I despise children

DENVER, COLORADO, US: I despise children. No, maybe I should clarify: I am repulsed by the strange Pakistani culture that surrounds the concept of children. There’s an overwhelming societal expectation that a person with a uterus must not only have children (usually multiple), but that they must desperately want children, often to the exclusion of all else. It’s tied very much with the notion that everyone is supposed to get married and promptly produce offspring and put themselves neatly into hetero-normative traditional gender roles so as to be good adults and “productive members of society”. Those who don’t abide by this notion are outcasts.

This is the underlying idea that infests every conversation about health or future or family. It’s this concept that makes those who do not want children (biologically) to constantly brace themselves for potential arguments when they talk about any of these things. It’s the reason why family, friends, and even strangers feel completely within their rights to ask you about your reproductive plans, to make you justify all of your life choices to them at a moment’s notice, to question your thoughts and beliefs as if they know you better than you do yourself.

It’s the reason why the questions are so intensive that when someone, for their own personal reason, asks for lasting birth control in Pakistan. It’s the reason why we are told over and over the rate of regret, the success stories of people who changed their minds, the horror stories of those who didn’t. It’s the reason why, when you state that you have a “phobia of pregnancy” in the hope that it will make people stop asking you without making you explain yourself or justify your feelings for the umpteenth time, the only advice you get is, “Well, that mind-set needs to be fixed before anything else”.

It’s the reason why “because I don’t want children” isn’t enough.  It’s the reason why adoption is never seen as an option because “you’ll want some of your own someday.”  It’s the reason why people put such value on “extending the family line” and “continuing the family name.”

It’s the reason I have to say I hate children for people to stop questioning me on my views on them when I’m not even married. But just to clarify: I don’t hate children. I hate the misogyny that surrounds pregnancy. Most of all, I hate the people who perpetuate this culture, who deny someone else the right to say they don’t want to be part of it, who threaten to make them a part of it. But, you know, it’s so much easier — amongst people with one-track minds — to just say “I hate children”.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 21^st, 2014.