Women Without Children

For thirty-nine years I was no child's mother and was a pretty sorry prospect for the job, thinking back on it now. Thirteen years into motherhood and loving every moment of it, I still remember the stinging remarks and glances I got when I was a single childless woman, especially those from religious women, when I admitted that I didn't have children and couldn't imagine in fact a child in my future. The horror and shock on their faces made it clear that in the opinions of some, I was at best a pitiful excuse for a woman, a selfish monster at worst. "What's wrong with you?" was the question and look that greeted my decision back then to forego motherhood.

I thought then and still think today that there's nothing wrong with a woman who, by choice or chance, is childless. Honor the woman who knows what she needs and what she doesn't. Hug her and give her permission to grieve in your arms if she desires a child, but fate and circumstances prevent her from doing so. Sometimes we get to choose, sometimes we don't.

Can two women reach out to each other and find satisfying companionship if one is pregnant and the other permanently unable to bear a child? I think they can. But what if Elizabeth had refused to carry her pregnancy to term? Suppose Mary had conceived and later miscarried? What if one of them had decided that motherhood had come too early or too late? Part of what it means to grow up as a woman and to start looking at the world and your own life with new eyes is to cease being quick to pass judgement on those whose path, by choice or circumstances, differ from your own. You learn to accept the choices other women have had to make. Afterall you know how much courage it takes to choose one path and how much pain and guilt you suffer when you must turn your back on the path most travelled.

Whatever path a woman chooses with regard to childbearing, she will need the support of other women. The scorn and punishment that society heaps on those who do not conform to the biological expectation that women breed means that every woman must find the inner strength to decide what's best for her and to accept the things that are beyond her power to change. With that, let those of us with children honor our sisters who do not have children, both the ones whose reproductive choices are different from our own and those who struggle to make their peace with the fact that in truth they really had no choice in the matter.

Lord, help me not confuse a woman's womb with her soul.
With her who has given birth I rejoice.
With her who never experiences childbirth I celebrate her struggle
to find a different path for herself.
As for my sister who had no choice, I stand in solidarity, lending her my shoulder for support.
Show us all the other different ways to create
nurture, and reproduce good in the world,
without having babies.
Show us how to love and raise the babies we already have.
Teach us how to create a world of love and justice for all
where no child is left behind,
and no mother, or mother's friend, is made ashamed because of her womb.

Renita J. Weems, Ph.D.