I highly commend The Minimalist Vegan for their article Why We Don’t Want Kids, and I have written a similar article on my The Party Connection website about why Marriage Does Not Necessarily Equate Children, however this post that I wrote took place years ago while I was married.
I am now several years older, divorced, and more mindful on my environmentalist and vegan journey, and I still don’t want kids. Some people find nothing more joyous than children, and that is fine. I do not begrudge them their choice to procreate in the same way I do not begrudge a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy, or to keep one. This is your body and what you choose to do with it is up to you and you alone.
So here is why I don’t want kids. It is entirely selfish reasons, but it is also environmental.
First, the selfish reason. I am a 28 year old woman who enjoys living a hedonistic lifestyle. The only thing that I have responsibility to is my dog, and he is completely self-sufficient other than him needing to eat and go the bathroom. I enjoy being able to go out whenever I want, have sex with anyone I want at any time, spend money on pure pleasures such as travelling, clothes, and homewares, and not being restricted in how much I drink or what I do. I love living in a neat, environmentally friendly home, which would otherwise be destroyed if I had children, and I love living life on my schedule. For a long time I lived to the schedule of others – my parents and my family, my friends, my husband. Now that I am divorced I can do what I want and honestly that feels too fucking good to give up for a helpless, defenseless child who will only scream and poop on you and all your lovely things.
I also worked hard to create this life and this body of mine. I lost 20kgs of excess weight and quite frankly I do not want to put that on again in order to sustain a growing child inside my womb. I love my big, bouncy breasts and I see them as a sexual part of me – not for others to feed on, and certainly not simply for men to enjoy – but because they bring me pleasure.
So yeah, I dont want children coming in, fucking up my body, my finances, and my life. This is not an unheard of ideology in my group of circle either – two out of maybe ten of my close friends want children or would keep a child if they found out they were pregnant, and only two even have children at all. I dont have to spend time with their kids, and pretend like their demand for attention is adorable, and I am totally ok with that. If that makes me selfish, yeah I’m selfish.
Now, the not-so-selfish reasons. The world’s current population is 7.6 billion people and currently rising. The resources and money it takes to make a child means that resources on the Earth are scarce and we are looking to have a fish-less ocean by 2048. Is this the kind of world you want your children to grow up? I would think its not.
People who care about the environment recognise that if you want to sustain it, having more mouths to feed based solely on your instinct to carry on your lineage is a bad idea, and honestly, just as selfish a one for you to pursue. If the idea of having children because it will affect my lovely life is selfish, the idea of having a child so you have someone to pull the plug from you when you are on your deathbed despite knowing that the world is fucked up and doomed is also selfish. How could you knowingly give your child a shitty future?
There is an alternative though, if you want a future with children, and it is the only option I would even consider if I ever wanted to have a family. This is option is adoption. There are currently 152 million children in need of care, who were born into a terrible situation, who did not ask to be born to someone who could not take care of them. They need a home, and by taking on their care it means that you can give love and support and build a family without adding to the environmental and population problems this world face.
Having children is as staple to this world as eating meat, using plastic items, and being supportive of those only in your world view, but these things that human race do – that they have done for thousands of years, is destroying our planet and our environment. The time to change, to be bold, and to make decisions based on your life and your world is now. I will not conform. I will be selfish, and I will be self-less by not adding to this ailing world.
And this is why, I will never give birth to a child.
Courtney Hope | Author 