Early on in our relationship Julie and I confirmed that neither of us wanted to have children. I had taught long enough that I was glad the children went home at night. Julie didn’t want to be a mother, but had assumed that she would be one, and that it would be messy, exhausting, and frustrating.

Somewhere in her adolescence, she told her mother that she would have kids, but would adopt them after they were potty-trained. That no doubt amused her mother, at least until Julie’s 40th year, when her mother told her that she couldn’t imagine a life without children, even though Julie lacked them and was doing fine.

The culture has ways of enforcing parenthood, and one of them is a parent waiting for grandchildren.

Julie says that marrying a man who didn’t want kids opened her life up in ways she couldn’t have anticipated. I’ve replied that I have other happy characteristics, but she says that was the one that caught her attention. “Women can see the path ahead better than men can,” she said. “You notice when there are detours, because there aren’t many of them.”

My words, not hers, but that’s what she meant. Imagine being able to see a world chock-full of possibilities but having your path through it more or less dictated, especially if you’re fated to be pregnant.

I’m quite happy being a detour in Julie’s life. I hope the detour has become long enough and complicated enough and happy enough that she’ll never find her way back to the main road.

 

A recent news item on the Guardian website notes that a Danish study involving 199 countries over 200 years has found that while men have lower life expectancy than women, 25% to 50% of all men outlive women with the same birth year. This is a baffling statistic, not least because the study suggests you could come up with a number for men who have outlived women, and a number for women who have outlived men. Then you could subtract one from the other and figure your chances.

Messy variables are involved. The study reveals that a man who has a college education and is married will likely outlive an unmarried woman or one who lacks a high school diploma. That makes sense, in my experience, because all of the girls I knew in high school who didn’t graduate were unmarried and pregnant. All of them were rape victims of one sort or another.

Prior to legal abortion, they had to put away the books and get to work supporting their kids. They ended up having hard lives, working for low wages in jobs that lacked health insurance. When they did get married, they didn’t choose great partners. They had all the kids they could afford and then some, divorces, car wrecks, chronic diseases, unpaid bills, rotten luck. The ones I know about are dead, so the Danish study has anecdotal backup.

The authors of the study now recommend a more nuanced approach to gender differences in lifespan, starting by looking at individual countries and time periods to determine what other factors might cause some women to live longer than men. But a more nuanced approach means that you go from the general (199 countries, 200 years) to the particular (girls I knew who got pregnant in high school).

It’s not a good idea to base public health policy on anecdote, although I can see that it would be useful to look at some specifics. Obesity, phthalates, abortion, prohibitions on female education, 19th century obstetrics, guaranteed medical care, violence against women, early puberty due to hormones in dairy products, wage disparities, and constitutional guarantees of gender equality all deserve scientific attention.

 

Gender equality has been on our minds lately. The Supreme Court’s refusal to view Roe v. Wade as established precedent has resulted in abortion again becoming illegal in large areas of the country. The country is being prepped for a constitutional crisis and maybe a civil war over the de facto use of women as breeding stock. Abortion opponents are advocating sweeping federal laws against abortion. Kansas, surprisingly, has just reaffirmed the right to abortion that is guaranteed in its state constitution and plans are being made for other states to follow.

An abortion ban transfers the ownership of a woman’s body to the state. In some cases, states have transferred ownership back to the woman’s husband or extended family or medical provider. Every government that has banned abortion has privileged the fetus over the woman it’s growing in.

Some anti-abortion laws allow abortions in the cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the life of the mother, but a lot of them don’t.

Pregnancy is dangerous. It causes huge and irreversible changes to a woman’s body, particularly in the absence of medical care. It complicates and sometimes ends education, marriages, and careers. Premature births and birth defects hijack hopes and dreams and retirement funds. Motherhood destroys one identity and replaces it with another.

Depending on how you define life, a pregnancy is always a threat to the life of a mother. The minor losses that send men spiraling into mid-life crises wouldn’t impress a mother, especially if she’s ever brooded about the trade-offs she’s had to make.

 

People have asked me if I have children. I say no. Then they ask—some of them do, anyway—if there’s a chance I have any I don’t know about. “I don’t think so,” I say. “I’ve always been terrified of ruining my life.”

Those are my mother’s words, spoken to me in high school, and I’ve thought long and hard about them. My mother was an ambitious, intelligent woman who had grown up in a poor family. She had, by hard work and sacrifice, become an R.N. She must have seen plenty of possibilities in the world and must have also seen that only a few of them were open to her. She took the one that best fit her intelligence and drive, and married a man who brought possibilities into her life rather than taking them away.

She also wanted children. She had two boys early in her marriage. One of them died early on, and that’s the reason I’m here. I’m a replacement kid, and she endured five miscarriages before I came along and lived. I’m also a DES baby, because medical practice at the time dictated that women in danger of miscarrying be injected, over the course of their pregnancies, with large doses of diethylstilbesterol, a powerful synthetic estrogen. I was marinated in it as a fetus.

Female DES babies have a high incidence of cervical and uterine cancer, and they are 30% less likely to be lesbians than the general female population. Male DES babies, like me, do not have characteristics that vary significantly from the general male population, either physically or in sexual orientation. We do recognize estrogen when we see it.

Once in a college English Department meeting, I let it slip that I probably had more estrogen receptors in my brain than anyone else in the room. My female colleagues were not amused. My authority in departmental discussions of gender policy did not noticeably increase.

In any event, in order that I might be born, my mother had put herself in deep danger with a drug whose full effects are still being discovered. She knew that DES had not been properly tested and that it was used in cattle feedlots to make cows put on weight, and to stop postpartum lactation, and to stunt the growth of too-tall girls. But she wanted another baby.

In response to the patriarchal culture of the 1950s, many women looked at all the paths that had been denied to them and tried to ensure they were open to their male children. My mother had a good marriage and a good career and a family she was proud of, but she said, without rancor, that if she had been a man, she would have been a doctor.

From the time I was a fetus, I had a job.

There was never any doubt about my path through a world of infinite possibilities. I was going to go to college and grad school. I was going to have a good job as a professional. After that, I was going to marry and have children who, because I wasn’t still in high school, would not only not ruin my life, they would complete it. I knew all this because my mother told me so.

I managed it all except the kid part. In her last years, when my mother’s mind had succumbed to dementia, part of our long, circular conversations consisted of her asking me if Julie and I had had children yet, and me saying no, not yet. Then she would ask if her parents were gone, and I would say yes, and she would ask if Julie and I had had children yet, and so on, until it was time to go home until next week’s visit.

 

Julie and I have been together for thirty years, and two willful, crafty, accustomed-to-getting-their-way people don’t stay in love for that long without recognizing each other as equals in marriage and everything else.

So it’s been difficult for both of us to watch the U.S. Supreme Court reinstitute slavery for women. Slavery, you might think, is too strong a word. It’s not. I can’t think of anything that subverts the right of a woman to be a free, independent, and thinking individual more than being forced to give birth. If you think that force is too strong a word, then you need to look at some of the punishments states are prescribing for women who seek out abortions and for the doctors who perform abortions.

We are beginning to see mutterings in favor of criminalizing birth control and making it impossible for both women and men to have surgical sterilizations. These are Christian nationalist impositions of Eve’s Curse, when God says, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16, English Standard Version)

I know there are men who pride themselves on being the state-sanctioned ruler of their families. It doesn’t work out well for them. Often as not they end up as the unwitting instruments of the women and children they oppress.

There’s nothing quite so sad as looking at a thirty-year-old Mormon father walking the beach at Redfish Lake, with a baby in one arm and a screaming toddler dangling from the other, and two older kids yelling, and a dog pooping on the only shady spot in sight, and everybody wanting ice cream or a band-aid or the bathroom. There’s a bewildered look on his face, one that says, “I thought I was supposed to be the boss.”

You realize that his life is going to be one long lesson in running easy in the harness. You hope for his sake, and his family’s sake, that he learns it.

Authoritarian patriarchy: not all it’s cracked up to be.

 

I can’t imagine being in a marriage where I’m the boss. Julie’s and my marriage is ruled by consensus, which means—both of us will tell you—that we don’t get our way nearly often enough. But we haven’t made the common and fatal mistake of blaming each other for our lack of freedom. In fact, we have more freedoms and wider horizons together than either of us would have alone.

By consensus, we have rejected the responsibilities of parenthood and have privileged our own development over the continuation of the species. Because of the Supreme Court decision, we can see that the joy we’ve found in each other being a fully alive, responsible, thinking, free human being will from now on exist in opposition to state policy.

The Supreme Court just affirmed the two or three million years of human history where women were property and didn’t have a choice about whether they were going to give birth or not.

It was not a happy two or three million years, at least compared to the happiness humans have achieved since they started having relationships based on equality. It’s a shame that the pursuit of happiness is in the Declaration of Independence and not in the Constitution.

It’s perfectly natural for a civilization to enact its deepest instincts into law, much as the Catholic church looked long and hard at human nature before deciding what humanly unavoidable sins would keep the church going strong—and thus were forgivable—and what sins weren’t.

 

But a dark future is being born. It’s too late to abort it. The blind drive to reproduce that kept scattered tribes of humans alive through glacial periods, famines, eruptions, disease, and war has become counterproductive. The sheer number of humans has become a threat to human survival, in the forms of mutually assured destruction, resource depletion, disease, pollution, and the overheating of the atmosphere and the oceans.

By following our instincts rather than our reason, we have become a weed species, and have spread over the garden to the detriment of everything in it, including ourselves. The same forces of natural selection that have shaped life on earth are about to perform one of their periodic eradications of the unfit, and humans, male and female, will be among them.