One suspects that whichever angry 15-year-old boy votes J.D. Vance gained by his “childless cat ladies” remark were not worth the offended 30-105-year-old women’s votes he lost. Doing culture wars about abortion, it’s like, yes, some people do think a fetus or even an embryo is a person. But denigrating all women without kids—evidently step-kids don’t count, which doesn’t bode well for adopted ones either—isn’t the savviest of strategies.
This is largely because factors beyond whim enter into whether someone winds up having kids. Yes, just over half of US adults 18-49 who expect to stay childless say this is by choice, but when you factor in that many of these people are very young and in a life stage where babies represent a disastrous unwanted outcome of sex, when you factor in that ‘don’t want to’ encompasses everything from the glamorous jet-setter to the person who doesn’t want to replicate their abusive household of origin…
I guess what I’m saying is, if you meet someone of an age where you’d expect kids and no kids, they’re very likely to say this was by choice, even if it was not. People tend not to open with fertility struggles or financial woes or inability to find a suitable partner.
And the people who are parents by choice—that is, who weren’t caught off-guard but actively tried for a baby—are aware, some more intensely than others, how easily that might not have happened. Obviously anyone who used ART to conceive is aware that a baby isn’t a given, but even woman who tracked her cycles a couple months knows that but for careful timing, she too could be a “cat lady” and thus in Vance’s doghouse.
Because past a certain age, everyone with some vague awareness of how these things work knows that ‘I chose not to have kids’ is a polite social fiction approximately half the time, Vance’s “cat ladies” remark came across as criticizing something as a life choice that isn’t necessarily that. So it’s understandable that there was an outpouring of explanation about the not-chosen side of things. It is obviously more cruel to denounce people for a choice they didn’t make than for one they did, even if, in this case, if you’re a pro-natalist politician, you’re better off making childbirth free than sneering.
All of which brings me to David Roberts’s defense of childlessness-by-choice. At least I think that’s what he was going for. In a sense he’s right, you don’t need to justify your reasons for not having kids. But also, people do not publicly justify their reasons for not having kids, unless they happen to be professional awareness-raisers of some kind (memoirist/essayist, activist, influencer, etc.). Vance has inspired some to do so now, but as a rule, these things are kept private.
But the part I can’t get over is the permission slip he offers to dislike young children. As though being pro-choice were a position not on the personhood of a fetus but on that of a four-year-old who’s being a bit rowdy on the bus.
No one is rounding up curmudgeons and forcing them to work in preschools. But yeah you do sort of have to avoid making your dislike of any entire demographic known. No one’s diving into your brain to assess whether you like babies or elderly people or Lithuanians. But if you’re going to live in a society, you have to accept that other people are people as much as you are and have every right to take up space.
And you do see this when you’re out with little kids, this expectation that you apologize for them acting the way little kids (with rare exceptions) will act in eras when that isn’t beaten out of them. That you atone for the sin of having brought a stroller to a public space, when it’s like, the alternative would be the 2-year-old in that stroller running around, and would that be preferable? No, you might say, the preference would be that you keep the 2-year-old home. Which, after lockdowns, whomst amongst us wants to do?
All of this is also a feminist issue insofar as who do you think is typically with these little kids and therefore excluded from public spaces if they are, but it is also a humanity-generally thing given that, to reiterate, children are people.
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I feel like people mean a couple different things by "not liking kids" and one is just "all things being equal, I prefer the company of other adults and I like having spaces that are adults-only." But there is probably a pithy way to express that without sounding like you post on r/childfree!
Word. I don’t particularly care if somebody doesn’t want kids — parenting is a hard job, and not one everyone is cut out for. But general dislike of children never sits right with me. First, I thought we had agreed that it’s rude to dislike people based on a characteristic they can’t change. Second, everybody on earth was a child once. The biggest anti-natalist in the world was once that 3-year-old loudly melting down in the middle of the aisle at Safeway.
I do judge parents who don’t at least try to keep their kids under control in public — but that’s the fault of the parents, not the children.