How did this childless story turn out?

I promised some followups with the women I interviewed for my Childless by Marriage book. I think lots of people who are still deciding whether or not to have children wonder how they’ll feel when they’re older. So I asked. The first response came in from Diane. She didn’t actually end up in the book. I had so many great comments and only so much space, plus Diane was childless by choice rather than by marriage, but it’s good to find someone a little older than me who can tell us how her story turned out.

Diane, 63, lives in California and works in marketing and communications.

If you were with a guy when we talked, are you still with him?

“My husband decided in May 2008 that while he still loved me, he no longer wanted to be married. My belief is that this was a type of mid-life crisis, as he decided during the week we spent in Baltimore for his stepfather’s funeral. It was and still is very amicable. We are still legally married, so that I have the benefit of his job’s platinum-plated health care plan, until next year when I can switch to Medicare. We still file our taxes together, too.

Did you wind up having children after all? Is there any chance you still might?

No. Too old both [to give birth] naturally and to adopt. I prefer to adopt animals.

When people ask you now why you don’t have children, what do you tell them?

There are 7 billion people on the planet now and I think that’s about 3 billion too many. 7 billion people and maybe 1,000 wild tigers. So which is more precious, more rare, more worthy of our protection? We’ve made a trash pit of the planet and it will only continue to get worse. I chose not to contribute to overpopulation. Too many people in the world have children with absolutely no thought for how they will support them and no concern for the larger issue of global overpopulation.”

Do you regret the choices that led to you not having children?

Not at all!

Are you worried about being alone in old age?

I am sometimes, but my plan is to surround myself with friends in my age group, as well as younger and older.”

What would you say to others who are dealing with partners or spouses who can’t/don’t want to have children?

Consider that having your own children is an insult to the planet given overpopulation. It’s insanely selfish! Consider the cost. What else could you do with your life and for the world with the money it costs to raise even one child? Worst case, consider adoption as a compromise—better than adding to the 7 billion! But do so with a clear sense of how your life, your wishes and your goals will be altered, even compromised for the rest of your life.

I expect to hear some rebuttal to Diane’s comments. Many of us are sad about not having children, but maybe it will turn out all right. If I interviewed you for the book, and I have not contacted you, please comment or send an email so we can find out how you’re doing.

Book predicts decreasing birth rate will lead to disaster

What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan V. Last, Encounter Books, 2013. 

After years of hearing that we have too many people on this planet and that we have to decrease our population, here comes Jonathan V. Last to tell us that if we don’t start having more children, we’re in trouble. We’ll have a population of old people with no young ones to support them. Other authors tell us the exact opposite. Whom should we believe? This book is a slow read, a scholarly compilation of statistics that show the birth rate going down below replacement level in most first-world countries. Last blames it on many factors of modern life, including the cost of raising children, women going to college and having careers instead of babies, the decline of marriage and religion and the general belief that having children will take all the fun out of life. He details the efforts, mostly unsuccessful, that have been made to encourage people to have more children and makes suggestions for how to encourage more births. Last has a strong conservative bias and occasionally laces this footnote-fest with sarcasm, but there’s a lot of interesting information here, and it certainly provides food for thought. 

There's no doubt the birth rate has been going down. In some countries, such as Germany and Japan, the population is shrinking at a rapid rate. The question is whether this is a problem. I had this book with me at the doctor's office a couple days ago. When I showed my doctor the cover, she exclaimed that a smaller population is a good thing, that this world has too many people in it. That's what most people thing. Just visit any large American city at rush hour. Wouldn't fewer people and more open space be good? Yes, we'd have to work out how to manage things like Social Security with fewer workers contributing to it, but wouldn't it even out in time? 

And how does this affect our individual decisions on whether or not to have children? Certainly overpopulation is often cited by the childfree crowd as a good reason not to have kids. If we're to believe Jonathan V. Last, anyone who has more than two children should be rewarded with tax breaks and other incentives. But Laura Carroll maintains in The Baby Matrix, reviewed here in February, that couples should be given tax breaks for NOT having children. 

So what's the answer? I think if you want to have children, you should have them, and if you don't want them, don't have them. The population will sort itself out. 

What do you think?  

Is population control a good reason not to have babies?

The world's population has reached seven billion and is still growing. In her new book, The Baby Matrix, Laura Carroll insists that if our culture keeps encouraging people to have babies we will destroy the planet. People who care will not have children, or if they must, they will have only one biological child. If that's not enough, they will adopt additional children. The overriding theme of this book is that our "pronatalist" society's belief that having children is the right and natural thing to do is wrong, wrong, wrong.

For baby boomers like me, Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, published in 1968, was required high school reading. In it, he predicted that if we didn't do something about our ever-increasing population, the world would become so overpopulated it would self-destruct. This book became the bible for the Zero Population Growth movement. It started about the same time as birth control and abortion became legal for most people in the U.S., so people really did start having fewer kids. The average family produced two children instead of three, six or a dozen.

Still, Carroll says we need to cut back even more. When I talk to people who are childless by choice, many mention overpopulation as one of the reasons not to have kids. It's rarely their main reason, but it's one of them.

All of this makes me uncomfortable. Weren't our bodies designed to make babies?

I was happy to find some articles that report the population has started decreasing, that maybe we're not headed for disaster. This one from Slate, "About That Overpopulation Problem," explains that some countries, such as Germany, have already lowered the birthrate so much that the overall population is going down.

With couples waiting until they're older to have kids, with birth control being available to most people, and more and more choosing not to have children at all, it would seem likely that our population would stop growing. If not, I suppose the natural methods of population control that work with non-humans--predators, natural disasters, lack of food--would eventually balance out the numbers.

What do you think? Do you believe we should limit births to keep the population down? Has anyone in your life suggested this as a good reason not to have kids?