Childless by choice

By Sandy Naiman
August 15, 2000

"When I was 20, I asked my doctor to tie my tubes, but he wouldn't do it," says the 31-year-old Rogers Cable administrative coordinator, who lives in Oshawa with her husband, Rick, a firefighter.

"We realized after just two weeks of dating that we did not want children."

In 1900, seven percent of American women by age 40 were childless.

Today, that demographic is up to 20 percent, notes Berkeley, California psychologist Mardy Ireland, author of Reconceiving Women: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity (Guilford Press, 1993).

Yet, despite this statistical shift and more diverse lifestyles, ours is an increasingly child-centred society and childlessness-by-choice is stigmatized.

Endured jibes

Kurelo has endured jibes from friends, family, even her doctor who said she would be a very lonely senior citizen if she chose not to have kids.

"This world is so messed-up," she says. "We have too much violence, not enough teachers, racism, no jobs, pedophiles, and unreliable, expensive childcare. I can list a thousand reasons why we don't want to bring a child into this world."

Kurelo admits to suffering an occasional attack of "the baby blues" when she sees a mother putting her daughter's hair in a ponytail, as she did last week.

"Then I hear about how those two teenage girls were brutally assaulted, raped and one murdered. I don't know how a mother could survive an attack or murder of her child."

One of four children raised by a single mother who sacrificed everything she loved to support her family, she says, "I wouldn't want someone else raising my kids so I could work to give them the life they want. We enjoy our freedom and have no regrets."

Sandi Gillis-Huhtala, a 35-year-old retail manager in Ajax, agrees: "I've known I didn't want children since I was a pre-teen. If I had a dollar for every time someone said, 'Oh, you'll change your mind,' I could probably retire."

After seven years of marriage, her parents accept her choice, but ironically, her peers don't.

"I have people call me selfish or assume I dislike children. And I don't. I love them, they're just not for me," she insists. "Worse, people have tried to analyze me and come to the absurd conclusion I had a lousy childhood. It seems I'm always on the defensive, forced to justify myself."

Another anonymous woman, 38, who had a tubal ligation 10 years ago, chose a different path of resistance by providing aid to two children in India.

"My mother admits she never wanted children, but felt compelled by societal pressures to have four," she confides. "It is supremely sad four children were born to someone who genuinely didn't want any of them."

Real wisdom, she says, is admitting you lack a certain calling. At a time when the world population exceeds six billion, "childless people should be applauded and not condemned, as is frequently the case."

Going against the flow

What does it mean to be a woman and not have motherhood factored into the equation?

Increasingly, women are finding answers that contravene cultural and social trends, says psychologist Mardy Ireland, who studied more than 100 socially and culturally diverse women, who are childless by choice.

"A significant number are finding they're better, for example, as aunts than as mothers.

"Others accept they simply don't like children, or prefer the quality of their relationships without children, or want to further their careers in a man's world," says Ireland, 51, who is also childless by choice.

Though our culture has trouble understanding what it means to be a woman and not a mother, some years are more neutral.

In others, the emphasis is on family values, and childless women are more marginalized, as is the case in a more politically conservative climate, she explains.

Our culture has to embrace this identity, so you can feel you don't have to have children, Ireland states.

"And it's happening. You can't dismiss it."