What No Baby?

By Leslie Cannold

What, No Baby? takes us on a journey into the lives of contemporary women who plan to have it all - marriage, motherhood and work - yet have been derailed by reluctant men, insatiably demanding jobs and ever-climbing expectations of what it takes to be a 'good' mother.The Australian Bureau of Statistics predicts that 25% of Australian women who are currently in their reproductive years will never have children. Yet respected researcher and ethicist Leslie Cannold argues that women want to mother as much as they ever did. What has changed is their willingness to sacrifice eveything they've built - everything they are - to do so. Drawing on demographic data, social research and insights gained from interviews with women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, Cannold shows that the easier society makes it for women to combine parenthood and paid work, the closer women get to having the number of children they want.At the end of the 21st century, it is women's freedom to mother that is most at risk. Guaranteed to reshape the current debate around declining fertility, What, No Baby? is a must-read for everyone concerned about Australia's fertility decline and for women who want to better understand - and to solve - the social problems keeping them from fulfilling lives in which children play a part

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fremantle Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781921696923

Book preview

freedom.

About the author

Dr Leslie Cannold was born in New York but has lived in Australia since 1989. She has degrees in psychology, medical ethics and education, and works as a researcher at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. She is heard regularly on radio and TV, and her opinions appear in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Age, the Herald Sun and the Brisbane Courier Mail. Her previous book, The Abortion Myth: Feminism, Morality and the Hard Choices Women Make, was rated outstanding by the prestigious ALA 2002 University Press Books. Leslie lives in Melbourne.

For more information see www.Cannold.com

Women make their own reproductive choices, but they do not make them just as they please; they do not make them under conditions they create but under conditions and constraints they, as mere individuals, are powerless to change. That individuals do not determine the social framework in which they act does not nullify their choices, nor their moral capacity to make them. It only suggests that we have to focus less on ‘choice’ and more on how to transform the social conditions of choosing, working and reproducing.

Rosalind Pollack Petchesky[1]

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I want to sincerely thank my agent, Fiona Inglis, and my publisher, Margaret Whiskin. They believed in this book and fought for its existence against a phalanx of doubting Thomases. Here’s to proving the doubters wrong.

I am also extremely grateful to my partner, my father and stepmother (Michael and Mimi Cannold) and my mother and stepfather (Libby and Arnie Margoluis). They have been more than generous with their emotional and financial support during the writing of, and necessary breaks in writing, this manuscript. Special thanks go to Helen Barnett for help with research, and to Sarah Shrubb for her incisive editing.

Note to readers

This book is the first of its kind. It’s about women who don’t have children not because they are childless by choice or infertile, but because circumstances have limited their freedom to choose motherhood. Women who are childless by choice are those whose desire to be childless is longstanding, and who pick and discard life partners on the basis of their willingness to go along with these women’s strong, unwavering desire to avoid motherhood. There is an adequate and ever-expanding literature about these women. Similarly, many books exist that speak eloquently about the experiences of women struck by infertility.

I know voluntarily childless and infertile women exist. I respect their choices and support their struggle to have their stories heard and acknowledged. But this book is not about them. Instead, it is devoted to putting a hidden group of childless women—those childless by circumstance—on the map and offering some solutions to the problems they face.

I dedicate it to them.

Preface: Why this book?

You probably think I’m mad. Most people believe that it is the freedom women have to choose childlessness—not motherhood—that has long been and remains under threat. But I promise you, I am perfectly sane. After some five years of researching the issue of childlessness, I fear my predictions about the threats contemporary women currently face to their reproductive freedom are frighteningly accurate. In fact, if most women knew what I do about the obstacles many will face getting to motherhood, they’d choose the challenge of an unplanned pregnancy over the ethical and practical dilemmas of unplanned childlessness any day of the week. These days it is mothers, not the childless, who are an endangered species.

The extent of the problem is mind-boggling. At the peak of the baby boom, just over 40 years ago, Australian women were averaging close to three children each. Now they each have fewer than two (1.75 to be exact), and the numbers are still falling. By 2008, experts predict that Australian women will have 1.3 children, or just slightly more than one child, apiece. The US situation is much the same, though high birth-rates among subgroups such as Hispanics and teenagers have reduced the fertility free-fall somewhat, and kept fertility at around two children per woman. However, this is significantly down from the 1957 figure of 3.8 children per woman, and if we adjust this for these subgroups, the United States’ rate is just 1.8 and—like the Australian one—falling.

This decline in what experts call the fertility rate includes two sorts of women: those who are having fewer kids, and those who are having no kids at all, though it is the spiralling number of women in this latter category that has left so many observers open-mouthed. In fact, so staggering has the rise in childlessness been that the Australian Bureau of Statistics predicts that one in four Australian women currently in their reproductive years will never become mothers. In the United States, the figure is one in five. This downward trend is sweeping the developed world, with fertility falling in from 1.9 in 1990 to 1.6 in 2000. Indeed, Italy’s current fertility rate—1.1—is so low that unless things turn around quickly, demographers predict that there simply won’t be any Italians in 100 years’ time. The Greeks and the Spaniards are in a similarly bad way.

But why should things change? Don’t low birth-rates simply reflect the choices Western women are making about children, choices that not all that long ago—in the bad old pro-childbearing days of the 1950s—women were denied the freedom to make? And even if it is true, as many experts say, that these trends have worrying implications for society as a whole, what can be done about them? Expel women from the workforce and lock them back behind suburban picket fences? Confiscate all forms of contraception and return abortion to the backyard? In any case, surely the decisions women make about if and when to mother are private ones for them alone to make. Personal choices that should rightly remain beyond public scrutiny and political interference.

Well yes ... and no. The first thing to understand is that plunging fertility rates in Western countries don’t reflect what women want when it comes to motherhood; they just reflect what women are getting. Ask young women in their late teens or early twenties what they want their lives to look like by the time they turn 35 and the vast majority (92%, according to one large Australian study) say the same thing. They want to be partnered for life with a man, working in a good job, and the mother of at least one or two kids.[2] In the United States, a recent survey of childless career women found that a mere 14% of them said they had not wanted to have children; another survey found that 60% of childless women wished they’d had children.[3] And it wasn’t only childless women who were dissatisfied with their reproductive results: one in four mothers said they would have preferred to have more children than they actually did.

In fact, you may be surprised to learn that the more educated and ambitious a woman is, the greater the number of children she wants to have. In one study, university-educated women were found to want, on average, just over two kids (2.6), while those without a degree hoped for slightly fewer (2.4). But while education and ambition don’t dampen a woman’s desire for motherhood, they severely restrict her chances of achieving it. By the time they reach their early thirties, women with degrees have sharply revised their childbearing ambitions downward, to just 1.8 children: a number that they don’t even come close to reaching. This story contrasts with that of less educated women who each give birth to, on average, slightly less than two children and in so doing come far closer than the more educated to achieving their motherhood dreams.[4]

What sort of procreative difficulties do upwardly mobile women face? No prizes for guessing that the time it takes to get a degree and establish a career is a major one. Most graduates are somewhere north of 30 (particularly if they’re looking to have ‘Dr’ before their names) before they skid into the workplace and start searching in earnest for someone to share and build a life with. As one researcher put it, this doesn’t leave them much time to identify Mr Right, get him up the aisle and convince him he wants kids before the decline in fertility—which begins in earnest when a woman hits 35—really starts to complicate matters.[5]

Not surprisingly, many women find it hard to get their lives to conform to such rigid social and biological timetables. The longer a woman waits to have her first child, the more likely she is to fall short of her childbearing goals. This is not rocket science, just common sense. There are only so many cycles in a month, and so many pregnancies a woman can carry in a year. If a woman has her first pregnancy at 38, she’ll have to keep her finger on the fast-forward button if she’s to have any hope of fitting in the other two she planned before her body ‘just says no’. And if she’s 40 by the time she starts trying to fall pregnant, she’ll be lucky to hold even one squalling newborn in her arms before the final physiological curtain falls.

Is this choice? Most people understand a choice as a decision a person makes when she has a full range of possible options from which to select, and is equally free to choose any one of them. Yet while increasing numbers of Australian and American women are finding themselves without children (or with fewer children than they want), only a handful would say this outcome was a result of free choice. Those in the know, such as Professor Peter McDonald, who heads up the demography and sociology program at the Australian National University, estimates that of the 25% of Australian women predicted to remain childless, only about 7% will actually choose not to mother. Another 7% will be waylaid by medical infertility, and the rest, about 11%, want and fully intend to mother but miss out because of circumstance. What this means is that while the percentage of women choosing childlessness or suffering infertility has remained relatively steady over the last few decades, the number of women who are circumstantially childless is rising at an astronomical rate. It is the phenomenal rise in circumstantial childlessness, not the childlessness that women choose, that explains a good chunk of the downward spiral of fertility rates across the developed world.

There is no question that women should be in charge of decisions about their bodies and their lives. Choices about motherhood—the whether and the when—are unquestionably theirs, and theirs alone, to make. But in order to be free, really free, to make a choice, people need a range of external supports. Such support can take various forms. It can manifest as supportive social attitudes or practices, or the absence of laws or other restrictions on what we say and do. Resources of various kinds are nearly always necessary. For women to have the freedom to choose abortion, for example, laws criminalising the procedure had to be repealed and clinics that women could easily access, and that offered the procedure at affordable rates, had to be set up. In fact without safe, accessible and affordable abortion services, the legal freedom to choose becomes an ‘empty’, or meaningless, right.

It is no different with motherhood. While conservative governments like to pretend that there is nothing they can do to influence women’s reproductive decisions, it’s doubtful that even they believe such nonsense. Respected political commentator Paul Kelly recently called the Australian government’s insistence that it could not influence women’s fertility ‘irresponsible, self-defeating ... inconsistent ... [and] dangerous’.[6] Neither Kelly nor any of the other political commentators looking for a change in the attitudes of decision-makers on this issue is calling for governments to reassert control over women’s bodies. Far from it. What they are asking for is what feminists like to call enabling social policies: policies that provide women of reproductive age with the attitudinal and practical support they need to have the children they want.

The childless by circumstance: why no-one wants to talk about them

But while calls continue to be made for changes to the way the Western world treats actual parents, and those who want to be parents someday, the circumstantially childless themselves remain eerily silent. The reasons for this are complicated, and include the embarrassment some women feel about admitting that they wanted kids, but at close to 40 (or beyond it), they still don’t have them. This is particularly the case when there is no man in the picture. For some, standing up to be counted as a woman who despite all efforts has been unable to achieve the life she wanted for herself is tantamount to a public admission of failure as a human being. I will say much more about this later, but for the moment I note only that such feelings are understandable for women who live in countries like Australia, where we are all raised to believe that we are fully in control of our own destiny and that everything bad that happens to us is therefore all our fault. The truth is, however, both more complicated and less finger-pointing. Many of the decisions women make about having children are in reply to circumstances beyond their control; consequently, their outcomes should attract neither shame nor blame.

Unfortunately, there are a number of groups who would be quite happy if the childless by circumstance remained a political force that dared not speak its name. The motives of these groups range from the venally self-interested to the thoroughly well intentioned. Those concerned with their own interests are the leaders of the business world, and their political lackeys. Because the sad fact is that all women, but particularly mothers, suffer dreadful inequality at work. Harassment and discrimination still exist in many workplaces and, most critically as far as reproduction is concerned, women still make around 84 cents, in Australia, and 77 cents, in the United States, to every man’s dollar. When they become mothers, the pay and conditions gap increases, mostly as a consequence of reduced working hours, and women find themselves unceremoniously booted out of the competitive scrum seeking advancement.[7] The unapologetic and unrelenting family-unfriendliness of the modern workplace is one of the most critical circumstances forcing tomorrow’s mothers to delay—and in some cases put off altogether—their procreation plans.

The massing of a political movement of the childless by circumstance would send alarm bells ringing in CEO suites across the nation because its very existence would call attention to all that is wrong with modern-day workplace attitudes and practices, and to the laissez-faire approach of governments that allow them to continue. If business leaders and politicians can continue to push the plight of the childless by circumstance below the public awareness radar, then no-one need know about the countless frustrations and lost opportunities that young women on the bumpy road to motherhood encounter at work. Much, much more on this problem, and how it also affects men, later.

Less self-serving motives are behind the urge of childless by choice and feminist activists to deny the existence of the childless by circumstance. What they fear is that unless all women without children are deemed to be childless by choice, those who did really choose childlessness will be catapulted back to the bad old days: as deviants, or pitied as unwomanly. Back then, social conservatives got away with claiming that all ‘normal’ women instinctively craved children and knew, in ways that men could not, how to raise them.

There is no doubt that feminist activists should feel proud of their success in removing the stigma attached to women without children: after all, only 40-odd years ago such women tended to be treated in social situations like a bad smell. But it is time for feminist successes on this front—huge, substantial, significant successes—to be acknowledged, and for the debate to become more nuanced and complex. Things have changed a lot since the 1960s, and this includes attitudes to the childless. While just over a decade ago only 2% of Australians believed having none or one child was ideal, by 1997, 30% saw a childless life as complete. In 2000, this figure had ballooned to 48%, and it’s likely that such rapid opinion shifts will continue apace. Even political activists in the childless by choice or ‘childfree’ movement admit that society’s views are changing quickly, with a number reporting that an increasingly common response of friends who are parents to the activist’s own decision not to have children is envy. When high-profile feminist historian Anne Summers conducted a series of round-table interviews with women of reproductive age years ago, she was amazed at the high levels of tolerance women had for each other’s choices about children. Gone, she said, were the ‘shrill accusations’ of selfishness aimed at those not having children that were a feature of Australian life just a few decades earlier. They had been replaced, she said, with a ‘compassionate realism’ and acceptance that ‘life is about making choices and decisions and then living with those decisions’.[8] Indeed, this high and growing level of acceptance backs up the assertions of many social scientists that it is the motherhood decision, rather than the experience of motherhood, that constitutes the contemporary woman’s rite of passage to adulthood.

It is unseemly for feminist activists, some of whom are researchers, to insist with a straight face that in today’s world women who choose not to have children are ‘commonly reproached for selfishness’ or ‘pitied for their immaturity’, when this claim is based on data that is biased, poorly analysed, or simply out of date. It is also sloppy for feminist activist researchers to use women’s ultimate acceptance of, or even happiness about, being childless as proof of choice. The reality is that women may ultimately live a fulfilling and happy life despite being childless by circumstance, but this doesn’t justify rewriting history to say they chose not to have children. It would be better for activists and researchers to take well-deserved credit for having led the charge on achieving much-needed changes in attitudes to the childless by choice, to welcome those changes, and then to switch their focus to those in need of their attention and passionate advocacy: the childless by circumstance.

The need to speak out

I feel extraordinarily grateful to the women who invited me into their lounge rooms, gave me a cup of tea, and then honestly answered all my questions about intimate aspects of their lives. What a privilege! Along with it, however, came a whole host of responsibilities, one of which was to make the sacrifice of their time and privacy amount to something. It simply wouldn’t do to let fear of how my findings might be misused, or anxiety that they might impede some women from getting over their disappointment about missing out on motherhood, stop me from making them public. As I see it, the women whose lives form the basis of this book trusted me enough to share the joys as well as the disappointments of their reproductive lives. If telling their stories to the world, and naming the source of their disappointment, might change their circumstances or those of the generation to follow, then I am obligated to do it.

However, I did seriously consider shirking this responsibility. Not by rewriting women’s personal histories, or altering my analysis in order to conform to existing theoretical frameworks, but simply by keeping my findings locked up in some dusty PhD dissertation that practically no-one would read, and moving on to something else. The reason for this vacillation was that a few years back I wrote another book, about abortion, that told a number of researchers and activists things they didn’t want to hear about women’s attitudes to abortion. Many of these people were colleagues, a few were friends, and I found it painful to be on the wrong side of their anger. At a conference organised a few years after the book was published, I was surprised to find it still the centre of attention. While I had my defenders, much of what was said about the goal of the book—which was to describe and defend women’s abortion freedoms in moral terms—and consequently about me, was, shall we say, far from flattering.

I knew that this book would set me up for attack, too. At the heart of my argument are contentions about the nature of choice that don’t toe well-trod and simplistic lines. I insist that we see a woman’s childlessness, whether chosen or circumstantial, as the outcome of a decision that is worthy of respect. Women without children are neither victims nor candles in the wind of fate. Alongside this claim, however, is my assertion that some women may have made a different decision about motherhood had they had more reproductive options and a greater ability to choose among them. I affirm the capacity of circumstantially childless women to survive the disappointment of missing out on motherhood and build happy, meaningful lives, but at the same time castigate the wealthy societies in which these women came of age for not providing them with the same freedom to embrace motherhood as they had to avoid it. The difficulties contemporary women have getting to motherhood are not personal but political, and it’s going to take political action to ameliorate the devastating impact they are having on women’s freedom to have the number of children they want, or any children at all. The rarity of such arguments in the public domain makes them ripe for misunderstanding and abuse.

Before I began writing this book, I rang up one of my closest friends and told her I didn’t think I could go through with it. I wasn’t as young or as bulletproof as I used to be, and didn’t feel up to being on anyone’s ideological hit list. Again. My friend is stunningly beautiful, extraordinarily talented but, at 39, somewhat insecurely partnered and trying—as yet unsuccessfully—to get pregnant using sperm from an anonymous donor. She is, in other words, one of the women this book is about.

‘But you must write it!’ she shouted down the line, genuinely appalled. ‘What you’re saying is so important and no-one else is saying it! It’s so zeitgeist ! You must speak up! If you don’t, there’ll be another lost generation like ours. More women who’ll be misunderstood, and who’ll miss out on a chance to have children!’

So I considered it and, after asking her to explain what zeitgeist meant (the outlook characteristic of a generation), decided to push ahead.

Why worry about circumstantial childlessness?

There would surely have been others, had I sought their counsel, who would have advised me against writing this book. Foremost among them are the population drones. These are the people who are convinced that low birth-rates, no matter where in the world they happen, or how they are achieved, are always a good thing. They are easily recognised, because they use the same old ‘arguments’, both in and out of their usual habitats—Sceptics Society bashes and other venues for the loud and earnest, but desperately ill-informed. Their arguments go something like this: ‘Doesn’t the world already have too many mouths to feed?’ and ‘Why would you bring a child into such a screwed-up world?’

Such arguments are mistaken, and are tragically beside the point. It is just silly to think that overpopulation in one country in any way cancels the tragic consequences of rapidly declining population in another. It doesn’t. And for Western countries, the costs of decreasing populations are very serious indeed. They include—but are not limited to—shortages of young innovative workers, shrinking tax bases at precisely the time when populations are ageing, a less competitive economy and, as a result, plunging standards of living. And even if large-scale immigration were politically saleable at the moment, which sadly it is not, it is no substitute for the ‘natural’ increases that come through people having babies. Basically, this is because babies don’t migrate on their own; they come with parents, and sometimes grandparents too. This means that absolutely enormous numbers of migrants are needed to make even the tiniest change in the ratio between the young and the old and a dent in the social difficulties that low fertility brings.

In fact, once a population shrinks beyond a certain level, the downward momentum takes on a life of its own, and among those crushed by the landslide are those who already have children (and may have been thinking of having some more). With declining population go schools, hospitals, maternal health care and child-care centres ... and all the other services that ease the burden on parents. This adds degrees of difficulty to parenthood that in turn discourage all but the most hearty and determined of prospective parents from taking the plunge, and so the population shrinks more, eroding services even further, and on and on it goes. Philosophers describe this as an ‘infinite regress’, but demographers and parents call it a bloody disaster, particularly because the point at which the population spiral goes critical is somewhere around 1.3 babies per woman—the level Australian society is predicted to reach as early as 2008. Unless, that is, unless something is done—and fast—to stop it.

But I want to make clear from the beginning that the main concern I have about population decline is not to do with absolute numbers or the social disruption caused by rapid change, though these things do matter. The main reason I worry about population decline is because, upon closer inspection, it reveals the lack of choice many women are experiencing when it comes to motherhood. Circumstantial childlessness is a problem, in other words, because it is the consequence of the lack of real options experienced by contemporary women who want to have children. This lack of options begins with the way our society defines ‘good’ mothers and implicitly questions the rationality of those who procreate. It then moves on to the lack of men who are willing and able to play the husband and father part in the procreative drama, and is sadly rounded off by the Byzantine constraints the contemporary workplace imposes on employees who dare to dream of a life beyond the office.

The limits that the combination of these forces places on women’s freedom to choose motherhood are no trifling matter. Real reproductive freedom is not a middle-class luxury, but a moral good and political right essential to women’s identity, as well as to their capacity to build a meaningful life. Nothing corrodes the essential dignity of a person—male or female—more than being told what they must do, or must not do, with their bodies and lives. This is as true of motherhood as it is of abortion.

What this book won’t be

It won’t be a harangue against women. There’ll be no blaming of women for their failure to reproduce, or to reproduce enough, or to reproduce on time. There will be no telling younger women to partner early and to forget about their careers or risk missing out on children altogether. No attempts to stampede older childless women into grabbing a partner to procreate with (any partner—QUICK!) before it’s too late. I will not be criticising women for not realising what they are up against, nor will I imply that with just a bit of foresight and careful planning, any girl with a Palm Pilot can beat the odds.

There are, unfortunately, a number of people involved in the debate about childlessness who do this. And not only is it truly annoying, it’s also damaging to both women’s self-esteem and their chances of achieving the social change needed to have the children they want. One such commentator is wealthy businessman cum leader of the failed Australian Republican Movement cum Liberal Member of Parliament Malcolm Turnbull. In a recent newspaper piece, Turnbull urged women to close their eyes, think of England—oops! I mean the birth-rate—and get down to marrying at a younger age so they could produce more babies for ‘the nation’. What was most ridiculous about Turnbull’s intervention was not his fretting about the birthrate, but his presumption that women’s failure to breed was caused by their bad attitude, rather than competing demands. Then there’s columnist Cathy Sherry, a young partnered mother and part-time legal academic who never tires of advising single and childless women to take a leaf out of her book when it comes to marriage, work and motherhood. In one article she chastised women who did not act as quickly as she did on the knowledge that fertility declines with age.