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Why Women Choose Not to Have Children

⋮ 17/4/2015

Culture

As detailed in essays by 16 different writers, both male and female: because they don’t want to, and because
not wanting to is perfectly reasonable.

By Sophie Gilbert

Lauren Giordano / The Atlantic

April 17, 2015

Pope Francis is widely believed to be a cool pope—a huggable, Upworthyish, meme-ready, self-deprecating
leader for a new generation of worshippers. “He has described himself as a sinner,” writes Archbishop
Desmond Tutu in Pope Francis’ entry on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, “and his
nonjudgmental views on … issues such as sexual orientation and divorce have brought hope to millions of
Roman Catholics around the world.”
But there’s one issue that can make even Cool Pope Francis himself sound a little, well, judgy. “A society
with a greedy generation, that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all
worrisome, a weight, a risk, is a depressed society,” the pontiff told an audience in St. Peter’s Square earlier

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this year. “The choice not to have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies:
It is enriched, not impoverished.”

Ignore the irony of a man who’s celibate by choice delivering a lecture on the sacred duty of procreating, and
focus instead on his use of the word selfish. This particular descriptor is both the word most commonly
associated with people who decide not to have children, and part of the title of a new collection of essays,
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed, by 16 different writers (both female and male) who fall into exactly that
category. While the association appears to be so deeply embedded in the collective psyche that it’d take
dynamite to shift it, if the book reveals anything, it’s that there’s an awful lot more to not wanting children
than the impulse to put oneself first. “People who want children are all alike,” writes editor Meghan Daum in
the book’s introduction, with apologies to Tolstoy. “People who don’t want children don’t want them in their
own way.”

The 16 essays—variously funny, devastating, infuriating, insightful, and, yes, occasionally smug—not only
dismantle the assumption of selfishness, they shed light on a stigma that’s remained stubbornly pervasive
well into the 21st century, even as other formerly taboo lifestyles have become thoroughly mainstream. In
2015, thanks in no small part to the success of various works of fiction, it’s more acceptable to talk about
wanting to be beaten by a sexual partner than it is to express honestly and openly a deliberate intent to not
procreate.

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“Shame,” writes the psychotherapist Jeanne Safer in one essay, “—for being selfish, unfeminine, or unable
to nurture—is one of the hardest emotions to work through for women who are conflicted about having
children.” In 1989, Safer wrote a magazine article about her “conscious decision not to have a child,” but was
so aware of the thorny territory she was wading into that she published it under a pseudonym. The article
became a book, Beyond Motherhood: Choosing a Life Without Children, and Safer became a figurehead for
all the like-minded women who felt, she writes, “that someone was speaking for them at last.”
“I don’t really want to have a baby. I want to want to have a baby.”

Twenty-six years later, the women Safer interviewed tell her they’re more than happy with their choices, but
still the shadow of shame lingers. “Any person who marries but rejects procreation is seen as unnatural,”
writes the author Sigrid Nunez in another essay. “But a woman who confesses never to have felt the desire
for a baby is considered a freak. Women have always been raised to believe they would not be complete
and could not be thought to have succeeded in life without the experience of motherhood.”

The concept of the innate biological desire to have a baby is a familiar one, repeated throughout books and
television shows and emotional anecdotes about how friends and family members were suddenly gripped
with a burning desire to get pregnant. But for women who’ve never felt such an urge, and who keep waiting
for it to happen without ever experiencing any such stirrings, the notion can be alienating. “I finally said to
myself, I don’t really want to have a baby, I want to want to have a baby,” Safer writes. “I longed to feel like
everyone else, but I had to face the fact that I did not.” If you’re of child-bearing age, it can indeed feel like

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Facebook feeds are flooded with bump selfies and sonograms and baby pictures. In the 1970s, one in 10
women reached menopause without giving birth to a child. But by 2010, it was one in five, according to data
gathered by the Pew Research Center, and one in four for women with a bachelor’s degree. A quarter of
educated American women are getting through life without ever having children.

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The inextricable links between increased education and intelligence, and opting out of procreation, are
underscored by Laura Kipnis, a cultural critic who writes one of the more explicitly feminist essays in the
book. Referring to the activist Shulamith Firestone, who believed that “childbearing was barbaric and
pregnancy should be abolished,” Kipnis ponders the value of equating motherhood with “such supposedly
‘natural’ facts as maternal instinct and mother-child bonds,” which, she writes, “exist as social conventions of
womanhood at this moment in history, not as eternal conditions.” The concept of profound maternal affection,
she argues, was invented in the 19th century after both birth and child-mortality rates started to decline.
Before that, women couldn’t afford to get attached to infants that had a 15 to 30 percent chance of not
reaching their first birthday. Ditto the concept of mother-child bonding, which coincided with the rise of
industrialization, “when wage labor first became an option for women” and it became important to impress
upon them the significance of staying home. The reason why fewer women are giving birth in Western
countries, Kipnis says, is education.

Though no one exactly says it, women are voting with their ovaries, and the reason is simple.
There are too few social supports, especially given the fact that the majority of women are no
longer just mothers now, they’re mother-workers. Yet virtually no social policy accounts for this.
Interestingly, women with the most education are the ones having the fewest children, though
even basic literacy has a negative effect on birthrates in the developing world—the higher the
literacy rate, the lower the birthrate. In other words, when women acquire critical skills and start
weighing their options, they soon wise up to the fact that they’re not getting enough recompense
for their labors.

That critical thinking plays a role in falling birthrates is backed up by a study conducted at Kansas State
University, in which researchers found that “people’s desire to have children is most influenced by the
positive and negative interactions, and the trade-offs.” These are detailed elegantly in an essay by Lionel
Shriver, the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a book in which a mother’s life is ruined by her
psychopathic son. “I could have afforded children, financially,” Shriver writes. “I just didn’t want them. They
are untidy, they would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have
siphoned away too much time from my precious books.”

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Shriver acknowledges that this attitude could be interpreted as selfish. But, it seems, her feelings are
indicative of “a larger transformation in Western culture no less profound than our collective consensus on
what life is for.” In other words, she's saying, an existential shift in the way educated humans approach living
—a switch from living for the (possibly celestial) future to enjoying the present—has led humans to think
much more carefully about having children, because the drawbacks tend to outweigh the benefits. “As we
age,” she writes, “we are apt to look back on our pasts and question, not, did I serve family, God, and
country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will
assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but whether they were
interesting and fun.”

That attitude might indeed be selfish, but is it any more selfish than bringing ever more humans into an
overpopulated world? Is it more selfish than having a baby simply because you want to, which is often the
case? Has anyone in recent memory declared that they were procreating out of a selfless desire to
perpetuate the human race, when the human race has never, ever, been less in need of perpetuation? The
sense that having children is the worthiest of human activities is questioned by the writer Tim Kreider, who
argues that it’s “a pretty low-rent ultimate purpose that’s shared with viruses and bacteria.” Ditto Geoff Dyer,
who writes in his very funny essay that “not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the
people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our
endangered species, and fill up this vast and underpopulated planet.”

Has anyone in recent memory declared that they were procreating out of selfless altruism?

Not having children isn’t selfish. Not having children is a perfectly rational and reasonable response given
that humans are essentially parasites on the face of a perfectly lovely and well-balanced planet, ploughing
through its natural resources, eradicating its endangered species, and ruining its most wonderful
landscapes. This might sound misanthropic, and it is, but it is also true.

Maybe the world would be a better place if fewer women weren’t compelled to have children while their
resources are stretched unreasonably thin. Maybe fewer sweet, chubby-cheeked toddlers would grow up to
be surly, resentful adults because they always had the lingering sense their presence wasn’t wanted. Many
of the writers in Shallow, Selfish, and Self-Absorbed discuss their own traumatic childhoods, and how they
were made to feel responsible for their parents’ failed careers, or failed relationships, or unhappy lives. But
there should be no shame attached to the decision not to participate any further in the great human
experiment, whether or not it comes from the fact that that experiment has failed a person in the past. “To
me, the lack of desire to have a child is innate,” the Fusion culture editor Danielle Henderson writes. “It exists
outside of my control. It is simply who I am, and I can take neither credit nor blame for all that it may or may
not signify.”

As a compilation of writing, Shallow, Selfish, and Self-Absorbed is generally very strong, bringing together a
diverse range of voices and styles to riff entertainingly on a subject that has seemed, up until now, unriffable.
But as a collection of manifestos, it’s hugely significant. It won’t influence anyone hell-bent on children away
from having them, nor will it dissuade people who feel eternally conflicted about the subject. But what it
does, more crucially, is refuse to accept the perpetuation of the myths that have surrounded childbirth for the

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last 200 years—that women have a biological need to procreate, and that having children is the single most
significant thing a person can do with his or her life, and that not having children leaves people sad and
empty. Try telling that to Oprah Winfrey, or Ellen DeGeneres, or Jane Austen, or Queen Elizabeth I. Or
George Washington, or Nikola Tesla. The argument that lingers after having read the book is that the sooner
having children is approached from a rational standpoint rather than an emotional one, the better for
humanity, even if the result is that there are slightly fewer people left to enjoy it.

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