The real reason I am childless
an explainer that might be helpful in these Gileadan times
During fascist regimes, the men in power want women to have more babies. There are various reasons for this. Women skew from the idea, and often in advance of said fascism descending. We sniff the Zeitgeist. We possibly sense what’s coming and choose to redirect our resources to protecting existing community members, and to being of rebellious service. Which, of course, is partially what incenses these men into their fascist turn.
My childlessness has always been up for discussion in both public and intimate settings. (It has been the object of male rage; so so so many men have felt a vigilante compulsion to write cruelly and violently about it in various comments sections.) But I’ve noticed interest in it has dialled up lately. Both childless women and men are approaching me to ask how I hold the choice (or otherwise), how I steer a sense of purpose, and what shelf I put my grief on. I think the heightened interest is almost certainly triggered by the headlines warning of population collapse, a phenomenon not resulting from humans suddenly dying in greater numbers around the world, but from (predominantly) young women choosing not to have kids, and in droves.
A UN study published last month - The real fertility crisis: The pursuit of reproductive agency in a changing world - has laid out the various systems collapse-related reasons why young people around the world are not having kids. “A toxic blend of economic precarity and sexism” are cited as major reasons (my italics). Young women have looked at the situation and are deciding they don’t want to embark on a lifetime project with men. This is backed by the conversations I’m having with young women (and some men). They are simply and rather quietly “opting out” - saying no to kids, marriage, even dating and sex with men, per South Korea’s 4B movement, which has spread globally in the past year.
All of which, I think, is triggering older childless folk to reexamine their own situation. Did we, too, sniff the Zeitgeist some time back? The times somewhat coerced many of us to self-consciously declare that we were denied kids. We would’ve if we could’ve. But now I’m witnessing a reframing from some, enabled by what’s going on with young people (we are no longer outliers but perhaps early adopters of a broader movement). From the several dozen people I’ve spoken to recently, and from the many op-eds and podcasts I’m consuming on the subject, I notice a question being asked - What if some people at certain junctures in history don’t have kids so that they can be better available for, well, what is going down?
The Trump regime’s fascist turn and its baby-making policy focus lends potency to this. To be childless might just be a necessary act of defiance in these turning times.
One guy (a stranger) in his early fifties who I spoke to last week told me that he was now realising he had, indeed, made a choice. “I think I was picking up on something I did not want to be part of,” he told me. “whereas before I thought I was a victim of circumstances”.
An hour later I had another conversation with a woman - a surgeon who has worked in several war zones and now battles it out in Britain’s NHS - and we mused together that observing the broligarchy’s clamping down on women’s reproductive rights makes us feel that something bigger might just be going on, that in the great rebalancing and recorrecting that Life invariably does, we had somehow been steered, even if only subliminally, from bearing babies. “Clearly the world is needing more ‘black belt aunties’,” I said, referring to Vanessa Andreotti’s term. In The Collapse Book, I also write about the rise of Fierce Mother Energy among those of us signed up for being of defiant service, which is required to combat the Toddler Energy we are being subjected to. You can read it here:
There are a great many reasons, of course, why we should be concerned about population collapse. I go into them in this chapter below (and make the argument that migration and other social policies are the most effective ways forward; draconian fertility polices simply do not work):
But there are also a great many reasons why those of us who have not had kids should embrace our position, and rise to what it entails.
The various discussions in recent weeks made me go back and read over what I’d written about “my decision” to be childless in This One Wild and Precious Life. I’d been told at 34 that I could not have kids, but then managed to reverse this prognosis with various health protocols and fell pregnant four times in my mid-forties, all naturally and with whack stories attached. I lose one baby from mercury poisoning, another dies when she gets twisted in her umbilical cord. This forms a parallel journey to the three-year hiking route I tread around the world to find a salve to the climate crisis.
It’s funny. I have often framed my childlessness as something that befell me. It could be framed that way to some extent. But ultimately I did choose to terminate a strong pregnancy and it was largely because I felt that the times were calling me elsewhere. For anyone reflecting on similar themes, I’m pasting the chunk of the book where I write about this decision, below. It’s quite strange to read how cautious I was to share my decision. My writing is heavily caveated. I’m not sure whether the social and political climate has made me more forthright just four years later, or whether it’s peri-menopause (less fucks to give about what people think of me), or whether it’s the fact that, at 51, my child-rearing capacity is very much in the rear-vision mirror and no longer able to be controlled (although the angry men still chime in).
Please do feel free to share your thoughts openly in the comments. As the young people say, it’s a safe place.
Sarah xx
My decision to abort my final pregnancy
Extracted from This One Wild and Precious Life.
I will share that as I approached the end of this journey, I fell pregnant again, aged forty-five. It was the regular way this time – an ex-lover generously “helped me out”. It was a very strong pregnancy; I had morning sickness that left me confined to the bathroom. Then my bipolar flared; I was dangerously manic and didn’t sleep. My thyroid turned furious and my health spiralled. My endocrine system was fighting for its life in such a way that I knew it would take years and years to recover. I know the signs now; I have had to rebuild my health before. It took almost a decade last time.