I Am Not a Slave to the Biological Clock

I Am Not a Slave to the Biological Clock
PUBLISHED 7/11/2022 by Kirsten Stade

Our creative impulses are so much more than they seem in a pronatalist society.

(Creative Commons)

I’m celebrating World Population Day with a toast to the waning days of my fertility, and the fact that I’ve made it through my childbearing years without being overpowered by the so-called “biological clock.” With the recent turn toward the benighted and punitive in our nation’s abortion and reproductive health landscape, menopause will come not a moment too soon. The thought of bringing a child into an already full life, and onto an already full planet, has always seemed preposterous. It wasn’t just my anxiety about our planet’s carrying capacity, or the fact that that for most of my 20s and 30s I had little time to contemplate having a child, though I certainly didn’t—I was too busy playing in marimba bands, volunteering at Guatemalan wildlife rehabilitation centers, rescuing dogs, immersing myself in a Master’s program in conservation, and liaising with a series of activists, drum circle devotees, and professional music festival-goers who were decidedly not Dad material.

More than anything it was that the notion of having a child—a small, strange-looking, utterly dependent and infinitely demanding incipient human—held absolutely no appeal. And it was a good thing, too, as my career with conservation nonprofits exposed me to the fact that each new human born to an average American will contribute roughly 9441 metric tons of carbon to our total footprint. That means that a lifetime of the most dedicated efforts to bike to work and eat low on the food chain would be negated many times over by the act of making another human—a human over whose consumption habits I would, after all, ultimately have no control. Fine then, a pronatalist cheerleader might urge: Teach your child to consume less. Teach your child to live like an African villager, or even an average European—whose consumption of land, water and fuel are appreciably smaller than those of Americans. But the problem is this: Even babies born in Africa or Europe have an environmental impact that can no longer be absorbed by the ecosystems into which they are born.

. . ..

In fact, regardless of the biological or culturally-conditioned genesis of the procreative impulse, we do ourselves and our species a disservice when we throw up our hands in its face, and declare our powerlessness to exercise discernment over one of life’s most consequential choices. And in fact, while there is surely the possibility that I will one day regret not having had a child, there is an equal possibility that I would regret having had one—a possibility so terrifying that our failure to warn young people of its existence (just Google “I regret having children,” and be prepared for a ride) seems grossly negligent.

This is why I feel no regret and a building sense of relief as I appear certain to carry my ambivalence about childbirth beyond the menopausal point of no return. And why we would do well to recognize that perhaps the “biological imperative” is simply a powerful creative impulse, and we are glossing over this more complex reality when we attribute that impulse, with little examination, to wanting a child. That, by obeying the cultural expectation that we procreate, we may be denying ourselves the broad array of fulfilling creative outlets that would also satisfy our inchoate longings, while also saving the planet from the many burdens that accompany each human who joins our ranks.

https://msmagazine.com/2022/07/11/women-biological-clock-child-free-world-population-day/