On Freedom by Tory Shepherd

Author:Tory Shepherd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522875614
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

Why aren’t they doing their bit?

People who want children are all alike. People who don’t want children don’t want them in their own ways.

US author Meghan Daum reimagines

Leo Tolstoy’s well-known words

Just imagine a 2026 census question:

How many children have you had?

If you have none, please select a reason ...

This is data we need, but don’t have. We know quite a bit about why men and women physiologically cannot have children, but diddly squat about why they don’t in the absence of medical factors. We know that a cohort of women are leaving it too late, and we know that more women are choosing not to have kids—but we really don’t yet have the stats on their reasons.

Dr Bronwyn Harman is a senior lecturer at Edith Cowan University. She’s in the thick of a PhD on attitudes to childlessness in Australia. ‘We know approximately 25 per cent of all women aged between fifteen and twenty-four [now] will never have children,’ she says. ‘We think about two thirds of those are voluntarily childfree—but it’s hard to tell.’

Imagine the boxes following that census question:

I hate children.

I can’t afford children.

I can’t afford the reproductive technology.

I just never felt the urge.

I sort of liked kids but then my friend had a child with special needs and it scared the crap out of me.

I don’t have a partner and single parents do it tough.

I’m gay and the system sucks.

I didn’t think about it because I was too focused on work and now it’s too late unless I fork out thousands for IVF and I just don’t care that much.

I can’t afford IVF.

I don’t want to give up my annual holiday to Ibiza.

I broke up with my partner at thirty-eight and am not sure how to put ‘must have babies soon’ on my Tinder profile.

My partner wasn’t into it and I didn’t want to nag.

My own childhood traumatised me.

I lost my uterus in a tragic fishing accident.

It’s a statistical nightmare.

Dr Harman uses the words ‘childless’ and ‘childfree’ to differentiate between those who would like a baby but don’t have one, and those who don’t want them, but concedes they are inadequate terms to describe the gamut of personal experiences. Her research is looking at the childfree, specifically. She is passionate about hosing down bullshit theories about the childfree. ‘Very few actively dislike children. There’s a myth that people who don’t have children voluntarily don’t like children. That’s not true at all,’ she said. ‘Somebody told me it’s like having a Lamborghini. They don’t actually want one, they just want to drive one every now and then.’ That seems materialistic, but it matches the stories of many non-childbearers who love children. They just want to hand them back, and not have the bother permanently.

Dr Harman said another myth is that women who don’t want children must have suffered themselves in childhood. The evidence shows that’s not true, she said. There’s not a traumatised anti-kid thing. Just a meh-kid thing. After that ambivalence—let’s call it kidnosticism—she says another reason for not reproducing is the accompanying loss of freedom.

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