can begin to become an ironic parody of itself — what begins as a casual attempt to be ourselves out-loud can easily evolve into a child-centric battle to be accepted and understood as someone who chose to opt out of having a child.

A lot of us give up attempting to talk openly about our perspectives on this because of an inability to be taken seriously. Others get more blunt in an effort to override others’ entitlement to information about us, or a rejection of the “proving ourselves game”. And some, like me, can find themselves talking incessantly, in a kind of desperate attempt to be heard and understood as themselves.

As a childfree person, my ask is this:

Please stay aware that you likely have an unconscious negative bias against the childfree and please take responsibility for how this might shape our interactions

Please ask questions in order understand my position, not to disprove it

Please show you respect me by taking me at my word

Please don’t attempt to “fix” me

Please acknowledge that my choice is likely in some way significant to me, and therefore a part of my identity

Please take an interest in me and the differing ways I view the world

Please note that looking to debunk my stance is not the same as being curious

*Although others may relate to this post, it is a reflection of my own beliefs and experiences. I do not and cannot speak for all childfree women.*