Aisling Curtis | Senior Staff Writer

Childlessness goes deep against the grain of the dominant cultural expectation: that every woman longs for and will have children. Having a child is still glorified as the natural conclusion of a woman’s maturity process, a neat progression of marriage-babies to which our mothers and grandmothers adhered. But, with the advent of contraception, it has become possible for a greater number of people to exercise informed childlessness, to shun traditional reproductive processes and opt instead to live childfree.

Having a child is still glorified as the natural conclusion of a woman’s maturity process, a neat progression of marriage-babies to which our mothers and grandmothers adhered. ADVERTISEMENT

And yet there remains a stigma around those who choose this alternate route. People argue that it’s not natural, that it’s selfish to not want to have a child. But if we’re going to throw around the word selfish, I don’t see how women who choose not to add another human to the seven billion wreaking havoc on this planet can be classed as such. The world population is set to hit 9.6 billion in 2050, a number that will put untold pressure on our already decimated environment, Stretching agricultural systems to breaking point and resulting in even more hunger and horror than already exists in the world. Furthermore, UNICEF estimates there are already 153 million orphans in the world. There is not a shortage of children, whether they were wanted or not. If even a large proportion stay happily child-free, this will in no way negatively impact the future of the human race.

Regardless, I could argue that people don’t have children out of a concern for continuing population trends. Allegedly, a child effects a transcendent experience of joy, a suffusion of love, a dormant instinct rearing its cutesy head. This is what seems to draw people to it, this promised biological bond. To say you don’t want children is like a personal affront, an insult to this culturally agreed upon norm. In my anecdotal experience, men don’t receive the same reaction as women do upon saying they don’t want kids. I’ve heard all the usual lines – “you’ll change your mind” and “you’re too young to decide” – as if I’m too thick to grasp the overwhelming bliss of a child. My female friends hear the same. Whether it’s because men are stereotypically thought to be less interested in children, or that this stigma doesn’t permeate their lives, it remains that they don’t receive the same indignant disavowal of their stance. The stigma is a woman’s, as if motherhood is the highest echelon of femininity, and those who don’t desire it lack something intrinsic and just haven’t realised it yet.

Some find happiness in cultivating another person, and others in cultivating themselves.

But having a child is not a selfless act, nor is it selfish. Those words shouldn’t be thrown around in that context – they don’t make sense there. Each additional person generates waste that pressurises the environment. They cause pain to others or may be the catalyst for a horrific act of violence, and they cost an obscene amount of money – ₤220,000 per child in the UK. Though these are perfectly valid reasons for childlessness, they are also grounds for it not being selfish to abstain. If a person chooses to use that ₤220,000 on doing the things that they love, is that truly so bad? If that vast amount is spent on travelling, eating well, learning, skydiving and bungee jumping and hiking, visiting India and China and living in Rome and Tokyo, it is not the waste of a life. Some find happiness in cultivating another person, and others in cultivating themselves.

To those who think a purposefully childfree woman is unnatural, selfish, or immature: your life choices are yours, and hers are hers. Nobody’s opinions or decisions are so fundamentally flawless that they must be prescribed to everyone else. We all live diverse lives that elicit preferences for children or not. And with so much inequality and injustice in today’s world, perhaps it’s time we stopped insisting on having more children, and started accepting those who prefer to focus on the people already here.