My Big Fat Childfree Life
Because from a political perspective childlessness and abortion are complex systems problems not moral ones. Legislation of morality is never a good thing for liberty.
Though I grew up Catholic, and it is part of my heritage, these types of edicts from the Pope, is one of many reasons why I have not darkened the door of a Catholic church except during Easter or Christmas to listen to Mozart played at Mass.
Oh, gosh, I really like this Pope, too. And this is hard. And he’s not entirely wrong of course, he’s the Pope, for Heaven’s sake.
Though I love my cats dearly, and consider them a furry part of my family, they are not (nor should they be) a substitute for children. And I mean it. My cats are still cats, and they do cat like things. So I am not going to buy them little costumes or post their first paw steps out of kittenhood all over YouTube. No. I do like to buy them toys, and give them treats when they are being good little cuties.
And yet…
They are not children.
No. I am not sending my brilliant little Calico cat Smudgee to college. And if I am fated to die alone, my cat is more likely to eat what remains of me before my corpse goes bad than close my eyes in tenderness and remorse the way a grown child would his newly dead parent. One hopes for that future when you are a parent, anyway, because there are a lot of mean kids out there.
But as someone who inconveniently “forgot” to have children, I have to deal with my own private hell living long enough to see the culture mock me at every turn.
Take the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, by the SCOTUS for example.
No; you won’t find me rallying at the Arizona state capitol pounding on the doors like a mad gorilla does at the zoo. Nor will you see on the other side of town at Dream City Church, with me along with all of the tongues-speaking congregants lifting my hands in praise thanking Jesus for rescuing future generations of the so-called “unborn” either.
For someone who doesn’t have an abortion story to tell, this situation does not apply to me. Or does it?
Years ago, when I was in my late 30s my mom asked me like I wasn’t going to, like one of her co-workers go to some sperm bank. “It’s so sad that you will not experience childbirth.” She offered to pay for the procedure.
So, why didn’t I make a trip to the local sperm bank, as many aging “career girls” who found themselves without a husband, did back then?
Once there, I would be able to look through a book of donors (and pick a guy that looked like Chris Hemsworth and went to Harvard, of course), and have some stranger’s sperm-a stranger that had to go to bathroom with a Penthouse Magazine and mastrubate in a paper cup (no doubt looking at photos of women who look like Scarlett Johansson, students at Brandeis or UofChicago, of course) have his semen shot into my uterus with a device that looks like a turkey baster, just after I had gone through a series of (painful) hormone shots to get me to ovulate. And maybe, just maybe the sperm would meet the fertilized egg, and - we’re off to the races!
Kind of makes you think differently about that line in the David Bowie song, Suffragette City - “wham, bam, thank you mam” in a different light, doesn’t it?
But IVF, then, and now is never quite that simple. Nor is conception in the usual fashion either. Getting pregnant is really proof of the miraculous randomness of creation is it not? So, it stands to reason that man-made procedures have a significant failure rate, and IVF is for so many a heartbreaking not to mention an expensive failure.
IVF seemed so dehumanizing to me then and now, and still has me asking the question - have we come to a point in human evolution where we can manufacture people, and discard the less desirable products of conception arbitrarily like a medical quality control engineer? Is it any wonder why gender activists refer to people like me as “assigned female at birth” as if human beings came off a production line?
Well, if you can make a baby in this fashion, why not think of people making as TQM production process, and assign immutable characteristics such as gender and eye-color as if they were Tesla automobile features? Why not argue Simoine de Beauvoir’s point that women are made, not born, right?
I told my mom, that the only reason why people fall in love and have sex is to have children, and raise a complete family which includes a father, or at the very minimum that includes a child who knows who his/her/their father is. Why would I should willing raise a child without a putative father? If I wanted a man’s sperm to get pregnant, and ended up a single parent, I would have stayed married to my horrible first husband.
Well, part of the reason I was single again at the age of 36 and childless was because I had made the fatal error of marrying a man, who told me after I had been late on my period two weeks that if I were to have a child, it would be “my problem,” and that he was not interested in having HIS career interrupted by a little bundle of joy. And that was a horrible thing for him to say, because I told him before we got married that I wanted to have children, and raise them as Jews because so many of his ancestors perished in the Holocaust. My ex’s mother was a survivor of Aushwitz, having been pulled out a line heading straight to the ovens, her elder sister, managed to pull her onto a truck heading to a Nazi workcamp in Frankfort. He agreed, and we got married.
But - before I could make it to the gynecologist office to confirm or deny what seemed to be the case, I got my period. A few months later, realizing that he was only using me to get his Ph.D. and could give a rat’s ass whether I lived or died - much less have our child - I left him.
After my divorce I moved on, had a couple more relationships, even got married again, but after my first divorce, I never got around to having children. Not because I didn’t want them; but as life in all of it’s ironies, twists and turns, and because for reasons that are so complicated and medically difficult to explain in a forum such as this, it turned out in the end that I really was infertile, and had been so all of my reproductive life. [As to adoption, we just simply did not have the means or the resources to be a foster parents. That’s another story for another time.]
I know some who have had surprise pregnancies in their late 30s early 40s, and I know some women who started perimenopause in their late 20s. A woman’s fertility is truly a random thing; you really don’t know for sure how long you have before you stop having the ability to have children, or whether you are able to have children at all. So it is no accident that when it comes to the latest decision on Roe, I became upset and furious, but not for the reasons that you think.
Let’s take the issue of IVF again, for example. Personally, and speaking only for myself, I found the whole idea of conceiving children in a test tube to be dehumanizing and morally repugnant. It is on this one procedure that I feel like I am in complete alignment with the pro-life position, and to be completely honest, I am glad that it is one medical procedure that could be outlawed in those states that have banned abortion all together. There. I said it. But that’s just me, just saying.
And yet…
Like anything about life and living there are always exceptions and what ifs. What about the woman who has uterine cancer? Or is terminal? When both lives are in the balance the Catholic position, as I recall, relates to rescuing the more innocent life. Still. Is every sperm sacred? Really?
Likewise in the case of abortion, what about those other what-ifs? Like rape, incest, medical conditions, or just hell, a woman doesn’t want to have a baby not right now, okay?
What about the woman who thinks differently than me about IVF? Abortion, gender or anything else? Castigate the Roe decision as you will, but the one thing that was important about the Roe decision is that it left it up to the individual, not the state to decide these intractible and difficult life and death decisions.
Who am I to impose laws that compel those women to believe as I do, that life is seriously unfair, and so finite and precious - why not place sex in the context of that divine framework, and understand the larger - metaphysical and moral implications of these medical procedures? In short, when it comes to having a baby, or not, it’s not just about you, silly, but then neither should the law be used a method for regulating the sexual conduct of consenting adults.
Further, isn’t it true, that God himself, the God so many prolifers worship so fervently, the One who has given us the free will to choose to believe in Him the way I do, or not?
Not only that - it’s because I am not them, not living their lives, and I should mind my own business and focus on my own sinful nature before casting that first stone as Jesus himself commanded that’s why.
Just because I am childless isn’t the reason why I love my cat so much. My position in life had nothing and everything to do with some choices, some good, some bad I made, but in the end I am not childfree, I am childless. There is a difference, Pope Francis. And, truth be told, my lack of children is none of your business either. I really hate it when people judge me for this reality because who knows what pain belies my current condition - not you, certainly.
What good is it to impose my values upon an another’s existence? If that’s not playing the role of God in someone else’s life I don’t know what is, and that is the point of a prolife position: to make the case for choosing life, not to play God. And you know, we are playing God when we manipulating human fetuses in utero, or consider them independent legal agents in courts of law. Both of these paths lead to ruin of that I am certain. Period.
Look, we’re going to have hell to pay if we go around legislating morality and using the laws and courts telling people how to live again. Trust me, that’s really going to suck, when we start closing sex shops and having police departments enforce sodomy laws, which is a very real possibility, if you are to take Justice Thomas at his word.
Sadly, turning this issue to the states and allowing stupid politicians to regulate in ignorance sophisticated medical procedures such as abortion and IVF, politicians - most of whom are clueless about how women are made, much less how they get pregnant, or born, much less cogently define what a woman is, is going to cause a lot more problems than it was intended to solve. Not to mention make life a lot more complicated for all of us, regardless of what you feel about this subject. I mean just look at the way we handled the Covid pandemic as Exhibit A to my argument. Just saying.
Besides if you want to dress your cat in a ballet tutu and take her to a cat dance recital, who am I to judge?