Woman Calls The Childfree By Choice ‘Liars And Fools’ In Absurd Rant About Her Barren Uterus
U.K. journalist Kate Spicer has written a screed in the (where else) Daily Mail all about how not having children makes her feel “unnatural and sad.” At age 44, her doctor has told her that her chances of getting pregnant naturally were “slim to zero” and that there was a very slim chance IVF would work due to her medical history and her age. But before she gets to all that, Spicer needs to humblebrag about how difficult it is being childless. From The Daily Mail:
Take this week: I spent a few days on a friend’s sailing boat in Italy, sun-bathing, drinking rose, talking, laughing and dancing until dawn.
Back at home after my break, I slept for hours, ate breakfast in bed, and stayed there reading until well after lunchtime. I couldn’t be bothered to cook, so I went out for a Thai meal, bumped into a friend, went to the cinema and then out for drinks.
I will give you readers a moment to collect yourselves and wipe the tears from your eyes that have surely collected there from reading about Katie’s amazingly difficult life being childfree.
Earlier this week, a broadsheet newspaper ran a triumphalist piece by a 42-year-old who claimed she was wilfully and joyfully childfree. The writer was one of a growing number of women, she claimed, who believe having it all means not having a baby. I call them the Motherhood Deniers.
Statistics do not reveal whether the 43 per cent of educated women who are child-free are so by choice or by circumstance, but I believe the Motherhood Deniers, waving the flag for the childless life, remain in the minority. Admittedly a far more confident, glamorous, and witty minority than they once were, but a minority nonetheless.
For the rest of us, childlessness is a source of sadness and regret. Most of those 43 per cent will have gone through fertility hell, or never met the right guy, or left it too late, or have any number of unhappy stories.
A whole other mess of blah blah blah goes on, and I really get the feeling Spicer’s main regret in not having children is that there will be “no one to wipe her bottom in 40 year’s time” but she also says stuff like this:
I have never met a woman who regretted having children. She surely exists, but not in my experience. I have met, however, older people who lament never having kids, for whatever reason, and I suspect some of the noisy Motherhood Deniers will eventually join their number.
I need to preface what I say next by telling you all that I love my children. I love them with a love that is ferocious and all consuming and I have never regretted having them. If I could do it all over again and birth the exact same people who are asleep in my house at this very moment than I would do it again in a heartbeat. But if I were currently childless and my own children never existed and I was making the decision about whether or not to have kids in the first place? OH HELL NO. I would not. I love my children because I know my children, but I also feel that those people who are childless by choice know exactly what the hell they are doing and why they are doing it.
I find articles like Katie’s so offensive because it makes it seem like childless people, especially women, are totally ignorant and selfish, no, it makes it seem exactly as what Spicer calls it, a “motherhood denier.” It’s amazingly unfair to people, to women especially to accuse them of making an important life decision because they are in “denial” about what having children means or is like. I don’t agree with that. I think people who choose to be childless do so for very specific reasons, and well-thought out reasons, and it’s not a decision they take lightly.
Children do not complete you. They are not an insurance policy against parents growing old and ending up alone. There is no guarantee that having children will make your life better. And having kids for these reasons is beyond selfish and ignorant. We are LUCKY if our kids turn out okay. If they visit us on holidays. if they grow up to be good people who contribute things to the world and remember to call us on our birthdays and we have a relationship with them when they grow to be our age. But there is no guarantee.
Saying that people who are childfree are “deniers” is just as stupid as saying people who have children are “deniers” and all this does is invalidate women and their choices and creates a greater divide between people when people should be allowed to make their own decisions and be respected for them. My decision to have children and become a mother doesn’t make me “greater than” any women who doesn’t. All it means is that I wanted kids so I got pregnant and decided to keep my children. I love them beyond sense and logic but when I read about why people decide to be childfree, I can find no argument against it. I decided to have children. Some people do not. Nothing is wrong with either choice.
(Image: Aleshyn_Andrei/shutterstock)
