I recently had an exchange with a woman who wrote in response to this month’s On-the-Ground question: Who has been least accepting of you not wanting kids?
She said that she’d have to say her infertile friends. She has wanted kids, has been in the process of accepting she can’t have them, and her child”free” status is a recent development.
There’s been some ink out there of late on how not having kids is the greenest thing a person can do to help the planet. Less do we read how those who really want to do the green thing deal with also really wanting kids. Writer and ecological advocate Shannon Hayes talks about her road to stopping at two kids, and her story illustrates two key points about how and why we decide to have kids or not.
At the beginning of Hayes’ relationship with her then boyfriend now husband, they agreed it would be better for the Earth if they did not have kids. A few years later …