Childfree

wrote, "I do have to say it's interesting to see how you consistently refer to pregnancy as a "problem". It really demonstrates how much you don't want to have kids..." It depends on the point of view.

I want to stress that I am not criticizing people who have children, at all. The purpose of this post is to defend my decision not to have children from the "save-the-family" movement, or as some like to call them, the Dobsonites. Their contention is that it's selfish to not deliberately conceive and raise children of one's own. These graphs are intended only to illustrate the senselessness of that contention. Also, what is at issue here is not whether to support children one already has (which of course one must) but whether to create them in the first place.

Ready kids? I brought visual aids.

Option A:

Create art. Run a socially-responsible business that generates jobs. Join the Peace Corps or Habitat for Humanity with all that time you have while not raising children. The options don't end there. These are neither morally better or morally worse than adoption or other parenting. Parenting takes a lot of time and money that will keep you from doing this. (Depending on your philosophy, the world might not even be your problem and then you don't have to do this either. But remember we're addressing the "childfree is selfish" folks who don't think that.)

Option B:

We can all agree that all the helpless paraplegics and all the paupers lying in their own vomit in the gutters of Calcutta are not the way things should be. Right? Hunger, thirst, ignorance, immobility.

This is called need. (I'm going to use small words for the Dobsonites. NEED BAD. NOT-NEED GOOD!)

Yes, it's a "problem." Option B creates a new invalid lying in a pool of his or her bodily fluids in my house. Hungry, ignorant, immobile. This would keep me busy. Creating this problem is a perfectly fine thing to do if I feel the urge and have the wherewithal to set the problem right and atone for it. Like mountain climbing, such a responsible person can deliberately join sperm with egg "because it's there." Except it's a much more serious and dangerous hobby than mountain climbing. I would do it if it were for my fulfillment, but if helping the helpless is your whole parenting rationale, there is already a woman in Ethiopia with her face being eaten by flies, looking at you sternly right now. For that matter, since a Dobsonite is a Christian, Paul said in Romans this is the reason you should stay single. Remember?

If you're already a parent, too late, but remember this is not about whether to support your kids but whether to give birth to them.

If my purpose in having a child is the rewarding experience of happy family times, I'm OK! I don't happen to care for that, so I don't choose option B.

But if it was not that-- if, rather it was to make the world a better place-- congratu-frickin-lations to me. I would spend my whole future in miserable soul-killing jobs not pursuing my dreams, in order to earn the money I need to set right a problem-- my child's neediness-- that I deliberately caused. There is no shortage of existing people to love and cherish, and most of them are already not getting enough love.

Never mind the fact that my kid will probably grow up to oppose everything I stand for and drag that line in the wrong direction. That's a whole different issue.

Comments

twoofdtm on Jul. 14, 2005 3:44 AM

That should be brendand lovely, because I don't think *our* Brendan wants to slit his wrists. *nodnod*

Just trying to help, and very nice presentation.

matt-arnold on Jul. 14, 2005 3:47 AM

Oops! Thanks. Fixed.

flutterby68 on Jul. 14, 2005 11:05 AM

If I did not already have children, I would be child free. I started having kids at age 19. At 36, I've been a parent for almost half my life. Marriage is no guarantee (my 17 year old's father and I divorced when the child was only 2 years old).

If I had to go back and do it again, I wouldn't have had children. Seeing what the world has become, I think there are too many children already here who are suffering. Why add more?

tlatoani on Jul. 14, 2005 11:23 AM

Any chance you could put the diagrams behind a cut? For some weird reason, this seems to be breaking my friends page.

phecda on Jul. 14, 2005 1:33 PM

Perhaps you could spend less time on pretty charts and more time on the dishes and cleaning up around the house. I swear I spend all my free time cleaning after you kids! ;-)

Oh, and quit tracking mud across my nice clean kitchen floor!

(The heck with kids, I've got adults! ;-)

eternalmaiden on Jul. 14, 2005 1:45 PM

:: claps loudly and fiercely ::

I don't know if you are aware of how difficult it is to be a vocal childfree woman. People like you, and outspokenness like this, make it a little easier.

Thank you!

sarahmichigan on Jul. 14, 2005 2:57 PM

The worst are comments that "you're young, you'll change your mind." ARgh! How old do I have to be before people take me seriously? Once I go through menopause? J. and I decided, when he was 31, and I was 26, that we didn't want children, and he had a vasectomy. 7 years later, no regrets.

I can see *thinking* that a teenager or someone in his/her early 20s might change his/her mind, but I still wouldn't SAY that to that person. By your early 30s, I think people should give you the benefit of the doubt that you know your own mind.

matt-arnold on Jul. 14, 2005 3:21 PM

True. I said when I was a young boy that I didn't want to have a wife or children. I was always told, about this and many other matters such as religion, I would eventually see the light. Later on in my teens when I needed to start planning my life, I believed that if only I'd trust and obey I'd eventually see the rightness of all these things. Now that I'm an adult I've realized this is never going to happen. Ironically, people still think I'll see it their way eventually. The problem with that is, my elders and teachers were (by and large) wrong, and after careful consideration I was right all along. I think by the age of thirty it's safe to say the Emperor has no clothes.

cosette-valjean on Jul. 14, 2005 4:54 PM — Ummmm...

Just to add a little perspective from someone who has known you for ten years and heard so many intimate stories about your life including childhood, when you are referring to knowing you didn't want a family and kids when you yourself were a child, would this be about the same time you were experiencing that embarrassing story you told me about of which you didn't recover until the middle of your teens? Wouldn't not saying you didn't want a wife and kids have more to do with that particular state of being which you struggled than any understanding of what you wanted out of life.

You were a fairly convincing conservative, you know. You sure fooled me about wanting to have kids. Didn't seem all that reluctant to have children to me. You seemed really sad when the doctor told me that it would be difficult to have children. Was every last emotion you had regarding children all filtered through what you thought was expected from you. I find that very difficult to believe. It may seem all dry clear and cut right now, but it probably did back then, too.

The reason I think you may change yet again is because the pendulum has swung so far the opposite in a matter of a few years. I have observed that often the human tendency in life is to fall back to the center between previously viewed passionate beliefs. I realize I could be wrong, but that is my two cent opinion.

matt-arnold on Jul. 14, 2005 5:29 PM — Re: Ummmm...

Are you referring to thinking that girls "have cooties" as so many macho prepubescents do? That's true, it had to do with that. So what? Others were still wrong and I was, at least in the life-path, mostly right, although for the wrong reasons. You have no point.

I think the reason I made such a convincing conservative was that I sincerely trusted and obeyed. Yes, I wanted to have kids, sincerely trusting that "you'll understand better when you're a parent." So what? Don't most emotions about the future have to do with trusting promises (or in some cases threats) to be true? That trust took a long time crumbling, and I sure as hell didn't tell you about it.

As long as we're going down memory lane, I remind you that I always left conception "in God's hands," as I put it back then. If we got kids, I was prepared to bring my emotions into alignment with what I believed at that time to be reality. When we didn't, I felt bad for you, and summoned up the token of wistul sadness that I required to consider myself a good person by the standards I had then. But I was basically indifferent toward it.

It certainly wasn't all born of duty, but now that you mention it, do you remember how dutiful I was? I am very very good at making myself feel how I am supposed to feel. For instance, when I vow to love someone until they die, I will summon up that love through effort of willpower until I'm let off the hook and released from the promise.

Bottom line, what's your point?

cosette-valjean on Jul. 14, 2005 6:44 PM — Re: Ummmm...

My point was trying to get you to see that your memory might be a little selective at the moment. That is all and to state my opinion of changing humanity in loose relation to your situation.

marahsk on Jul. 14, 2005 7:36 PM

The worst are comments that "you're young, you'll change your mind."

The world is full of people who are unable to conceive (so to speak) of anyone whose opinions are different. *They* want children, therefore everyone does.

(I grew up in a place where everyone had a small-town, provincial view; it wasn't so much that they didn't like people who were different, it was more like it never occurred to them that anyone *could* be different)

marahsk on Jul. 14, 2005 7:43 PM

Actually, on second thought, it has nothing to do with whether they want children. You grow up, you get married, you have children. To consider whether or not they *want* children would involve realizing that some other path is possible.

The ones that were hostile to people who didn't want children (I was called selfish for not wanting to raise children on a wage that was too low to support just myself) were the ones who realized, consciously or not, that they wished they hadn't had kids (or had them so early, or had so many, or couldn't really afford them).