A cohort of women, a micro-generation in the making, are choosing not to have children. This isn’t a mandate or a manifesto—women are simply beginning to assert their agency and their right to choose. With social stigma still strong, if being child-free is a gradually rising “trend” in urban India, what are the factors responsible, asks Janice Pariat
I was 16 when I declared to my parents, one morning at breakfast, to not expect any grandchildren from me. The announcement was met with a mixture of amusement, good old-fashioned Christian embarrassment, and dismissal. “You’ll change your mind,” I was told as more scrambled eggs were ladled onto my plate, and the subject hastily changed. More than a decade later, in 2008, when I moved out of Delhi and back to my hometown Shillong, taking my pet cat with me, it became a running joke in the family that at least I’d given them a “grandkitty”. Now, in my mid-thirties, the jesting has stopped. Though of late I do find myself thinking a lot about children—of having them or not—perhaps because the question, now more than ever, is often asked: Don’t you want kids?
Implied here, especially since I’m a woman, is the normalcy of wanting them. How does one respond? I honestly don’t know. I’ve tried, mostly in jest, “But I have a cat” or “Look, I write books” but the truth is the question forces me to question my decision and think about it far more than I might actually wish to. As author Jeanne Safer describes in her essay ‘Beyond Beyond Motherhood’ in Selfish, Shallow And Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers On The Decision Not To Have Kids (Picador), I have “wanted to want to have a baby.” I’m aware that in my friend’s circle I’m not the only one. There is a group of us choosing not to have kids, and it’s got me wondering why. If being child-free is a “trend”, what are the factors enabling it to become one now? I recognise also that we are a certain type of women—urban, educated—and I’m wondering how this un-pronatalist decision might be connected to privilege and class.
TO HAVE KIDS OR NOT TO?
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July 2018 من VOGUE India.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July 2018 من VOGUE India.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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