The Choice That Pro-Choice Voters Don’t Talk About
All women should be able to opt out of motherhood, if they so choose. But is this choice always an empowering one?
I wasn’t sure whether or not I should ask my recently married coworker if he and his wife planned to have kids. It can be such a loaded question. What if he thought I was implying that they should have kids? What if they were trying and having trouble? What if he and his spouse weren’t in agreement on the kid question?
Finally, I bit the bullet because we were at a conference with a lot of one-on-one time, and we were running out of things to talk about. I prefaced the question by letting him know that I had no agenda, and that he was free to tell me to mind my own business.
Luckily, he didn’t seem to mind. He said, “We both want kids. But it doesn’t seem feasible. I think we’d have to move to another country.”
His answer stayed with me. He was absolutely right that he and his spouse would get more support in nearly any other high-income country, and more than a few other countries to boot.
It also got me thinking — if he and his spouse were to opt out of parenthood, would they really be choosing not to have kids?
