Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

by Meghan Daum

All living things on this planet have a simple two-part mission: to (1) survive long enough to (2) self-replicate. It is a complex animal indeed, arguably one too highly evolved for its own good, that consciously declines to fulfill one of its few basic biological imperatives. The only act more perverse and unnatural than purposely not reproducing is suicide. Some philosophers—the really crabby ones, like Schopenhauer—define suicide as the ultimate act of moral choice and free will. And, some ambiguous anecdotes aside, it appears to be the exclusive prerogative of Homo sapiens. I suppose you could argue that choosing not to have children, like suicide, is uniquely human. In fact, if anything can be said to demonstrate the possibility of free will, it is this: human beings willfully thwarting their one predetermined function in life. Admittedly, calling not having children the ultimate act of free will may be a little grandiose. People on both sides of the reproductive divide tend to be self-congratulatory about choices that are, let’s be honest, completely beyond their conscious control, like people who’ve inherited wealth thinking they deserve it. Parents need to somehow justify the lives of sputum, tuition, and sarcastic abuse to which they’ve condemned themselves, and so make their own grandiose claims about parenthood’s ineffable fulfillments and beneficent effects—that one cannot possibly know what real love is unless you’ve had children, that it is life’s ultimate pu...