HERE’S a question you can never get satisfactorily answered: why do you want children?
The honest answers seem a little ego-centric or empty. “I like kids” – empty. “I want to ensure my superior genetic material gets a good crack at lasting for eternity, or at least until the next Ice Age wipes out all of humanity, bar those rich enough to have taken a space shuttle to our new, water-rich home on Mars” – ego-centric.
Emily Bingham, a freelance writer from Maine, has a question she’s never had satisfactorily asked: when are you having children?
Emily has caused a minor web sensation with her Facebook post – at last count shared around 60,000 times – telling folks, well meaning or otherwise, to back off and stop asking women and couples when they plan to have children. Or, when they’ve had one child, when are they having another.
Ms Bingham points out that this is a sure fire way to risk causing someone “grief, pain, stress or frustration.”
A straw poll of female friends (it’s rarely male friends who suffer these questions. As though the desire or responsibility for procreation is purely of the woman) shows that the vast majority have been asked. Depending on the family circumstances, often persistently.
There’s an argument to be made that it is the business of friends and family as to whether a couple plans to have children – so many grandparents are expected to use their hard earned retirement as free childcare that it makes sense to give them a heads-up as to what their futures might hold.
But what’s curious about the whole thing, to my eyes, is that the most nonsensical, biology-driven option is still society’s default position.
I say nonsensical because children drain you of your resources: your finances and your sleep reserves. They put the kibosh on spontaneity. They strain relationships. They can be really, deeply annoying. All new mums do is complain about how horribly difficult the whole thing is.
And yet, the assumption that all women want children is still the default position.
It’s not an entirely healthy default position. It’s a default position, for example, that encourages women to stay in unhealthy, damaging relationships when they’re in their 30s because otherwise “it might be too late”.
It’s a position that encourages and allows for people to become parents who really shouldn’t have become parents.
It’s a position, also, that allows for those of us who don’t particularly want children to be forced to defend, in public, and question, in private, our decision when those who are going to extreme lengths because of a desperate, yet unexplainable, desire to have children proceed with sympathy and without question.
I still haven’t worked out yet what I want to do with my life so I feel, quite strongly, that if I had children it would be because I had given up on ambition. But trying say that to a mum who’s just asked you when you’re planning to settle down. It’s de rigeur to ask but taboo to honestly answer.
In August, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook again) wrote an open letter to announce his wife’s pregnancy after three miscarriages. “Most people don’t discuss miscarriages because you worry your problems will distance you or reflect upon you,” he wrote. We traditionally keep the announcement of a pregnancy secret for the first 12 weeks in case it ends badly. Many people prefer to keep their grief silent. But for those who prefer the comfort of wide support, this silence is an added pressure.
Abortion, at the other end of the spectrum, remains taboo despite a statistic of one in three women having had one. It's perfectly acceptable to ask, repeatedly and persistently, about a female’s reproductive system but completely taboo to give blunt, honest answers.
Emily Bingham wants people to shut up and stop asking. I'd argue it's about time we started more open-minded conversations.
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