Childless by choice
I am lucky. I came of age when women had so many more choices than our foremothers. I speak, of course, of white, Western, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender women, who in the last few decades, have joined our male counterparts as hyper-privileged in the world.
On June 24, 2022, the gains of all women were cut off at the knees by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) overturning a 49 year old case, Roe v Wade. In Roe, a Texas woman, pregnant with her third child, approached the court under a pseudonym, Jane Roe, to challenge the Texan abortion law that limited access to those cases where terminating a pregnancy was necessary to save the woman’s life. SCOTUS in 1973 ruled first trimester abortion should not be illegal but set limits on access to later-stage terminations. A game-changer.
The Canadian road to legal abortion was a bit different. In 1969, the federal government passed Bill C-150 which decriminalized both birth control and therapeutic abortion, the latter having been on the books since 1869. We have the father of our current Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, to thank for this. C-150 was also the Bill that began dismantling the barriers to equality that people in same-sex relationships experienced, leading to Trudeau senior’s statement “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” Indeed, groundbreaking legislation.
As a little kid 50 years ago, who was in whose bedroom was irrelevant to me, but I was already starting to reap the benefits of “women’s lib,” the second wave of feminism associated with this period. It allowed me to know from my earliest age that being a mother was not on my to-do list and, more importantly, for the first time in history, it didn’t have to be.
I was raised alone with much older siblings. My parents had no friends with kids my age and we have no cousins living nearby. Other than my classmates, my first encounter with a child was when my niece was born. I was 10 and entirely unimpressed with this blob of flesh who usurped my role as youngest in the family. At age 2, my niece stayed with my parents and me when my sister (her mother) was hospitalized for the last three weeks of her second pregnancy. Instead of using the chance to build a bridge from my mid-generation position, I was a horrible beast to her. It wasn’t until she and her brother approached teenage-hood, that I began to develop some rapport with them but even then, I treated them like adults because, well, I’ve just never known what to say to kids, even when I was a kid.
“Well, it will be different when you have a family of your own,” people would say to me when they got wind of my disdain for children.
“But I don’t want kids,” I’d say, comfortable with this confession even as a youngster. I was then and remain confident today there are people more skilled and with temperaments better suited to molding quality adults from the clay of a baby.
As a teenager, chances to earn money were slim, babysitting being the most common. I took the jobs but unlike most teen girls, I wasn’t using it to prepare for motherhood. I was in it for the cash. One summer, a neighbour family hired me to care full-time for their two girls, aged 7 and 8. Their mother worked in town and their dad was a farmer who was regularly in and out of the house. I was a terrible sitter. TV-less at home, I wanted nothing more than to veg in front of the soaps. The kids quickly learned I had no clue about keeping them in line and behaved in that style made famous by the von Trapp children before Julie Andrews arrived on the scene. I was grateful the day their dad said “Would you like to go home?” I nodded, sodden Kleenex in my hand, and drove myself home still crying. They’d pushed me to the limit, and he’d found me in mid-breakdown, coming into the house on one of his trips to get a coffee refill or use the toilet. That was my last day on the job. The experience cemented my decision, at 16, that I would not have any kids of my own.
In university, I got interested in women’s rights while studying women in politics. I was in third year when Dr. Henry Morgentaler and his legal team convinced our Supreme Court to overturn the law prohibiting voluntary abortion. He did so after years of heroically providing women with safe abortions despite the law. He was a hero because, while I believe strongly in the rule of law, some laws are unjust and we need people like him to push those boundaries. The Supreme Court found the anti-choice laws violated section 7 of Canada’s Charter and Rights and Freedoms, the right to life, liberty and security of the person. We all rejoiced.
Choosing abortion is never an easy decision and carries stigma. Women talk tentatively about theirs with deep emotion, even years after the fact, often sharing that they have told very few people. I have not had to make that difficult decision. In my mid-40s, though, during the only brief moment in my life when I thought I was pregnant, I knew voluntary termination would be right for me. It was a false alarm, thankfully. Although I wouldn’t have changed my mind if he hadn’t supported the decision, I was lucky that Jack was pro-choice too. It would be so much more complicated to make that decision against the wishes of the father as I’m sure many women do.
Jack, though, had spent half his life in Poland where women enjoyed decades of safe and legal abortion access. Polish women learned that nothing can be taken for granted when, in January 2021, Poland's Constitutional Tribunal made abortion illegal except when the pregnancy is a result of a criminal act or when the woman's life or health is in danger. The SCOTUS reversal of Roe v Wade is not an isolated incident.
Could this happen in Canada? The debate between the pro- and anti-choice positions has hit the headlines regularly since the Morgentaler decision, usually prompted by a Conservative leadership campaign like the one we’re in now. “Will this one allow the issue to be discussed in Parliament, if the party gets power?” pundits and activists fret. Each time the Cons have formed government, we’ve held our breath - we know a chunk of the Conservative base is socially conservative on the abortion issue among others. So far, none of those leaders have “gone there.”
I hope that trend holds but the changing international tide on the issue should make us all nervous. Will there be future generations of women who can’t leave the world of childbearing and rearing to people better suited to it, like I have?
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