Durex arrived, the pill happened, but the baby pressure stayed

Women still get asked when will they hear the patter of tiny feet, or when are they going to get on with it, writes Terry Prone

A woman in England recently said she didn’t want to have babies. She said it in a blog and then on mainstream media. She is now famous, or infamous, depending on how you look at it, for not wanting to have babies.

Every headbanger who wasn’t busy trolling someone else at the time came out of the wirework to stab her for being unnatural, self-absorbed, unloveable, and intolerable. After all, went the argument, no woman in her right mind would stand up there on the BBC and state that she did not now want and would never want a babe in arms. Ever.

Interesting, is it not, the atavistic threads that run through 21st-century lives and surface just when we thought we had moved beyond such limiting old-fashioned notions as motherhood being intrinsic to womanhood? Fifty years ago, a sponsored radio programme called the IMCO Show went out once a week on Radio Éireann.

If I remember wrongly, you won’t hold it against me. But if I remember rightly, IMCO was a dry-cleaning operation, and the programme visited community events and workplaces, all of them filled with the kind of lippy oul’ wan who has now lost independent life and been subsumed into Mrs Brown.

These lippy oul’ wans were at the stage in life where they had few expectations, a multitude of observations, and a willingness to promiscuously disclose what needed attention in the editing suite after the recording.

The one safe disclosure was the one about the number of children. Today, radio dialogue tends to start with: “And how did you feel?” It can be: “How did you feel when a six foot wave inundated your kitchen?” It can be: “How did you feel when your lover stabbed you with the pinking shears?” In recent times it can be: “How did you feel when you first heard Teresa Mannion give it her considerable all?”

Fifty years ago, radio wasn’t that much into feelings. At the top end of the social scale, people didn’t have feelings because it would have been beneath them. At the middle of the social scale, people who had them were private about them. At the lower end of the social scale, people who had them saw no point in expressing them because nobody at the other two levels was paying attention.

This was complicated by the fact that, half a century ago, women were not that noticeable on radio anyway, and, as we know, women own the feelings department.

The IMCO show, accordingly, did not ask: “How did you feel?” Instead, it would establish the lippyness of the chosen oul’ wan, explore it a bit, and then ask: “How many children do you have now, Mary/Molly/Concepta/Assumpta/Noeleen?” To which the answer would be something on the lines of 16.

Queue a wild round of applause from surrounding audience. If that round of applause did not naturally occur, it would be evoked by the questioner. Once we had the body count, we were set. Majority content broke out, collective reassurance had been given, and all would be well.

Except for people like my mother, who would hurl saucepans into presses in a marked manner in response to these applauded claims and mutter darkly about women who defined themselves by their fecundity. This she would say with such force through such firmly gritted teeth that I was an adult before I realised “fecundity” was not a swear word.

So life moved on and Ireland became more liberal, as did the rest of the world, although the rest of the world was somewhat less self-congratulatory about it. Durex arrived. The pill happened. Sexual freedom abounded. And you know what? The baby pressure stayed.

Today, it is alive and well and torturing women, whether those women are married or in stable relationships, who still get asked when they’re going to hear the patter of tiny feet, or more crudely, when they’re going to get on with it. The answer to either question is: “None of your damn business and get your intrusive questions and yourself the hell out of my life.”

Yet that answer is never given. Young and not-so-young women smile and say nothing, because they do not feel able to share that they’ve postponed having children while they establish a career or buy a home or get sure about their partner.

A minority of young and not-so-young women smile and say nothing because the last several defeating years of IVF have been unsuccessful torture, leaving them with a sense of personal or shared inadequacy and an aching void nothing but a baby can fill.

The most silent minority, however, are the women who do not want babies. Who have never looked in a buggy and envied the mother pushing it. Who will hold someone else’s baby if required, but lack the desire to create one themselves.

Those women — and their partners — are perfectly natural. They don’t go the Dean Swift route and want babies boiled for breakfast as comestibles for families who are down on their luck. They have nothing against procreation, as long as someone else does it. They may, however, make the legitimate inference that perhaps baby-production may be over-rated as a guarantee of happiness, given that watching parents on any day in any supermarket provides evidence to the contrary.

They are silent because of a coercive consensus that parenthood, and particularly motherhood, is the all-time ennobling catalyst in a life, and that anybody who fails to seek this elevation to a higher state is a vicious throwback who just wants an endless supply of designer bags and shoes.

It is not possible for anybody to gesture at the current procreative generation and seek proof of such ennobling. It’s a given. People who have babies are good. People who refuse to have babies (after a decent interval) are bad. This equation is based on the insupportable but firm belief that having babies makes their parents more unselfish. Maybe now and again, but for the most part no.

And that’s not even taking into account the manifest unselfishness of the woman who created the baby storm, who, while wanting to be sterilised, also wants to donate her eggs to facilitate another woman or women who might be desperate to have a child.

The coercive pro-procreation consensus has everything going for it, including predictions of doom, which take the form of a prophecy that the woman who doesn’t, in her 20s or 30s, want a baby, will in her sad and sick old age, wish she could roll back time and have children who would now rally around and be good eggs.

It somewhat contradicts the premise that having babies marks you out as selfless, to suggest that delivering offspring is a good insurance policy against an isolated old age, but consistency has never characterised any coercive consensus.

A long collective coo over every available baby, followed by a zipped mouth on the desirability of popping a sprog, would remove a nasty pressure on those who plan to be child-free and move us on from the IMCO show syndrome.