Remaining childless can be wise and meaningful. The pope should know Gaby Hinsliff
Yes, the pope was at it again, shaming and criticizing people who are childless or child free. Here are one or two rebuttals.
(Link): Dear Pope Francis: Not having kids IS selfish … and that’s ok.
(Link): Remaining childless can be wise and meaningful. The pope should know by Gaby Hinsliff
Excerpts (if you want to read the entire piece, please use the link above)
- Feb 2015
- Pope Francis’s comments on parenthood show how we struggle to accept those who are baby-free by choice
- Choosing not to have children is selfish, or so says the pope, who is surely something of an expert on this one, being childless himself. Reminiscing this week about his own upbringing as one of five, he told an audience in St Peter’s Square of his fears for a “greedy generation that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk”.
- ….This isn’t just about Catholicism, and its vested (some might even say selfish) interest in church growth by encouraging the faithful to go forth and multiply. We live in an age where one in five women will not have had children by their mid-40s.
- (And no, there’s no equivalent data for men; giving birth to a child being a more unmistakably public event than fathering one). For some that will have been a positive choice, for others painfully not so; and for a third group it’s perhaps somewhere in the middle – a difficult consequence of choices made but not regretted, a fork in the road not taken.
- But although it’s something millions experience, not having children still carries a wholly unfair stigma for both sexes, an unspoken sense that you owe the world an explanation.
- Any woman in the public eye who doesn’t have children can expect endless nosy questions about why it never happened; whether she had to choose between baby and career, or whether perhaps there’s an intimate gynaecological problem that she fancies sharing with the world.
- But increasingly, childless men are viewed with suspicion. Remember that faintly desperate Gordon Brown photo opportunity, arranged in the days before he had children of his own, involving him at the birthday party of a small child of a staff member? Borrowing someone else’s kid was clearly preferable to the risk of being portrayed as a workaholic loner, incapable of sharing his life.
- And the greatest taboo of all remains confessing to being child-free not by accident but by choice. Stories of infertility, miscarriage or just never having found the right person do at least evoke sympathy. The bile heaped on the former Australian prime minister (Link): Julia Gillard for being what her critics called “deliberately barren” is a reminder of how often the mature, considered choice not to have children is portrayed as cold and heartless.
- …But anyone claiming to have given birth for the benefit of a grateful world is either a liar or an ocean-going narcissist. Having children is without doubt the single most selfish thing I’ve ever done: I did it not for the greater good of a planet that is already teeming with more humans than it can sustainably support but frankly because I wanted to, and because it makes me happy.
- There’s precious little evidence that having children makes you a nicer person – arguably in the sleep-deprived years, it just makes you a grumpier one – and certainly no evidence that bludgeoning people into having children they don’t really want helps anyone concerned.
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Related Posts:
(Link): More Criticisms of the Pope’s Anti Childless Anti Childfree Comments
(Link): Hey, Pope Francis: Some people would rather raise pets than children by C. Hall
(Link): Pope Francis Is Wrong About My Child-Free Life by Amanda Marcotte
(Link): Pope Francis To Couples: Raise Children, Not Pets
(Link): If the Family Is Central, Christ Isn’t
(Link): Site for Parents Who Have Been Dumped By Their Adult Kids
