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There are quite a few places where mothers, and potential mothers, can find information and support. Less talked about are members of the childfree movement, or women who are childless by choice. It's not as easy being a member of this group as you might think. There are endless questions to dodge, societal expectations to ignore—especially if you're married, in a committed relationship, or past a certain age. You might have to deal with guilt heaped on you by family members, constantly asking about the possibility of a grandchild. You might find that longtime friends drift away because they have children and no longer feel like they can relate to you. People might even go so far as to accuse you of being selfish.
Proponents of the childfree movement are quick to separate it from the term "childless." Childfree denotes a conscious choice, not simply an inability to get pregnant. This is not a temporary state of mind for a woman who thinks she might want children at a future point in time, but a lifestyle decision. From Spotted Elephant:
I describe myself as childfree, not childless [emphasis hers]. I chose not to have children. I am not suffering from the lack of children in my life. As this is my chosen state, I am quite happy about things. Pity is neither needed nor desired.
Elisa Gonzalez Clark wrote this article in an open-letter format for the San Francisco Chronicle, calling it "Off the Mommy Track."
When you showed me your freezer filled with a three months' supply of stockpiled breast milk, I had to turn and confirm you were the same girl who would jump into the mosh pit and hold her own with misogynist skinheads. And when you were ecstatic over the 10th pink baby outfit, I had to squint to see the same girl who would gyrate until 3 a.m. and then make out with bad boys on the sides of cars in the gritty twilight. [...]
I chose to take my road without children. It doesn't make me shallow or immature, it makes me realistic. If I had children it would be to satisfy other people, not me. I am a lover, daughter, sister, writer and friend. I don't need the label of mother to make me more. I am enough.
Another one from the San Francisco Chronicle, Kids R Not Us.
[Christine] Fisher knew as early as third grade that she did not want children. She had no interest in games that involved playing house or cooing over babies. In the world of childfree men and women, she is what's known as an "early articulator."
In the 1950s, there was an assumption that everyone would get married, then have children. [...] As many as 80 percent of people thought that staying single and childless was "deviant or abnormal," [professor Stephanie Coontz] said. But in the 1970s, amid turbulent social change...those assumptions were challenged. These days, the "vast majority" of people think it is acceptable not to have kids or marry.
Some statistics suggest more women now are childless by choice, but it's hard to come up with a firm estimate because women, on average, are having children older, and demographers don't usually ask why they don't have them. The National Center for Health Statistics confirms that 6.6 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 called themselves voluntarily childless in 1995, up from 2.4 percent in 1982. And according to 1998 U.S. Census Bureau statistics, 19 percent of women 40 to 44 were childless, compared with 10 percent in that age group in 1976.
Soon after the launch of the parenting website Babble.com, they included an essay by Lisa Gabriele. (Seemingly at odds with their dominant theme, it's the first in a series called "Notes From a Non-breeder.")
Now way back, my friends and I all vowed that we weren't going to allow being parents to change us, to turn us into conservative, frazzled neurotics. I hope it doesn't sound smug to say that I seem to be the only one who took those vows seriously. You may think it's inappropriate to speak to children the way I do, but I've always been of the firm belief that we talk down to them way too much. Also, I like to remain unalloyed in their presence because children have the best bullshit detectors around.
Laura reprinted an article about the childfree movement, called "The New Breed," found in the Summer
