Maclean's: The case against having kids (excerpts)

Elaine Lui was 29 years old and had been married for a year when she and her husband decided they didn't want children. Front-line exposure to a relative's three young children and the work they required provided a wake-up call. "That killed it for us."

As baby refusniks the couple belongs to a tiny but growing minority challenging the final frontier of reproductive freedom: the right to say no to children without being labelled social misfits or selfish for something they don't want.

Still, in a pro-natalist culture that celebrates the "yummy mummy," and obsessively monitors baby bumps and the mini Jolie-Pitt entourage in magazines, saying "I don't want kids" is akin to "There's a bomb on the plane."

Speaking up on the subject can elicit a smackdown. Last February, the 37-year-old journalist Polly Vernon wrote a defiant column in the Guardian enumerating the reasons she didn't want children: "I'm appalled by the idea. Both instinctually ('Euuuw! You think I should do what to my body?') and intellectually ("And also to my career, my finances, my lifestyle and my independence?)." The response was terrifying. "E-mails and letters arrived, condemning me, expressing disgust. I was denounced as bitter, selfish, un-sisterly, unnatural, evil."

Lui, who writes the popular celebrity blog LaineyGossip.com, says, "Motherhood is the ultimate whitewash. Steal somebody's husband, or be a drug addict, then become a mother and you're redeemed."

In a culture in which Jennifer Aniston's childlessness provides weekly tabloid lamentations, a female star who goes public with the decision to remain so demonstrates courage. In a recent interview in U.K. Cosmopolitan, 36-year-old Cameron Diaz, who is childless, expressed a disinclination to have children, citing environmental reasons: "We don't need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet. I think women are afraid to say they don't want children because they're going to get shunned."

"Children were not a way of ensuring happiness or endowing my days with meaning," the poet Lorna Crozier writes. "That hard task was mine alone."

But no book on the subject has been more provocative or summoned more furor than Corinne Maier's No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children, in which she deploys an acerbic wit to dismantle the idealized depiction of parenthood perpetuated by the state. "To be childless is considered a defect; irrevocable judged, those who don't want children are also the objects of pity."

But Maier believes "conscientious objectors to this fertility mythology" should be rewarded, not stigmatized. "To have a kid in a rich country is not the act of a citizen. The state should be helping those who decide not to have children: less unemployment, less congestion, fewer wars."

Much of what Maier has to say won't be breaking news to most parents: children kill desire in a marriage and can be demanding money pits. Without them, you can keep up with your friends [SiS: so why are WE so often considered the ones who are lagging behind our parent friends?] and enjoy your independence.

Research backs Maier's assertions, finding that childless marriages are far happier and people derive more satisfaction from eating, exercising, shopping, napping or watching TV than taking care of their kids. "Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework."

Yet a 2007 Pew Research Center survey found people insisted that their relationships with their children are of the greatest importance to their happiness. Author Daniel Gilbert (Stumbling Upon Happiness) believes the reason people say this is because they're expected to.

In No Kids, Maier lampoons the modern family ("an inward-looking prison focused on the child") and the prevailing mindset that celebrates reproducing one's DNA as "the ultimate objective of human experience." Over-attentive focus on children saps cultural creativity, she argues: "Children are often used as an excuse for giving up on life without really trying. It takes real courage to say, 'Me first.'"

Parents, not non-parents, are the selfish ones, she avers: "Every baby born in a developed country is an ecological disaster for the whole planet."

And that in turn has created a backlash among the childless that is less focused on children than on modern parenting itself., what Lui refers to as the "mommy cult" and Vernon calls the "pampering cult of Bugaboo-wielding, Mumsnet-bothering dullness." Like Maier, Vernon doesn't like what parenting does to grownups: "Spare me the one-track conversations. Spare me the self-righteousness, the sense of entitlement, spare me the pretensions of martyrdom and selflessness." There's NOTHING selfless about having a baby, she argues, pulling out The Planet card: "You really want to be selfless? Adopt."

In fact, the precise goal of the most extreme childlessness advocates out there, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, is this: "The hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo Sapiens. Us."

Some research explores the common concern that the childless will be lonely or bereft in old age: they're no less lacking in support than those with children. "There's no guarantee that having children will make you happy or not having them will make you sad."

In fact, what any happiness appears to stem from is not children or their absence but rather the ability to make the choice. Why then, Lui points out, "did we fight so hard to make this choice, only to have it not respected when we do?"