NO KIDDING ... YOU DON'T WANT KIDS?

Westside residents form chapter of international social group for people who choose to lead child-free lives.

By Denise Carson Westside Weekly
November 24, 2000

The West Los Angeles residents, both 54, boast 29 happy years of marriage, minus the headaches and heartaches - and many might say the joys - of parenthood.

Since the fourth grade, the pair were a perfect match growing up in Chicago. The Bergers agreed before getting married that having children would change their relationship and stifle their aspirations.

Their bond is evident as they finish one another's sentences and laugh at their private innuendoes.

The Bergers enjoy the freedom of coming and going as they please. They are tied only to each other and not pressured to settle into a house for the children.

"We were already complete," said Marc Berger, who is an attorney for a private firm. "We didn't need one more to find out how it might turn out."

But a child-free lifestyle also means sacrifice. In social circles, the Bergers lacked a child to brag about in conversation. It soon became socially undesirable.

Friends drifted out of their lives and into parenthood. Those friends who remained, along with family members, constantly pressured the Bergers about having children.

To others, it never was a question of if, but when, the Bergers would embark on this parenting journey.

"Friends tried to sell us on their big mistake; they wanted us to join them in their misery," Marc Berger said, half-jokingly. "They made our business of having children their business."

The Bergers, however, are not the only ones hassled about living child-free.

Others in the same situation gathered this month at the first meeting of the Westside chapter of the international child-free organization No Kidding.

In a secluded banquet room at the Spitfire Grill in Santa Monica, a handful of Westsiders from varying professions - entertainment industry-types and lawyers to school teachers and social activists - carried on a round-table discussion about the social pressures and leisure living of their chosen way of life.

"There's a real hope in finding something in common with people who are child-free," Marc Berger said.

"People that don't have kids are much more interesting than those that do. They are more self-actualized and they have more to talk about other than their kids."

No Kidding was founded in 1984 by Jerry Steinberg in Vancouver, Canada, to reach out to those rejected by a childbearing-oriented society.

The all-volunteer, non-profit group attracts couples and singles in their late 20's to early 60's, who meet for socializing, community volunteering, sporting and traveling together.

"My idea of being child-free is being rich with life," said Melody Platt, 41, of Culver City, chairwoman of the Westside group.

Platt said she was 18 when she knew that she had no desire to have children.

She tried to get a tubal ligation to prevent ever becoming pregnant but was refused by doctors. She said doctors told her that she was too young and sent her home to have a couple of children before returning for the operation.

At 38, doctors finally conceded to her numerous requests for the operation, a method of female sterilization in which the Fallopian tubes are surgically tied.

Generally, women who have their tubes tied before 30 have a high rate of reversing the procedure, so doctors are wary of performing the operation, said Dr. Alan Decherney, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA Medical Center.

"The doctor doesn't want to make a mistake," he said. "He'll look like a fool if a woman gets her tubes tied at 22 and then at 29 she wants them reversed.

"It doesn't look like he counseled her properly. This is a permanent procedure [and] when you're young, you're not as wise. It's a major surgery and it's expensive."

Platt said she had no regrets, except that she did not get the procedure done sooner. She engages her nurturing side as a special education teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District and loves mothering her cat and dog.

"Being rich with life is getting up in the morning, taking a bike ride to the coffee shop and reading the newspaper or taking a nap in the middle of the day with my purring cat curled up on my chest," she said. "Or cooking a fantastic adult meal like lobster with booze."

Childless singles and couples alike say they often face the question "If you don't have kids, who will take care of you when you're old?"

"You have to have money," Eileen Berger said. "It is not a guarantee that children will care for you when you get old."

Some in the group described retirement homes filled with lonely old people whose children never visit them. But others in the group admitted their fears of growing old alone.

"It's too late in the game to have child simply to appease that worry," said Philip Greenfield, 48, a lifelong bachelor and computer engineer from Playa Del Rey.

Preparing for old age is the easiest way to combat those fears, said Greenfield, one of nine siblings.

"My brother spent $130,000 of retirement money to send his son to MIT. I will now retire five years earlier," he said. "I parent vicariously through my siblings' children. They've had enough children for all of us to enjoy."

Four years ago, Greenfield solidified his solo lifestyle with a vasectomy after watching a television news segment about Los Angeles' adoption system.

"If there are 40,000 children looking for parents, why do I need to create one?" he said. "That made me stand up and make the appointment for a vasectomy."

Many of the members of No Kidding say they have been accused of leading selfish lives.

"I would argue that not having children is selfless," Platt said. "My ego isn't as big as some people who are motivated by selfishness. I think the planet will do just fine without replicas of ourselves."

To remain child-free, however, requires strength and confidence. As an individual or a couple, these people are going against the social and biological programming of human nature.

"I am independently and unrepentantly child-free," said Dave Dismore, 54, a feminist archivist and long-time member of No Kidding. "Having a child should be a decision. But in our society it's an assumption. We would be a richer society of we respected unconventional philosophies in regard to career and lifestyle."

The Koreatown resident grew up in Ohio in the 1950's, when conformity to the social norms was king.

When he was 26, Dismore was working at the Los Angeles office of Zero Population Growth, a group that advocates limiting birth rates, when he came across a doctor who would give a bachelor without a partner a vasectomy, the surgical removal of the vas deferens.

So he ended decades of worry on January 27, 1973. Every year he celebrates "Vasectomy Day" as the day he discovered a loophole in mother nature's reproductive plan.

Bruce Britt, a self-proclaimed bachelor, said he takes his lumps for being childless.

But he said that he has spent enough time with his sister's child to know he doesn't want to be a full-time parent. Like many men, Britt has lived through a pregnancy scare.

"Your sex drive evaporates into nothing and you pray to God that you will never have another lustful thought again," he said. "Your life flashes before you. It's then [when you] realize you have to work at some boring, dead-end job to feed junior."

Britt said he is not ready to concede his freedom and childlike exuberance for a child. His energies are focused on music, writing and self-growth.

"We would live a fairly empty existence if all of us didn't fill our life and our hearts with other goals," he said. "Playing a guitar is an instant gratification. Creativity is a child you can shape and control; it won't get on drugs or embarrass you in public."

Others in the group nodded in agreement with Britt.

As the first meeting of the Westside No Kidding group came to a close, each individual realized that his or her choice to live childless was not obscure or selfish - just different.

"We all have our babies that are not necessarily human beings," Dismore said. "We shouldn't discriminate against how people choose to contribute to society."