“Atheist” is similar to “childfree”, but “vegetarian” is positive; it describes what the person does eat.

So by that logic, a childfree analog to “vegetarian” might be:

“I’m an aunt”
“I have a dog”
“I build hot rods”
“I party all night long”
etc.

Which of course doesn’t work because it says nothing about the decision not to parent! Not to mention framing one’s childfreedom this way is pronatalist in that it suggests the childfree person is replacing parenthood with another activity, as if parenthood is naturally present and its removal leaves a hole to be filled by something else.

This, incidentally, is a paradigm that I come across quite frequently among parents and childfree alike. Our culture is so pronatalist that it’s automatic to think of the childfree decision as one of removing-and-replacing, a concept that I feel misses the point entirely. Just like I didn’t choose vegetarianism so that I could eat more plants, I didn’t choose childfreedom so that I could ________ either.

So if the decision not to parent doesn’t leave a hole in one’s life that should be filled, terms that suggest absence (“childfree”) or replacement (“travel”) are inaccurate. Then what else is there? Preservation of earlier/current way of life: “nulliparous”, a medical term meaning “has never had a child”, or relationship status: like “single” describes someone who doesn’t have a romantic relationship, we could make up a word for “doesn’t have a parental relationship with a child”. These both are problematic because they don’t look into the future, and being childfree is as much about desire and commitment as it is about current status.

That’s the thing. What we’re looking for is a term that describes that desire and commitment going forward. All kinds of people merely weren’t/aren’t parents, but it’s a special kind of person who won’t be!

Since there is no parent/child analog for the relationship status “single”, we can’t construct a term like “alwayssingle” or “permanentlysingle”. This leaves us with negative terms, which in this case I don’t object to. Parenthood is very common and expected in our society, and describing ourselves with a word that translates to “won’tparent” or “neverparent” only serves to emphasise the fact that said status is the result of a deliberate decision.

But most importantly, the verb “to parent” is crucial here, as it defines the “neverparent” by her own behavior, instead of defining her by the presence/absence of something external to her (the “child” in “childfree”). This shift of focus would be the best thing we could do for ourselves!

But I’ll leave the actual construction of the word to someone with an intimate familiarity with etymology!