I may not change my mind: Ruminations of being childfree and the vote to overturn Roe v Wade

The travesty that is the USA’s Supreme Court vote to overturn the historical Roe vs Wade has come at an interesting time personally - soon after my reading the New York Times bestseller by Megan Daum: Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: 16 Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids. Finally, amidst the memoirs of the misfortunes of the childless, and perky children’s picture books, the individual’s choice to forgo child-rearing has earned its place.

Roe vs Wade was the decision made by the US Supreme Court in 1973 to grant women the autonomy to seek an abortion should she so wish. It was a landmark decision, meaning that it affected the interpretation of all other existing laws in place. For many, it was a ruling that granted celebration for its acknowledgement of the reproductive rights of women across the western world.

In 1996, South Africa passed the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act; meaning, in our constitution, a woman has the right to seek an abortion under the terms and conditions cemented in law. The implication of this Act is that it is a very literal constitutional human right to not want or have children. South Africans have not met the interesting fate that seems to have befallen the States, but I wonder on the state of our cultural confrontation of not just abortion or contraception, but a far more nuanced phenomenon that is being spoken about more frequently across the world: the active decision to live childfree, a decision undertaken not in misery or poverty, but out of the full and wondrous understanding of the agency that women have had for more than twenty years in this country to design life on our own terms.

As a twenty-something, I am often told that I’ll change my mind, about so many things. Career, sex, love, Self. Still, all these choices are nothing compared to the one about not reproducing, and how, seemingly, no matter how old I get, this is something I will always change my mind about - naturally, in favour of God’s gift of children that I will probably never be able to afford.

This, specifically, is my gripe. For it is an idea that seems to me to undermine the very foundation of why we have laws that speak to reproductive rights in the first place. Reproductive rights are decisions. They are decisions that women are allowed to make every single day, and to insist that a woman will change her mind about a choice that she has made under a constitution that demands she make her own choices is to deny her the validity of her own reality.

It may be interesting to note that the brain has a very specific way of dealing with absence. Our brains would much prefer that we do something than not, and if we opt for the latter, our minds make the even more incredible feat of deeming that thing as unfulfilled, and even goes as far as calling it regret. And this is what bothers the perceptions of those who tell us that, inevitably, we will be filled with the maternal yearning forever imprinted in the female sex, and that, as a consequence, we will abide by that thing someone once coined the biological clock and proceed to bear babies - and lots of them, preferably.

Indeed, a woman may change her mind. But how is that the business of a man, or a neighbour, or a relative, or a medical practitioner, when we quite literally have the astonishing power of the law behind the decisions we make around a choice so fully ingrained in our independence of women of a new order?

I am a millennial, and a fairly typical one at that. Aimless ambitions, no grounded sense of identity, and a host of other self-deprecating things, including the inability to make sense of the real world and its responsibilities. Still, I have my own account on the decision not to have kids, and despite my Gen Y genetics, my account, I’d like to believe, is one I undertook with great zeal, introspection, and yes, even maturity.

My story starts with falling in love, and having the world open up before me like a rose, pink with fertile possibility. I was, I’ll admit it, convinced. Then the most beautiful, inspiring thing happened - I spent time (and a good chunk of it, mind you. 2020/2021 lockdown, anyone?) with an actual child. I spent time witnessing her mother make the greatest sacrifices that I hadn’t known the human psyche and the female body could endure. I watched motherhood; I witnessed it in all its fantastic pain and enviable attachments, and I realized that I wanted none of it. I wanted exactly nought of a baby’s laughter clinging to my breast, I desired to have absolutely nothing to do with a toddler’s roaming sticky fingers and talent for lighting up an entire living room.

But moreover, I saw why someone would. I saw why someone would, indeed, change their mind. And I had what I might call resonance with those who insist that, someday, we will.

And at the same time, I thought about my passions and hobbies. I thought about the agency that I have at my fingertips every single day, with little apology. I saw my life in renewed ways, and I appreciated its maiden-esque langour and meandering; I liked the colours of its gypsy-adjacent lifestyle, and what one might almost call an endless youth that stretched out before me, untethered to an individual that needed the strength of every orifice I had to give.

And moreover, I saw the joy of following one’s own calling. Despite what it may look to others and the labels they give it. I’ve heard that not wanting to have children is not wanting to anchor oneself into a life that is less temperamental, less lopsided, less whirling-dervish. It is, in essence, not wanting to grow up and have one’s shit pieced together in appropriate sectional lounge suite upholstery.

But I wonder, as a wave of (especially millennial) women take the plunge to forgo child-rearing, if perhaps it is the exact opposite of infinite childhood. Perhaps it is taking responsibility for one’s own fate, instead of leaving it to the whims of biology and passing urges. Perhaps it is growing up to the breathtaking extent of knowing better than to place one’s happiness in the hypothesis of a happy family, instead taking the reins of one’s own joy and tracing it on the world in one’s own way. And perhaps the musings I’ve had over my aimlessness, my groundless self, and my bohemian rejection of real world sensibilities is in fact a refusal to be called into a life that simply is not for me. I am not built for parenthood, nor do I ever wish to be. Perhaps I do not wish to own a home, or a soccer-mum car. Perhaps I do not wish to settle, instead roaming the earth like a blithe, restless spirit. Perhaps not having children is knowing you could never heal enough of the trauma that you faced as a child yourself, and the realization that the rest of your existence will be dedication to the reattachment of the most fragmented parts of you.

So when you tell me I’ll change my mind, that we’ll change our minds, what you are telling us is that our version of reality - of the reality that is and the reality that will be - is unacceptable. You are telling us that it is lesser than. That it is futile, simply because it does not involve the carrying and full time care of a someone else that will invariably take us, in one way or another, from ourselves. In taking away our decision to choose, you are ultimately supporting a system that actively seeks to undermine women and silence acts of change that, let’s just call a spade a spade here, really do not hurt anyone but the people whose entire existence depends on the invalidation of others’.

The decision to not have children is important simply because it is a decision. It is a choice that all people deserve to be faced with and to question because we have individuals risking their lives to fulfil the demands of democracy everywhere in the world every day an abortion clinic gets picketed or ransacked or bombed by religious zealots or gatekeepers of morality. It is as important as any other right we have, because it asks us: what do we want our lives - our lives - to look like? And how is that not as great a freedom as any?

Pro-choice isn’t in favour of the absence, but in favour of the choices that our ancestors fought to give us. The choice to find life, and give life, in other ways. The choice to find fullness in other things and other humans that are just as bright and promising. And whether we change our minds, that choice should never be taken away from us. Whether we change our minds, it should never be an expectation that we will.