My mom wanted to be a grandmother, so the last time she secretly protested, I turned in front of her and exposed the ultimate firewall: “Look mom; It’s like I like to live my life selfishly and I’m not sure if I should have kids.” The woman who gave birth to me was in disbelief while I felt admiration for raising a daughter who challenges her generationally. Although next I wondered why it would be selfish to do what I want with my life.
Maybe, because just as I could have children to please my mother and to fulfill a family chore, the public debate is increasingly about blaming women for the impact of their emancipation. They sell us that the welfare state collapses only because woman chooses to distance herself from the reproductive power that nature gave her. Birth rates in Spain this semester have fallen to the lowest level in history.
Then the opportunists flee and take the opportunity to strain their reactionary morality without any filter. The far right, which blames abortion, is essentially the same as the nostalgic left, which is determined to blame the low birth rate solely on capitalism because it keeps us precarious or, he even affirms, distracts us with mundane pleasures. In both cases, they preach a stale paternalism based on the idea that every woman was born to give birth, even if she didn’t choose to, poor thing.
You could have come to a friend’s wedding. At the table we sat the “without a family”, the “married children with expectation” and all of us with the economic reins of our lives. The only difference is that we chose the first ones freely, after spending our twenties working and studying, our thirties are our years of going out and in, enjoying without ties. Because yes, motherhood is a choice too, but it involves renunciation, like living for someone else until they fend for themselves. And this is often kept secret by many girls for fear of being publicly accused of being “bad mothers”.
It is strange that those who are offended by our freedom masquerade as subversives when they can no longer play the game of the system that wants us back into the reproductive herd. Even days force you to breastfeed when the bottle gave women so much autonomy to enter the labor market. The odd ones question a woman’s maturity to make decisions about her body when the abortion ban condemns the humble classes to having abortions in unhealthy homes.
So the reactionaries are not interested in precariousness; just the alibi for his speech. And even less our freedom, because they cannot tolerate that when a woman chooses, she only chooses herself and not as part of a community or family. In doing so, they spread the old stigma that female solitude is never chosen. The ugly word is loneliness, which means sadness. Does a woman in her thirties feel sad when she is enjoying her freedom as she pleases with a significant personal project?
This leads to an uncomfortable truth. With friends, we reflected on how many women of my mother’s generation, deprived of their caring role, don’t know how to fulfill themselves because perhaps they haven’t had as much time to get to know each other outside of their children or a man. Many others are even rebuilding their lives after getting divorced; maybe they’ve embraced the happy taste of singleness. This raises doubts as to whether they all formed a family of their own free will or just because of societal norm or custom.
So if my freedom not to have children causes problems, it’s only because I believed I could choose my destiny and the previous conquests. The public must help those who need it. But why insist on burying my will under the wishes of the state or family when those wishes are not mine for the time being? Our freedom only makes itself felt when we are uncomfortable with it. And throughout history, too many stereotypes have established themselves that control, divert and coerce them. Defending that, my selfish chick, is subversive today.
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