Choices for women or lack thereof

I don’t know what it is about people and their expectations from every female in the world to have children. There are various battles we have won, but the things we still have to encounter are legion. A man rarely gets asked why he hasn’t got any children. He doesn’t have to deal with the sideway glances, the judgmental looks if he says he doesn’t want to have kids. At a different level, it is how no one discussed Biden's suit but Kamala Harris' suit for January 20th was open topic of discussion in even serious newspapers like Guardian.

For years after I got married, I kept being asked this question. Everyone and their cousins thought it was appropriate to ask me. As though somehow I was reneging on my promise to the universe to procreate. Whereas my husband got asked this only by people very close to him, people like his closest friends and his parents, eager to have grandchildren, a wish not entirely unreasonable and also kind of cute. In the 7 years that I was married before I had my son, this question was asked by people thousands of times.

It is a different matter that I did want to have a child and love him enough to die for him. It is a weird fascination other people have with a woman’s private life that I just don’t get. I still routinely get furious when people judge on the basis of the choices women make. Why should their unsolicited opinion about who I marry, my marriage status, my desire (or not) to have children, my sexual orientation, be of any consequence to anyone else. The most daunting of those choices is the woman who wants to stay single or a woman who chooses to not have children. Simply because of the barrage of questions which drown you down.

 A woman wanting to remain single and/or not have children seems like an existential threat to people. Look around you, for crying out loud. There are enough people to fill this earth and carry forward the human race. People judge women who don’t want to have kids – as though they are bucking out of the responsibility. They will talk about your god-given responsibility, your womb and all the moral questions around it.

Studies in the UK, Europe and the United States show this is now the choice of significant numbers of women. Once this was considered insane or unnatural. Even today, it is viewed with suspicion - women with no desire to procreate say they sometimes face awkward questions and disapproval. Heaven help you if you are in India – it won’t even take others – it is your own family and relatives who will drive you up the walls and take permanent residence there. If they hear you are married and don’t have a kid, they first go quiet, assessing the reason, wondering if you have some medical issues. In these situations, it is almost like a gay person outing himself/herself, if after all that sympathetic silence you tell them it was your choice. And somewhere down the line, over the months and years of this behaviour, you yourself start internalizing that guilt. And that is so wrong. Your fertility status is public property, never mind if your fallopian tubes won’t fallope, a man never gets asked these questions. If he is the problem in this whole kid-making exercise, it’s all a hush hush.

Sure, and thank god, sociologists have found out that this is a new phenomenon, gaining credence in the last couple of decades, this voluntary childlessness. More and more people are openly saying they don’t have kids because they don’t want to, period. People will tell you things like you don’t know what you are missing. Yeah, sure, sleepless nights, cranky kids you want to throttle during said nights, zombiehood for a decade trying to have both a career and kids, unending fears and worries for a lifetime, because now that you have had them, you love them more than life itself. Then they will tell you how you will make a great mum. Like they have a clue about it – one of my closest friends is wonderful with kids, loves my son to bits, but I can absolutely agree with her decision not to have her own. Till I saw my nephew, children scared me, I was not even sure I had it in me to feel the kind of maternal affection required. With him, I realized it was possible for me to love a child and not be infuriated by their antics beyond a point, spending hours and hours just looking at him babbling nonsense all day.

Truth be told, I also never argued the case to myself. I didn’t want to think too hard about the alternative, the physical trauma and perma-exhaustion I’d be avoiding if I stayed childless. It seemed like a decision best made instinctively. But if you think about it, lacking that moment of clarity, the choice would have remained. For women today who can access IUDs, birth control pills, condoms and abortion, many have to think through their options with unprecedented deliberateness. Without a strong desire to reproduce or a strong aversion to it, how does one decide?

So many factors are at play in a woman’s decision to be or not to be a mother. Our choice is tightly circumscribed by factors which have nothing to do with us - like geography, race, civil rights and socioeconomic class. For white middle- to upper-class women in countries like the U.S. and European nations, obtaining effective birth control and legal abortion is easier than it’s ever been; meanwhile, their children are likely to have fairly comfortable lives, historically speaking. Ditto for privileged middle and upper class women in India. With what can only be called retrospective clarity, the question of whether to have children at all seems urgent, with anxieties about population explosion or inflicting a climate change-ravaged planet on our innocent children. I have often discussed with friends about how scarred we will leave this world for our children and in every conversation I have had with my son, he has confirmed my fears – that their world was messed up because of us.

When I did get pregnant, and all through the pregnancy, I was terrified. I was puking all the time till kingdomcome. My mother was 6000 miles away, my husband had an on-call rota of hell, in a hospital some distance away. Not a single one of those things inspired me into what was happening to me as wonderful. I remember clearly this sense of utter panic when the doctor told me I had to have the kid at 30 weeks, stat. My parents still 6000 miles away. And when the 1400 gms little lizardy thing was brought to me, I felt nothing, no umbilical-cord-induced instant love. I felt the same panic I had before the operation. Utter unpreparedness. And weeks later when we brought him home, I opened the bedroom window in Cambridge and howled for hours because that little twit was crying for hours too. So, yes, I can totally understand why no one would want that in one’s life.

Also, consider this whole different dilemma. For a long time, feminists have framed motherhood as a suffocating requirement; and choice meant the choice to not be a mother. For the socio-economically backward women, everywhere, choice also meant the choice to be a mother and not to be separated from children by death, bondage, forced sterilization, the economic imperative to work outside the home (sometimes by caring for some other rich women’s children), and so on. Privileged women and children have been nurtured at the expense of poor women and children; if the world today looks more and more unfriendly to privileged mothers and babies, that’s only an echo of how unfriendly it has long been to the poor ones. But even so, most of the people who will be reading this are with varying degrees of success wielding their careers and their family, it is largely because of other women who are helping out, keeping the privilege flame burning. And for those without that privilege, even among the working women of today, they choose their careers and that is entirely their prerogative. Something which doesn’t deserve judgment exactly like their partners’ choosing to frontline their careers don’t.

Company’s thus need to be more aware of the difficulties women face, the immense odds they fight. This pandemic and the tremendous juggling act between work and home should teach employers that women can work just as hard if given a sympathetic understanding of their problems. As more and more people work from home, there is a growing acceptance of the background noise and the sudden emergence of the puppy or the toddler on to the screen. They need to be assured of career progression despite their personal situation. Because women are actually working a lot more now than they did before just because they find the understanding refreshing. It should not be either/or. They need to be told it can be both. They need the assurance.