Next Person to Say They’re ‘Childfree’ Gets a Time-Out
I published a book about choosing not to have kids. But I’m not gloating and neither should you.
The word “childfree” is everywhere these days. You see it on T-shirts and coffee mugs. You see it in the steady influx of news articles and think pieces about how millennials are too economically insecure and/or afraid of world collapse to procreate. It’s in the title of several books, most recently Childfree By Choice, by sociologist Amy Blackstone.
I get why this term has caught on. It’s concise, looks good with a hashtag, and makes a crucial distinction between people who choose not to have children and those who, for whatever reason, wish to be parents but cannot. It’s also extremely relevant. Recent data shows that not only are U.S. birth rates at an all-time low but that 37% of childless adults never planned on being parents in the first place.
Those on the extremes will greet this as either good news or terrible news. On the good news side are anti-natalists who see planned human extinction as our only hope for avoiding environmental catastrophe. On the bad news side are white nationalists who are obsessed with reduced birth rates among Caucasians. The man who murdered 51 Muslims at a New Zealand mosque last February complained of the…
