Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Archives for April 2010

Life With a Book

Laura S. Scott is the founder of the Childless by Choice Project and wrote this book based on her findings.

Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice is the narrative of one woman’s quest to explore the motives and decision-making processes of the childless by choice in North America. Facing the end of her childbearing years in a childless by choice marriage, author Laura S. Scott surveyed 171 voluntarily childless individuals in United States and Canada to determine why and how they came to the decision to remain childfree.

It makes for interesting reading. She says:

I think we need to acknowledge that in a pronatalist society, child-free can sometimes be a loaded term. It can imply more than we intend, inviting people to assume motives—like dislike of children—which may not apply to some who are using the term as a way to communicate their well-being. Child-free also implies a type of lifestyle that may not be an accurate description of the lives of some of the childless by choice persons I have interviewed: teachers, childcare workers, and those who choose to welcome other people’s kids into their lives.

Have you read this book? Can you recommend other books for childless or child-free readers? Let us know.

Whiny Wednesday

“Why don’t you just adopt?”

People ask this question as if adoption is as simple as filling out a form and picking out a baby. But anyone who’s had a close friend or family member go through the process knows all about the drawn-out bureaucracy, the failed adoptions, the expense of going private, and the trauma of adopting from foster care.

So, don’t ask me why I don’t just adopt, unless you have plenty of time to hear my answer.

It’s Whiny Wednesday. What’s your gripe?

From Easter Eggs to Donor Eggs: The Ethics Debate Rages On

The debate rages on about the ethics of buying and selling donor eggs for in-vitro fertilization. A recent study suggested that guidelines set by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine regarding appropriate compensation for donors is largely ignored, and that ads appearing in student publications of more prestigious universities offered way in excess of the $10,000 recommended cap.

A Los Angeles Times article makes the case that with the soaring cost of higher education:

College women comprise the largest market for donor eggs, and students struggling to pay college bills may be more tempted than ever to part with their genetic material. I can imagine some women, down the road, may regret that exchange.

Slate argues that this is just a step away from designer babies, suggesting that:

The egg market shows us what lies ahead. Once it’s possible to upgrade your seed, people will do it. And that will shake the foundations of equality. Rich folks won’t just have the best health care, education, technology, and social networks. They’ll have the most talent, too. Meritocracy will become aristocracy. What then?

A Christian Science Monitor blogger suggests that capping the price of donor eggs will just push open the black market:

Price controls cause shortages, and force people to contract elsewhere, outside the regulators’ jurisdiction.

While majority of people would consider buying better babies unethical, the fact remains that Assisted Reproductive Technology is already an option only for the wealthy. With $10,000 for donor eggs, $10-15,000 per IVF cycle, plus the cost of medical and agency fees, most people just don’t have this as an option.

What do you think? Tell us how you feel about egg donation and designer babies.

You Tell Us

You’re living Life Without Baby now, but maybe you still want children. If so, what’s stopping you right now? Please tell us; we’d love to hear.

[polldaddy poll=2998550]

Holiday Traditions

With Easter and Passover upon us, it’s a time of year for gathering with family and keeping up traditions. Maybe your traditions include a huge family dinner, a sunrise service, or a mad hunt for chocolate-filled plastic eggs. But when you don’t have children, many traditions are either impossible to maintain, or simply aren’t the same. Not that there’s anything wrong with decorating eggs for your own pleasure, or mounting a one-person egg hunt, but having your photo taken on the Easter bunny’s lap could present all manner of problems.

My family didn’t attend church and so our Easter day was almost always spent hiking in the nearby countryside. That’s a tradition I’m more than happy to keep up. If I had children, I would decorate hard-boiled eggs and make bunnies out of pom-poms. An Easter egg hunt would be a tradition I’d adopt for my children, too. But I don’t have children and so I won’t be doing those things.

Many holiday traditions revolve around activities for children, so those of us without children have to start our own traditions. Today I’ll cook lamb with fresh spring vegetables, such as fava beans, English peas, and baby potatoes. I’ll uphold my family tradition of getting outdoors by taking a walk or a bike ride with my husband. I might even go to the sunrise service at the beach.

Which child-oriented holiday traditions have you abandoned and which new traditions have you created in their place?

Top Ten kid-friendly activities to do even if you don’t have kids

Here’s my Top 10 list of kid-friendly activities I still love to do even though I don’t have kids. What’s yours?

10. Play miniature golf and insist on playing by the rules

9. Go out for ice cream

8. Ride the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland

7. Play whack-a-mole

6. Build a sand castle and defend it against the sea

5. Watch Bugs Bunny cartoons

4. Do spins on a swing

3. Draw on the paper tablecloths in restaurants

2. Celebrate my birthday with cake and presents

1. Go to the midnight showing of a Harry Potter movie

Octomom and Peta: Promoting population control

I’ve already been caught by an April Fools’ prank today, so I carefully checked the dates on this news before sharing it.

In an effort to ease her numerous financial woes, “Octomom” Nadya Suleman has accepted an offer from PETA to place a sign promoting neutering and spaying on her front lawn in exchange for $5000 and month’s supply of veggie dogs (which is a 6-month supply for your average 2.4 kids family, so a lot of dogs.)

The sign will read: “Don’t let your dog or cat become an “Octomom.”

This is one of those “don’t get me started” moments, so I will let the Los Angeles Times article speak for itself, and leave you, dear readers, to make of this what you will.

No Fooling: It’s Another Baby Movie, And Another

Coming soon to a theater near you: Two new baby movies. Oh joy.

The first is The Back-up Plan, starring Jennifer Lopez as a woman who decides to have a baby alone using artificial insemination, conceives twins, and then meets Mr. Wonderful (on the day she conceives, of course.) She then drags the poor guy through the usual array of baby-related gags—throwing up on their romantic date, passing out while watching another woman give birth—and ultimately, as the movie is slated as a romantic comedy, lives happily ever happy. It’s Baby Mama meets Knocked Up, as far as I can tell, and does the world really need to see this again?

Also coming soon is Bébé(s) (Babies), a French documentary about the first year in the lives of four babies from around the world. When I first saw this, I thought how refreshing it would be to see the difference in childbirth and childrearing in various cultures. I thought what a great opportunity it would be to highlight the difference in medical care between a country that schedules births for convenience and one where no medical help is available; to show the contrast between countries where a woman might remortgage her house to have a baby of her own, and one where a woman has no access to birth control and has no choice but to keep having babies she cannot afford to feed. This is a movie that could have a lot to say. But watching the trailer, it seems that this is a movie about how cute babies are, and how siblings squabble whether they’re sitting in designer onesies or naked in the African dirt.

Ah well, I guess life would be dull if every movie was made purely to convey a message. On the other hand, do they all have to be pure sap? And how about a positive movie about a woman who decides not to have children and has a happy and fulfilling life regardless? Perhaps Hollywood thinks that too fantastic a concept.