#without children

[1938rebecca]

reading without children by peggy o'donnell heffington rn and it's making me love abortion and contraception more than ever . i <3 having the option to not be a parent !!!!!!!!!

[helloiamausacresfan]

Childless Adults Are Lone Group Taxed Into Poverty | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

EITC Expansion Could Address Problem

Adult without children are the ONLY group being taxed (further) into poverty.

This is not okay to do to ANYONE.

[sofie-kouzelnice]

The next frontier: Advocating for automatic (reversible) sterilization of all children at puberty, so when people consciously choose parenthood (when they’re “old enough,” and have “met the right man,” of course,) they will run the same gauntlet of interrogation, endure years of privacy violations and patronizing advice, before being “allowed” to conceive. Talk about a way to weed out the daydreamers and dabblers!

https://medium.com/@XLR8EDLiving/s-i-n-k-single-income-no-kids-4f80a7ef60dd

[sofie-kouzelnice]

'It's not just women who sometimes regret parenthood'

One father believes his friends without children tend to be the happiest.

[sofie-kouzelnice]

Is this the reason why some parents hate childfree people?

The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  

The basic premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves. This symbolic self-focus takes the form of an individual's "immortality project" (or "causa sui project"), which is essentially a symbolic belief-system that ensures oneself is believed superior to physical reality. By successfully living under the terms of the immortality project, people feel they can become heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal; something that will never die as compared to their physical body. This, in turn, gives people the feeling that their lives have meaning, a purpose, and are significant in the grand scheme of things.

Becker argues that the arbitrariness of human-invented immortality projects makes them naturally prone to conflict. When one immortality project conflicts with another, it is essentially an accusation of 'wrongness of life', and so sets the context for both aggressive and defensive behavior. Each party will want to prove its belief system is superior, a better way of life. Thus these immortality projects are considered a fundamental driver of human conflict, such as in wars, bigotry, genocide, and racism.

[bookburning]

Without Children

Like a good portion of other reviewers, I picked this up with enthusiasm and abandoned it in annoyance. "Without Children" is a bad case of an editor or publisher doing the writer and readers a disservice by framing a book as something it's not.

I came for what the book purports to be on the cover: the long history of not being a mother. Inside, I found the material is not so much about women without children, but about how women without children don't actually exist—how motherhood is, in a broader sense, inescapable. This is presented, moreover, as a good thing, a worthy consolation prize, even an obligation to society.

Any author is entitled to make this argument, but it's an obnoxious and unnecessary bait and switch to hide it behind this particular cover. Obnoxious because voluntarily childless women are already subject to erasure and dismissal; unnecessary because involuntarily childless women would get more from this book were it written for and to them directly.

Anyway, for the record: I don't have kids on purpose, and it certainly isn't so I can look after everyone else's. 😒

[sofie-kouzelnice]

The Most Selfish Choice

I can’t imagine any decision more selfish than this: to bring another person into being without their say-so, simply because you desire it.