OLIVE & Being Child-Free By Choice

A generation of women are opting out of parenthood. That doesn't make them selfish, shallow or in denial, but it does make society feel uncomfortable.

BY EMMA GANNON, for ELLE, July issue / 14/07/2020

My inbox was going insane. Every second, a new ping! Every refresh, another 10 emails. It was December 2018, and I was doing some research for a project about women who had decided to not have children.

I wrote a tweet asking people to get in touch: 'For a thing! I am looking to speak to a range of women who have zero desire to have kids (by choice!) who might talk to me, please reply or slide into one’s DMs – thank you.'

Within an hour I had 180 public replies, 200 private DMs, then non-stop emails – for weeks afterwards.

'I’m 48 now and neither of us has had a change of heart,' said one.

'I’ve long let go of the distraction of giving a fig about what society thinks, and it is freeing,' said another. 'There are obvious positives, such as having more independence and money, but these aren’t really reasons why I wouldn’t want [children]. I just simply am not interested.'

I gulped their messages down, savouring every last word. Sometimes I read them late at night for comfort. Their stories were not the ones the world tells us about childfree women: that they are sad, bitter, in denial, consumed with career or lacking a ‘natural’ instinct. These women were joyful, open-hearted and deeply unapologetic about their choice to skip motherhood.

As their messages stacked up, I felt something akin to a high. For years, I had struggled to articulate why I felt so differently about being a mother compared to other thirtysomething women I knew.

I realised it was because there had never been a language that moved beyond the claptrap and cliché to explain why women had decided to opt out of parenthood. (The stereotypes being that we were selfish, narcissistic, hedonistic, even.) As I replied to each message, it felt like a cloud had been lifted. That, finally, the decision to say no to being a mother could at last be celebrated.

Read the full article on ELLE.co.uk HERE.