People Are Different; They Make Different Choices

[Content Note: Emotional auditing; hostility to choice.]

This is part three in a day-long series: Part One is "Pro-Choice: Choosing Not to Parent" and Part Two is "The Happiness Police."

A final observation on the subject of making choices that are different from the majority and different from the overwhelming expectation, specifically the choice to not parent: The judgment and policing that goes on around this choice (and others like it) is deeply hostile to the very basic idea of individuality.

Every person has a set of privileges and marginalizations, which may remain static (ex: white privilege) or change (ex: disability with which one was not born), many of which are relevant in making the decision about whether to parent. Physical health, mental health, finances, employment stability, relationships with extended family, the existence of and desire for romantic/sexual partnership(s), legal considerations governing parenting and adoption, access to healthcare, job flexibility, the interest in having kids at all—this is not a comprehensive list of considerations that influence the choice whether to parent.

(Which is to say nothing of the privilege that even having a choice is.)

We are urged not to examine these considerations—"If everyone waited for the perfect set of circumstances, no one would ever have a kid!" is a common refrain. But there is a lot of space between a "perfect" set of circumstances and an ideal one, or even a manageable one.

(But ooh watch those considerations become ALL OF THE IMPORTANT once a kid is already here. "Why did you have a kid if you couldn't afford parenting? would pass on a genetic condition? had to risk tenure? weren't sure your marriage would work? blah blah shaming blah!")

And the exhortation to ignore what are, for many of us, crucial considerations is not merely a denial of privilege, but also a denial of the way that privilege—and the lack thereof—operates in every individual life.

It's just the same old bootstraps bullshit, swaddled in a fuzzy yellow blanket. Bjornstraps!

Because, although we talk a lot about how many of us can't live the way conservative fantasists tell us is the One Right Way, the fact is that a lot of us don't want to live that way, even if we could.

The intersection of opportunity and desire is the same, no matter who's telling you what way you should live.

And so is the attendant refusal to acknowledge that, even among people with the same privileges and access, there will still be a diversity of choices, because people are different.

That's such a self-evident observation, so simple, so easy, so much the stuff of a Sesame Street segment, that hardly anyone would bother to try to refute it, and yet treating people as though we are all the same is what underwrites every kind of garbage policing from "calories-in, calories-out!" rhetoric to "anyone can achieve anything in America!" codswallop to "everyone should be a parent!" admonishments.

That sort of hostility for individual circumstances, for individual competencies, for individual preferences, for individual choice, is dehumanizing. Central to every person's humanity is their individual agency, a self that is unique.

This stuff is more than annoying. It's harmful. It's resistant to the most basic kindness that is recognizing I am different from you, and you are different from me, and that is okay.