Child-Free By Choice

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

- 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?