Do you have kids?
When are you having kids?
Why don’t you want kids?

I was a girl with a list long before Tiktok’s the girl with the list. I just never had the audacity to post it online or the following to get it seen. I published it, admittedly in an odd format, in my 2021 poetry and essay collection Nulligravida. In hindsight, not the best title. I love mixing science into my poems and thought this term, meaning “never held a pregnancy” (vs. having a miscarriage or abortion or full-term pregnancy), was a perfect fancy word for (some of) the childfree. Of course, it was a death knell for marketing. No one is going to buy a book when they don’t recognize the title word.

The list was interspersed between the poems and numbered out of order. I thought this would create a puzzle for my readers. “Are there really 40 reasons or did she randomly choose the numbers?” I thought someone might actually count them. I wanted to engage my readers. As a reader, I now understand how pretentious and tedious that is.

To be honest, we childfree shouldn’t need a list. Parents don’t need a list of why they wanted their children. “I just want a mini-me, I want the experience, I want someone to take care of me in old age,” is all they say if they do explain (usually unprompted). But apparently, “I don’t need a mini-me, I don’t want the experience, I’m not training and manipulating new life into indentured servitude,” is not enough. We’re weird, we’re different, we’re “rebellious,” and LifeScript adherents find that threatening.

But we are not a threat. The majority of people still choose parenthood. I understand reproduction is necessary to continue the species. I am not petitioning for everyone to be like me. Conservative pundits like to fear-monger that “childless feminists” are the reason for society’s decline. No sir. Take another look in the mirror. You’re just big-mad that you can’t control me with your offspring and that it’s largely white women choosing childfreedom. “Replacement rate,” my ass. A dip in the population is healthy. Humans have reproduced in excess of the “replacement rate” for centuries. We didn’t even reach 1 billion until the mid-1800s, and in less than 300 years we’ve increased 7 to 8 times that. Why on earth does that growth need sustaining? The planet is tired. And don’t get me started on the Longevity vs Population Size ratio. (Mosquitoes live less than two months = population in the trillions. African Elephants live for 60 years = population under 500,000. It’s all about maintaining the right population size for the amount of resources available.) The rate of human reproduction defies nature. We have no predators. We live within sterile walls. We have separated ourselves so far from our home that we are killing it to keep going. I am not hurting the world. I am helping it.

TABLE 1. HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE EVER LIVED ON EARTH?

YEAR	POPULATION	BIRTHS PER 1,000	BIRTHS BETWEEN BENCHMARKS	NUMBER EVER BORN	PERCENT OF THOSE EVER BORN
190,000 B.C.E	2	80	–	–	–
50,000 B.C.E.	2,000,000	80	7,856,100,000	7,856,100,002	0
8000 B.C.E.	5,000,000	80	1,137,789,769	8,993,889,771	0.1
1 C.E.	300,000,000	80	46,025,332,354	55,019,222,125	0.5
1200	450,000,000	60	26,591,343,000	81,610,565,125	0.6
1650	500,000,000	60	12,782,002,453	94,392,567,578	0.5
1750	795,000,000	50	3,171,931,513	97,564,499,091	0.8
1850	1,265,000,000	40	4,046,240,009	101,610,739,100	1.2
1900	1,656,000,000	40	2,900,237,856	104,510,976,956	1.6
1950	2,499,000,000	31-38	3,390,198,215	107,901,175,171	2.3
2000	6,149,000,000	22	6,064,994,884	113,966,170,055	5.4
2010	6,986,000,000	20	1,364,003,405	115,330,173,460	6.1
2022	7,963,500,000	17	1,690,275,115	117,020,448,575	6.8
2035	8,899,000,000	16	1,758,578,889	118,779,027,464	7.5
2050	9,752,000,000	14	2,068,409,608	120,847,437,072	8.1

Sources as of November 2022: Toshiko Kaneda, Charlotte Greenbaum, and Carl Haub, 2022 World Population Data Sheet (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, 2022); United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects: The 2022 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2022); personal communication with Dudley L. Poston Jr., Professor of Sociology and the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Professor of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University.   Found at https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/

It took realizing I am childfree, and I don’t have to force myself to go through what I was convinced was mandatory, to understand that gender is a spectrum. I broke out of my conservative upbringing to be accepting and open-minded. Individuals lead individual lives and that’s OKAY. I am in a female body but I am not and was never intended to be a mother. I guess the most accurate word to describe me is demigirl, but I prefer agender. I just exist as a human to experience the world. Sometimes I feel like a machine. Reproduction is not in my code.

So, do I mind the first question? Not really. It’s a conversation starter and a way of relating to a stranger. I get that. What I mind is what follows when I say no. The pestering, the judgment, the flippant disregard that some people struggle with infertility, the assumption the questioner knows me better than I do. If it’s a question of God…let’s just say if he exists, and he wanted me to have kids, I’d have the inclination.

When I say no, move on. Ask me about my hobbies, how I got into my career, what my husband does for a living. There are so many areas of life that help us relate to one another; it’s not all about children.

They don’t seem to understand
my eggs are full of briars

from “Briar Ratio” by Saralyn Caine

I have another book in production, tentatively titled Sweet Childfree, with a bunch of new childfree poems as well as some of my favorites from Nulligravida. It will have an appendix of my list as well as smartass answers to ad nauseum questions (what we in the community refer to as Bingos). I’m hoping to release it in 2025. Stay tuned.