Australian women increasingly deciding against having babies - Author Tory Shepherd reveals what it means to be child-free
Itβs a choice that Australian women are increasing making β the decision to not have children. But why? On Freedom author Tory Shepherd discusses the reasons why she forwent parenthood.
As more Australian women decide against having children, Lauren Novak quizzes Tory Shepherd, author of new book On Freedom, about her decision not to have babies.
LAUREN NOVAK: So Tory, you don’t want to have a baby and apparently everyone from your mother to complete strangers have an opinion about that. But why write a book about this very personal decision?
TORY SHEPHERD: I don’t usually like talking about personal things … then I had a few too many drinks one night and I wrote a column about being childless and the challenges you face.
I was blown out of the water by the response … from men and women, from all sorts of people I know and don’t know, saying, “Yeah, we don’t get to talk about being childless by choice, or childfree, or childless by circumstance”.
At which point I started looking at the statistics about how many households are childless.
It’s more and more common. Australian women are having 1.74 children each — which is obviously below replacement level. Actually we’ve been below replacement level since 1976.
Women are leaving it later, having fewer children — and increasingly, having none at all. But the stigma sticks. At the same time there’s a whole lot of data we’re missing about why women make this choice, or how they’re being robbed of choice by circumstance.
LN: One of the things that made me laugh was where you suggest we should have a question in the Census on this and you give examples like, “I don’t want to give up my annual holiday to Ibiza” or “I don’t know how to put ‘must have babies soon’ on my Tinder profile”!
TS: Or I’m not with the right guy at the moment, or I’m gay and that makes everything more complicated, or IVF is too expensive.
There are all these different reasons.
You have an innate feeling about whether you want to have kids and then there are all these circumstances interfering with your decision.
LN: So why don’t you want to have kids?
TS: I know people who don’t want selfish, snotty little things interfering in their lives but for me it was never a negative thing about kids, it was just an absence of wanting.
I was always aware that that made me different and that made people close to me unhappy at various stages, which is how I got to the “want to want” babies stage.
LN: “Wanting to want” is such a great phrase because it’s how a lot of women might feel. Do you think that it’s because having kids is what we’re told we should want?
TS: Yes. For me, I started to think. “I don’t have these feelings of wanting a baby”.
But everyone was telling me I would be so happy if I had one, everyone around me would be so happy if I had one. I thought I would feel like I’d done the normal thing, so my formula shifted so that I started to think maybe the positives might overcome my, shall we call it, kidnosticism, and maybe I should give it a go.
But when I tried I had a visceral reaction. It was the only time that I was actually happy to see my period. And that told me that wanting to want wasn’t enough because I really didn’t want it.
LN: So just to be clear, you’re not a baby hater?
TS: No, no, not at all! I love my nieces, and my friends’ kids. I don’t really care about strangers’ kids. I’m a little freaked out by the little babies though.
They’re so fragile and I can be a bit of a klutz. I find them much more interesting when you can talk to them.
LN: We should also clarify that you’re writing mostly about women who are childless by choice.
TS: There’s a fuzzy line between “childless by choice” and those who choose a career, for example, and leave it too late.
But the number of women who are fertile but childless is on the up — mostly in developed countries where women have more freedom to choose. But there’s still a stigma.
LN: But so much of our society is still geared around baby-making as the done thing.
TS: Yeah, our politicians talk about working families, or mum and dad investors.
And everyone remembers then-Treasurer Peter Costello urging us to have “one for mum, one for dad and one for the country”. It’s a duty!
LN: Who has a baby because the Treasurer told her to?! But you examine other more likely considerations that women toss up when they decide to have a child, or not.
TS: Individual women are juggling all these complex factors: what does it mean for work, how much do I want this, when should I start?
They’re making these very complicated personal choices. The truth is, as women have more freedom and more empowerment, they have fewer children.
That has happened as women’s equality has improved. They have more choice — not to have them, to leave things later, to prioritise work, to only have one …
LN: Can you unpack for us how women have more choice now and if that’s a good thing or not?
TS: There’s more technological choice, like IVF. I’ve got lesbian mates having kids; I’ve got friends choosing not to have kids; there’s this whole gamut.
But none of them are simple choices. One of the things I talk about in the book is my mum turning around to me and saying, “You know what, I’m not that jealous of your freedom because it was so much easier when you just hit your 20s, you got married, you had kids.
You weren’t tearing your hair out about work.
life balance, you weren’t worrying about what age to start, how many you have”. Freedom brings complications.
Then there’s access to some of the stuff that gives us freedom, which is where privilege comes in.
Some people can afford to try every technology under the sun, or have nannies or whatever, whereas for other people the choice is not accessible.
LN: And with choice comes the implication that there’s a right choice …
TS: Yes that’s exactly it. Now we’re told we can have it all, which is one of the biggest bullshit lines we’ve ever been fed.
Maybe you can, but just not all at the same time.
But it doesn’t help you decide what the right choice is. Choice messes with your brain.
It’s hard enough to decide what tomato sauce you should buy, let alone these big decisions. And I don’t think anyone could be 100 per cent sure that they’ve made the right choices.
LN: Isn’t a big part of your argument that women could be thinking yes, no or maybe one day, depending on where they’re at in life?
TS: Yeah, women who’ve always wanted kids still have to ask: “What if I don’t have a partner, what if I don’t have a partner at the right time, what if I break up with my partner at age 38, do I go it alone?”. There
are so many different parameters. It’s not a binary “yes or no”.
LN: What about when someone asks a woman where they stand and they might be on the fence?
TS: For me it was annoying. For women who are seriously struggling, it’s an awful thing to push them on. You’re facing that fertility cliff and people are tapping at their watches. It’s invasive when people feel they have a right to talk about your reproductive choices in a way that they don’t about other extremely personal things.
LN: What are some of the worst things people have said to you?
TS: Mostly it’s strangers who push it. You get pity or condescension. Or they’ll say: “You’ve still got time”. Or they’ll say, with pity: “Oh, well at least you’ve got a furbaby”!
LN: Ah yes, Nero. Our favourite office dog!
TS: He’s my dog, not a replacement baby. Big distinction. Behind all of that is this idea that I’m not normal and I’m not complete and I should be sneered at as the barren dog lady … or pitied because I’ve made the wrong choices in life. Then there are those who want a return to the 1950s — no contraception, no abortion, no freedom.
LN: Well, doesn’t the television show The Handmaid’s Tale show us that — horrifyingly!
TS: Sure, it’s exactly that. The men who argue women would be happier with less freedom, they would Handmaid’s Tale us!
LN: You list some other choice descriptions from male leaders in your book — from the Pope, the Turkish President — including that women were “lacking” or “deficient” without children. Do those labels make it hard to express your decision?
TS: It’s hard to say: “I just never wanted them”. Because people can get their back
up. People like to think they’ve made the right and normal life choice, so they feel threatened by people who’ve made a different life choice.
LN: Coming back to the point of your book — freedom — a lot of people seem to feel that having a child might curtail a freedom they enjoy. Did you worry that it would change
your lifestyle?
TS: I think you have an innate place on the spectrum of “wanting” or “not wanting”
and then lots of things go in your pro or con columns and that’s one for the con column, for me.
LN: Being selfish is another label that gets thrown at childless women — not wanting to give up your money or time or your independence for a child. Is that something you’ve been accused of?
TS: That’s one of the most common accusations. But it’s bollocks. You could equally argue that people use children as a status symbol, or as a future arse-wiper when they hit old age. Everyone is selfish,
in that they make decisions based on their very specific circumstances.
LN: On the old age insurance policy, there’s something to that in Japan, isn’t there?
TS: Japan is a perfect storm because they’re not having kids but they don’t like immigrants; they’re a very insular country. It’s also nigh impossible for women to have both a career and kids, so they’re not going to have enough young people in their system to look after all the older people. The stat that I found that really illustrates that was that adult nappies are now outselling baby nappies in Japan!
LN: And that’s not even the weirdest thing you came across in your research for this book, is it?
TS: Well Hippocrates — the father of modern medicine — coined the phrase the “errant”
or “wandering” uterus and he invented all these different ways of “fixing” it including getting women to drink boiled puppy soup. Furbaby soup!
LN: So you found that more women are making the same choice as you, to remain childless, but they’re still being judged for going against the norm. So what do we do about it?
TS: For me the heart of the issue is separating women’s identity from their motherhood status — that goes both ways. Don’t think of women as half-beings if they don’t have children. And don’t introduce a Nobel laureate by calling her a mother first.
Women are still mired in all these stereotypes based on how they use or don’t use their wombs.
And, on a bigger scale, we need to have a clear-eyed discussion about how when women are not free, they have more children. And when they are free, they have fewer. And who’s in charge of that? There’s a big shift on, but intelligent discussion about it is … barren.
Lauren Novak is Social Policy Editor at The Advertiser, and Tory Shepherd is State Editor.
On Freedom by Tory Shepherd is out June 4 from MUP. RRP $14.99, eBook $9.99.