Pregnancy as Punishment and the Misguided Worship of Motherhood

 I have never in my life wanted children. I never played with baby dolls. I never wanted a baby doll. My dolls were Madame Alexanders, and later, Barbie, who was a stewardess and a nightclub singer and a nurse. Yes, all of Barbie's careers were "acceptable" female careers, but my Barbie never had children.

In college I wrote a paper for a "Marriage and the Family" class called "Voluntary Childlessness in Marriage." The professor was a former pastor, and I expected a bad grade, but instead I got an A-minus, the minus only because he wrote "Well-researched, well-argued. I do hope you will change your mind someday." 

I never did. Oh, there were times when I assumed I would have children someday because it was what people did, but my vision of parenthood was sitting in a rocking chair in the dead of night trying to settle a colicky baby. I ha

I don't know why I never wanted children. It could be just that I'm wired differently. It wasn't that I was what we then called a "tomboy." I was lousy at sports, I hated playing outside, I hated getting my hands dirty, I was afraid of everything. But I wanted a Kenner Bridge and Tunnel Building Set more than I wanted a new doll. At the same time, I loved fashion. I made paper dolls with clothes copied from the fashion spreads in Life and Look magazines. I made dollhouse furniture out of construction paper but had little interest in putting actual dolls in the houses. The indications that motherhood was not in my future were always there.

I don't know how much my own mother had to do with it. She always told me that she'd really wanted babies, but I never felt she particularly enjoyed motherhood. It's clear when I look at old photos that not only was my parents' marriage already pretty much over by the time I arrived, but that she was not exactly nuts about the homely, cranky baby that had come out of her the second time around. She always told me that I'd screamed nonstop until I was four, but I have to wonder who exactly was doing the screaming, because my early childhood memories are not of fun times with Mom, but of parental fights and my mother drinking endless cups of coffee and smoking endless cigarettes. 

Mom worked as a legal secretary for as long as I could remember. It's not that she loved being a secretary, but she was good at it and liked feeling competent at something. I think she knew that she was lacking something in the mothering department, for all that she always defended herself later on as being better than most mothers (which if true is kind of scary). In some ways she suffered from 1950s young adult woman syndrome, but she was also a victim of her own mother's lack of mothering skills.

Mr. Brilliant, who apparently came from a similarly dysfunctional home, also never wanted children, and for 30 years, 27 of them married, we had a satisfying life without children. After he died, some people (showing the customary tactlessness people use with the bereaved) asked me if I now regretted that I hadn't had children. Of course my answer was "No," and it was the truth. I would have been a terrible parent, and so would Mr. Brilliant. We both would have passed on our own baggage onto yet another generation, and it is a blessing for the world and for the children that never happened that we did not. I have had to live in my head for 66 years, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, never mind my own children.

I've never understood, or even cared to understand, why I'm missing that motherhood thing. I'm capable of deep love and caring for pets, but I have NO patience for children. Perhaps it's because pets are animals and I don't expect them to be rational, but as I saw my friends have children and deal with their tantrums and their screaming that the same soup they eat for lunch every day was somehow different today, I realized that children are not rational and I do not have the patience for them.

I'm not a "childfree" activist, for all that I DID resent that the workplace is far more forgiving of the needs of pregnant people and new parents than it is of someone who has to care for a sick spouse. I'm fine with paying taxes for schools because it's part of being in a community. I don't have to prove that my decision is right for everyone, unlike those who need to write articles about how many parents regret having had children or that some would tell their friends who are on the fence not to bother. I know I'm an outlier.

I'm all for people who want children and have the emotional tools to parent them well to have them. I know some of these people and they amaze me. But I can tell you from experience that a life lived as the product of someone not equipped to be a good parent can be pretty damn hellish. Yes, there is therapy, but that doesn't get rid of that critical parent for whom you were never pretty enough, talented enough, good enough. You can grow up and know it's because that parent was so damaged, but you're left to survey the wreckage and try to rebuild yourself as an adult as best you can, with every day being a battle to keep that long-dead voice from taking over your head. 

We need to trust women who do not want children to know what they're doing. And while we're on the subject, having children so  you have someone to care for you in your old age is a terrible reason to have children. Imagine having to live up to a contract you never even had a chance to read, but that someone forged your signature on. I can't imagine anything more selfish than doing that to a child. I at least have to be a cold, hard realist and recognize that unless I am phenomenally lucky, I will be cared for by strangers in my final days, and my hope is that I will be kind to them, and they to me. I don't have the luxury of deluding myself that I will die beautifully in a cozy bed, surrounded by people who have uncomplicated love for me. It doesn't always work that way.

I regret nothing, at least not where that's concerned.

I remember the years before Roe v. Wade. I remember the girls in high school who developed poochy bellies and were suddenly "visiting grandma for a while." They'd come back with flat bellies 9-10 months later and never talked about it. I remember the crying college girls bargaining with God to please let their periods come. And this was in the days when even small colleges had clinics where the women could go to get free condoms, contraceptive foam, and diaphragms. Women of reproductive age don't remember the days when girls "had to get married," or went through a pregnancy and then gave their babies up for adoption, because being a teen mom meant dropping out of school and a ruined life. I remember around 30 years ago, during one of the many challenges to Roe that have come up over the years, seeing a young woman on the news blithely say, "Oh, they'll NEVER make it illegal again." Well, here we are. Except now it's going to be worse.

At least in my lifetime, for all that abortions were illegal, women who were fortunate enough to have one done by a medical practitioner weren't prosecuted. The doctors weren't prosecuted as long as they were discreet. Abortion happened but no one talked about it. Even when women without access to underground "safe" abortions ended up crouched dead on the floor bleeding out with a coat hanger still protruding from their vaginas, it wasn't talked about. My own mother had one before she was married. It was done by a physician and my father's mother cared for her afterward. Today, if it were Texas, my grandmother could have been sued by any Christofascist freak who wanted to. 

That is just one reason why today is different. Abortion has always been with us. Perhaps the relative lack of availability of safe abortions and the corresponding likelihood of women who have them, or attempt to self-abort, being "punished" by injury or death, made these pre-Roe "under the table" abortions acceptable.

Roe allowed for the availability of safe abortions and codified a woman's right to full, complete personhood, with the rights of the fetus only coming into play at such point as it is no longer dependent on being in the uterus to survive. As vague and even sometimes increasingly problematic as this is, given advances in neonatal technology, it at least attempted to strike a balance without ever turning women into mere vessels. 

You need not dig very far to realize that the evangelical-dominated anti-abortion movement has NEVER been about the sanctity of human life. Randall Balmer wrote in Politico in 2014 about how the evangelicals didn't fuss about Roe until Jimmy Carter sought re-election in 1979, promising an expansion of school desegregation. As with just about everything that causes conflict in this country, even the fetophile movement (which is what I call them), stripped away of all its veneers, has as its origin story the Fear of a Black Planet, and as its core, misogyny and theocracy. Frank Schaeffer, whose father was a founder of the Christian right, warned us of this just the other night:

This week, Texas passed two laws, both of which are fundamentally at odds with the so-called "sanctity of human life." One of them allows anyone to carry any kind of gun in public without a permit or even training, and the other one puts bounties on the heads of women who dare to seek to end a pregnancy via threat of lawsuits of anyone who even talks to them about how to do it. And this in a state where the governor who signed both into law has opposed ALL efforts to control the spread of COVID-19. Can there be any doubt that race and misogyny are at play here, and the relentless march of old white men towards a theocracy that will entrench patriarchy in our society and government forever?

The right to choose not to have children, whether a permanent choice as mine was, or a temporary choice because one is only ten years old, or was raped, or was simply not ready for a child, or another child, is a vital part of every woman's life. ANY law which says that a woman ceases to be a human being with the human right of self-determination at ANY point in her life is an existential threat to ALL women.