No, women who choose not to be mothers do not threaten future generations!

It’s been four years since I published “Let the Womb Go!” », in which I deconstruct the injunction to motherhood and maternal responsibility, which widen the inequalities between genders but also between women.

Nothing has changed in four years. Well yes: now it’s worse. Certainly the words of women who wish not to have children have been liberated. But rather than seeing the questioning of this norm of femininity as good news, rather than seeing it as an opportunity for all women to make informed choices, whatever they may be, in deep agreement with who they are, rather than those around them and society would like to be with them, the reactionary right wants to make the expression of a personal desire a criticism of motherhood and even a proselytizing apology for the decline in the birth rate against the backdrop of ecological “delirium”.

Farandole of reactive and transphobic observations

And, of course, feminists are held responsible for this elusive belly-flop, while France is still at the top of the European birth rate chart, according to the latest data from INSEE.

It only takes one woman to publish a single book about her choice not to have children – Why I chose to have a dog (and not a child)by Hélène Gateau – to endure the usual competition from reactive and deliberately transphobic comments in the press, on television and on the radio.

On Wednesday 4 October, Eugénie Bastié was on the set of the show “C ce soir”, where I was also invited to “debate” the choice not to be a mother, which has only involved me for 25 years – j I’m 41 today – but I still have to continue to “debate” with people who seem incapable of simply “accepting” it.

Feminist obligations kept me elsewhere, and I therefore left the valiant Charlotte Debest and Corinne Maïer, authors of two works that I recommend you read, to debate with this question posed in the preamble: “ Are No Kids humanists or dangerous extremists? (Yes), selfish beings or on the contrary, at a time when the planet is warming, the most responsible among us? »

The No Kids, these evil “ecological extremists”

To the classic assumptions of selfishness, insensitivity and immaturity is added today the very contemporary accusation of “ecological extremism”. If we don’t want to have children, yes Always that we think only of ourselves – an argument used by people who ask you: “Who will take care of you when you are old?” » and therefore consider their children as future free EHPADs; this is Always that we do not love children – because having children is irrefutable proof that we love them, as the increasingly alarming data on child abuse does not attest; and its Always that we lack maturity, since this is notoriously linked to our reproductive system: until we have had a child, we remain one, QED.

But now here we are Furthermore accused of threatening humanity’s future with our own “Ecological disappointments”. And in fact the climate crisis is a topic brought forward more and more often by young people who say they don’t want children. But he is not the only one, as Eugénie Bastié herself admits on the set of “C ce soir”, when she gets offended “The main reason women don’t want children is personal development”. Pretending to be happy outside of motherhood would make Robespierre look like a care bear, in fact…

The environmentalist obsession is therefore above all a media obsession, supported by journalists who have not deconstructed the norm of motherhood. The journalist Salomé Saqué says nothing else about France Inter, when she asks to normalize the choice not to have children, declaring that if she does not want to have children for environmental reasons, the choice not to be a mother derives from a question of desire in itself, which must be considered legitimate, like the desire for parenthood.

Furthermore, the pro-child argument was served by Eugénie Bastié who, on Europe 1, a few weeks ago, considered that slapping your child does not equate to violence, as the activist Bettina Zourli underlines on her Instagram account @jeneveuxpasdenfant. On the other hand, those who defend the birth rate and the family in the name of the “good of the child” are not defending all birth rates nor all families, far from it. We haven’t heard much from Eugénie Bastié expressing outrage over the fact that in April the Mayotte Regional Health Agency was encouraging, for example, young women to get sterilised.

An argument against freedom of choice

Because paradoxically, birth rate defenders easily attribute the climate crisis to overpopulation. This is the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, who in his latest book is alarmed by the fact that in 2050 the population of Nigeria will have exceeded that of the United States. Not only does it place current ecological damage on the shoulders of a population that has not yet been born, it also obscures the fact that the United States is responsible for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, compared to Africa’s 2.5% as village. Total.

Finally, most self-confessed babyphiles vigorously opposed PMA for almost everyone*, even though 100% of the numerous studies conducted on the subject in the last fifteen years confirm that children raised in queer families are not more unhappy than others, on the contrary. And that, furthermore, the number of single mothers has doubled in thirty years, with all the risks of precariousness that this entails for both women and children. Today, more than 1.5 million French mothers are single, and the vast majority of them suffer from their status. What is the difference between them and single women who choose to start a family on their own, much to the dismay of PMA critics for everyone?

The choice, obviously. Because it is there, the limit that has remained imprinted in the minds of those who oppose childlessness. In reality, and although the work is immense, they campaign not so much for children and their rights as against women’s freedom to make choices that undermine a reactionary and racist heterocentric norm.

But we won’t bother bothering them. Our children’s future (well, yours…) depends on it. I hope they will live in a world where exercising free will is no longer a threat, but simply normal.

*We remind you that to date the so-called PMA law for all excludes trans people.

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