In November 2001, Ontario Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced an early Christmas present for the province’s most needy: a $100 cheque for every low- and middle-income working family with young children. Now, $100 is hardly a fortune these days. But this small sum of money caused quite a big stir in the letters to the editor section of the Toronto Sun. One woman seethed at Flaherty’s announcement, saying she should get the bonus for not contributing to the overpopulation problem. Another writer expressed resentment at being forced as a childless person to pay school taxes for others’ offspring.
These are a couple of voices indicative of the childless by choice (or to use their preferred term, childfree) movement. They are individuals who have chosen not to have children and, rather than keep it a private matter, turned it into a cause. They see themselves as an oppressed minority: victims of pressure to reproduce from those around them and victims of a mentality that values the childless less than it does parents. After reading their literature, though, I came away highly skeptical of their victim status and less, not more, sympathetic to their cause.
Childfree advocates claim to be victimized by cultural pressures to procreate and criticism if they don’t. They rarely mention, however, that this so-called pressure doesn’t fall equally on all individuals. For instance, people with disabilities are often discouraged from becoming parents even if they wish to do so.
A friend of mine with muscular dystrophy was basically forced to undergo a tubal ligation after the birth of her daughter. In addition, in a society with cheap and available birth control and taxpayer-funded abortion on demand, pressure can only go so far: the childless by choice can virtually eliminate any chance of a visit from the stork (whereas in China women are sometimes made to have abortions they don’t want).
The “oppression” the childfree face seems confined to comments, some of which strike me as fairly innocuous. Why some childless by choice proponents take offence at the statement, “You’d be such a good parent,” for example, is beyond me: after all, even though I have no plans to enter medical school, it would flatter me to be told I’d make a good doctor.
It’s ironic that while the childfree militants constantly clamour for acceptance of their lifestyle, they’re frequently less than willing to grant the same tolerance to those who make other choices. They sometimes refer to mothers as “moomies” (from the sound the cow makes) and parents of both sexes as “breeders.” Their condemnation of others’ decisions makes their own plea for tolerance look rather hollow. To use an analogy, if I call the Holocaust a minor event, I shouldn’t get too upset if a Jew says the Irish famine isn’t worth commemorating.
Kymberly Seabolt, a writer for the feminist publication Hip Mama, describes the childfree movement as a hate group. While this description doesn’t apply to all individuals without children (a group that includes me at the moment), the movement as a whole does appear to be infiltrated by a fair number of petty, mean-spirited and yes, hateful people. For example, one childfree proponent tells of shouting out “Kill all the babies!” when passing by an abortion clinic. Another jokes about playing fetch with a pit bull using a baby as bait. No wonder Salon columnist Cathy Young, herself childless and pro-choice, says the childfree militants “make her sick.”
This hate extends not only to children and families but to cultures deemed overly “child-friendly.” In response to a Manila newspaper article expressing hope that the “childfree” mentality never gets a grip on the Philippines, one childless by choice website heaps scorn on Filipinos’ “bizarre belief systems” and militant Catholicism. Now if this isn’t racism, I don’t know what is.
Of course the organized childfree movement doesn’t represent everyone without children – the infertile, the unmarried and celibate and those who have chosen to forgo parenthood but who respect others’ choices. I even agree with them that their decision to remain childless isn’t anybody’s business but their own. But in the end, pretty much the only positive thing I can say about the more militant members of the childless by choice movement is that at least they won’t pass on any genes for obnoxiousness.
