This article is a preview from the Summer 2019 edition of New Humanist
Childless Voices: Stories of Longing, Loss, Resistance and Choice (Granta) by Lorna Gibb
Have you ever asked someone why they have children? I admit that I have not. After all, even in supposedly progressive societies that deem themselves distinct from pronatalist nationalist nightmares, parenthood is often taken to be the norm. Childlessness, meanwhile, can make a person conspicuous, leaving women in particular prone to perpetual questioning. Lorna Gibb knows this well. As a woman unable to have children, she has long fielded comments from acquaintances, strangers and, once, a new boss: “So, you don’t have children – is it by choice?” The result, she writes, is that “my identity is inextricably linked to my recalcitrant womb.”
Childless Voices sees Gibb reflect on her own childlessness, but it is ultimately a global portrait of those without children, whether through circumstance, choice, loss or denial (by body, state or others). Via deep listening and rigorous research, their diverse stories are gathered here, depicting the hope, hurt and adaptation shared by beings across borders.
As Gibb shows, the childless woman can be regarded as deficient; she may be stigmatised, shunned and denied even basic worth. In the “patriarchal societies of India and south-east Asia”, for example, “women are invariably blamed and often beaten for childlessness in a couple.” But elsewhere, we find subtle ways in which the childless are diminished (one example being the teacher “subject to comments about how a childless person doesn’t understand children”). The childless, writes Gibb, can be branded “less caring, less kind, and consequently of less value”.
Throughout, there are interesting reflections on childlessness and time. Gibb writes of workplaces in which non-parents may have to fit holidays around those of colleagues with children. Is the time of childless people less precious? She also confronts the notion that they are “selfish”, lacking cause to care for a future beyond themselves (after all, as Maggie Nelson notes in The Argonauts, “protecting the children” is used as a “rationale for all kinds of nefarious agendas”). Separately, Gibb’s stories of bereaved parents prompt reflection on how it might feel to wade through dislocated time in the painful present.
We also meet those who choose childlessness, including “GINKs” (“Green Inclinations, No Kids”), and the nun who describes herself as a “spiritual mother to many”. The nun does not see herself as childless and argues that “to say that a woman is only a mother if she gives physical birth is very limiting of womanhood.” The notion sounds progressive, but Gibb is right to wonder “Isn’t it enough to be a woman? What is it about the role of mother that means we have to attain it, whatever the difficulties, whatever the form?” This invites the eternal question: what makes a woman? Who renders her legitimate? (One thinks of Simone de Beauvoir: “Woman? Very simple, say those who like simple answers: she is a womb, an ovary…”)
Childless Voices would benefit from more LGBTQ voices and from an even broader discussion of alternative notions of parenthood and family (on this, I anticipate Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, published by Verso in May). Indeed, at points, I craved more critical consideration of the construction of our desire, as individuals, to have and raise our “own” biological children over others (I think here of Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood, in which the narrator describes noting that had she known nothing of the world, she would have invented “sex, friendships, art”, but not child-rearing.)
However, at a time when we seem more comfortable exploring ambivalent motherhood (think of TV’s Catastrophe and Motherland) than no motherhood at all, Childless Voices makes an important contribution. It reminds us of the damage done by judgement, and alerts us to the instrumentalisation and ranking of bodies that are born – and should remain – equal, regardless of their capacity or desire to reproduce. As an only child, Gibb writes, “the legacy of my parents’ long and happy marriage ends here, with me.” But perhaps, with Childless Voices, she has started something too.
