I just read an interesting review in the Globe and Mail about a controversial French book by Corinne Maier called No Kid: Forty Reasons Not to Have A Child. Dr. Maier has two, but says that she “regrets having children.”

The book sounds like a novelty joke gift rather than a serious piece of literature, but it does have a contrary nature. It’s running against the notion that women should feel obligated to have children:

• Everywhere you look in France these days, you seem to see its cover: The words NO KID in English, followed by “40 Reasons for Not Having Children” (I changed the Globe’s translation when I read the original title) in French. It is a huge bestseller. Her 40 reasons are often funny and personal (”Don’t become a traveling feeding bottle,” “don’t adopt the idiot-language of children”) sometimes bitter (”you will inevitably be disappointed with your child”) and often designed to puncture the idealized notion of motherhood that poisons Western societies.
• It is a combination of tart sisterly advice (”What hope is there of having a fulfilling sex life when a woman is forced to turn into a fat, deformed animal decked out in sack-like dresses?”) with shock-tactic social analysis (”More murders and child abuse happen within families than outside them. Every family is a nest of vipers – all the reason not to add to your own”).
• Such notions, in France today, are almost unthinkable. It is a country overtaken with what Ms. Maier calls “baby mania.”
• There’s a loud and expensive national crusade to have as many children as possible and valorize motherhood. It is a nation where the winner of the President’s motherhood medal (what other country has those?) makes the cover of Paris-Match, a place where people follow the fertility rate the way Americans follow the Dow Jones Industrial Average and where a national celebration with distinctly racist overtones erupted last year when that fertility rate reached the stable-population point of 2.1 children per mother, making France the continental European leader in fecundity. Upon the loins of the Frenchwoman, the weight of a nation.

I’d have to say that I am certainly pro-parenthood and pro-child. I heartily disagree with this quote from Maier’s book:

• “Children are born to disappoint you,” she says. “Because we dream about wonderful children, but there are no wonderful children. They are people like me and you, and they fail, they do things you don’t expect, they dream of things you don’t even imagine, things that are pointless for you but not for them. So of course they have to disappoint you. Most children are difficult.”

My children are both absolutely delightful. What I find difficult are the people having them have brought into my life, like day care workers who don’t agree with me, pediatricians who don’t agree with me, teachers who don’t agree with me and, occasionally, their father.

Still, I have to support any effort that separates a woman’s fertility from a political agenda. The fertility mania that has been sweeping Europe, about which I have written before, urges women to have more children so that those children can support pension plans, without giving mothers any real support or meaningful assurances that their children will have educational and work opportunities in the future. Plus, the older population has it’s own agenda and that will not result in improvements while our children are small. Kids can’t vote, but the legions of retirees can. My son’s kindergarten here in Germany, for example, has to beg for paper for the children to draw on, but the city has enough money to subsidize a magazine for seniors about free programs open to them in the vicinity.

The responsibility of having children is one that belongs to their parents, completely and absolutely. And because we accept that, we should not feel any obligation to have children for any reason other than love. Anyone who suggests otherwise, regardless of what political party he belongs to, can bear his own children.

And, even though I love my children more than life itself, I have no trouble thinking of reasons not to have children in the larger theoretical sense. I read a lot and between climate change, terrorism, war, and racism, there is a lot of bad stuff we have to prepare our children to (potentially/probably) experience. I am not sure I even know how to prepare my children for a life without Holland, Japan, most of the Caribbean, Manhattan and electricity. I have nightmares thinking about what my children might have to endure as a result of oil thirst, intolerance and freak weather. But rising sea levels, for example, were not a form of birth control in my case. I completely understand that it could be for other women.

Perhaps women who choose not to have children are smarter than those of us who choose to become mothers?

Post from: Babylune