Reproductive Justice Includes the Choice to Be Childfree

I've expressed before that I tend to find the language around the choice to be childfree pretty insulting. For example, the discourse surrounding Elena Kagan's aptitude as a Supreme Court nominee centers less on her professional credentials and more on her sexuality or whether or not she's deficient for never experiencing motherhood.

So while I wasn't terribly shocked by the new report from the Pew Research Center about the rise in the number of childfree women in the United States, I'm exceptionally pleased by the positive attention it has received. The study highlights the shift in cultural norms, social pressure to have children, and individual choice (including improvements in birth control methods and access) since the 1970s. Thirty years ago, one in ten women did not have children, while today, nearly one in five women will remain childfree. White women are still the most likely to remain childfree, though the racial gap has narrowed considerably in the past decade.

I'm not alone in my surprise that among the most highly educated women — that is, women holding advanced degrees including a master's, doctoral, or business degree — are slightly more likely to have children than they were in the past. This may be attributed to wealthier women's access to fertility treatments or the seemingly simple belief that women can now have children and a career with more ease than in the past (though for the record, I pretty strongly disagree with this sentiment). It could also be that some jobs that require an advanced degree can offer a healthy work-life balance payoff later on.

I'm only slightly less excited about the language used to describe the findings, calling women "childless" as if we lack for not having children. How is this any different from calling a woman "unmarried," as opposed to non-married?

What I also find troubling is the way the Washington Post article ends. A researcher from the University of Michigan who co-authored a study on the same subject stated, "[Childfree women] are not any more depressed; their psychological well-being is just as high." It's entirely possible that her thoughts were taken out of context, but at what point will we stop pathologizing women who don't give birth and quit using condescending tropes to assure everyone else that we, the freakishly childfree, aren't depressive defectives?

One in five is getting to be a pretty high ratio — certainly when compared to statistics from earlier decades. Can we instead start assuming that maybe all women are making better choices for their own lives — both to have children and to not — empowered by the wonders of modern technology, advances in social ideals, and less patriarchal pressure to procreate? Reproductive justice includes respecting women who choose, for whatever reason, to both have and to not have children. Period.

Photo Credit: Gnarls Monkey