On a personal level, all we want is some empathy (not pity, please, no more pity!) and an awareness that, as childless women, we are navigating life on the margins of society and, if childless not by choice, are often weighed down by unresolved grief and perhaps a mountain of IVF debts. On a political level, we would welcome a discussion on the underlying structural reasons for the current levels of childlessness. It hasn’t been this high since a generation of women born around 1900 were first robbed of potential partners by a world war, and were then hit by the Great Depression, which made children a choice many couldn’t afford. What are the reasons this time?
Those of us born in the 60s and 70s are the shock-absorber generation, taking the hit for a seismic change in male-female relations. In the space of one generation women have entered a labour market based around a “male” pattern of working hard in your 20s and 30s before “settling down” in your 40s – a pattern that runs counter to female fertility. We need to collectively confront the nature of work. We could do with looking at sex education too. Many women of my generation were given the idea that pregnancy was for losers, and that getting pregnant was all too easy – our teachers’ intentions were good, but the message was misleading. Mine was also the first generation to have had IVF as a “backup” and, lulled into a false sense of security, we remained blissfully ignorant of its 75% failure rate. Add to that the childcare costs and career knockbacks that motherhood brings – factors that will disproportionately affect women born in the 1970s, for whom the economic crisis has coincided with the prime childbearing years. Now that two incomes are needed to bring up a child, these structural factors also are crucial.
It is time, too, that we acknowledge the valuable role childless people play in society.
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