The raging discussion around abortions and women being allowed to terminate pregnancies is indicative of a growing concern.
One of the most popular reasons I received for being #childfree is financial reasons. I can get behind this because I am staunch believer in people not having kids they can’t afford. The economy seems to be going through it across the globe and women are taking this into consideration. They can barely afford themselves and black tax, what more a whole child? Do you know how much diapers cost?
Mental health was the second reason. As more and more young people become more self-aware, they don’t feel like they are emotionally capable of being parents. For example, depression has hard days whereby you can’t even get out of bed and with parenting, there are no days off. Children need constant love and affection. Children are always chirpy and they are insatiable for attention. How do you explain to a toddler that you need some time alone?
Most women cited that growing up, they didn’t have a great upbringing. It really sounds like no parent did a great job. In light of this, women are terrified of making the same mistakes and passing on the generational trauma. I saw a tweet that made me chuckle about how the only way to end generational curses is to just end the generation. We’re sick and tired of these generational curses.
Women are tired. They are put to home management as soon as they start playing house with their dolls. Now, they are helping out with their siblings, nieces and nephews and that has them all parented out. The economy isn’t helping either. Let’s put it like this, in the old days, it took a village to raise a child. Now we are so caught up in our own lives that we hardly check in on one another. We are so woke we have cut off most people. Culturally, when a mother/father or both passed away the family would come together and help the bereaved. The economy has taken that away from us. People can barely feed their nucleus family and can’t afford to add more mouths to feed. I am of the opinion that the economy is the death of ‘Ubuntu’ and has forced people to become selfish.
My spiritually paranoid self who believes we are indeed in the last days will argue that women are now selfish. The good book does say that in the last days men will be lovers of self. All this self love, self care, self awareness will make humans extinct. Having a child is a selfless act and it gets in the way of our being selfish. I do applaud women who know they are selfish and refuse to have kids because they know they will give them a crappy upbringing.
How can you have a great upbringing in such a mad world? My parents did the very best that they could to keep me safe and still trouble came knocking at my door. There are bad people in the schools, churches and in our families. The atrocities we read about in the headlines are gruesome. Why would you bring an innocent child into all of this mess? Being a good parent means you will worry about what fresh hell the new day will bring and if your child is safe. So I understand if you choose to not have kids for your own peace of mind. It makes sense to me.
You know what else makes sense to me? Refusing to have kids due to fear of pregnancy. Social media has amplified all the horror pregnancy stories and it feels like I bump into a new one everyday on the timeline. Women report losing hair, teeth, irreparable tearing and mental illness. I remember reading an article on HerZimbabwe about a woman who lost her marbles during childbirth and had to take meds for the rest of her life. Post-partum depression makes some mothers commit especially heinous crimes like infanticide. I wouldn’t be able to live with the guilt when I come back to my senses.
In addition to the mental illness point, I need to highlight how much men contribute to that in parenting. Young women have seen over and over how unreliable men are. Everyone is a survivor of the Mjolo pandemic and yet we still haven’t achieved herd immunity for it. The idea of having a child with a man who might flee is not reassuring. If a child was meant to have one parent, we wouldn’t need two to make one. The family structure has been structurally unsound for generations and it keeps getting worse. You have to go into motherhood fully prepared for the eventuality that you might have to do it alone.
Ultimately, I think this anti-abortion movement is a page out of the Handmaid’s Tale. They know something that we don’t about the population numbers and now they have resorted to forcing women to replenish the earth. But would you rather have a few people or plenty of badly raised, emotionally unstable, potentially serial killer humans? You can read up on ‘the mother-blame’ about how mothers make monsters.
