Ellie Gonsalves is a name I’d never heard before today and hope to never hear again. She only rates a mention for being stridently opinionated about not wanting children.
Curiously, Ellie’s list of 118 reasons why she doesn’t want kids omits the obvious — that she’s too selfish.
Her story is dull and not really worth the oxygen, but the bigger picture suggests a generation out of sync with the natural world — excepting those sorry individuals with legit concerns about passing on genetic flaws.
Like Rebel Wilson’s head, for example.
Yikes. What the fuck happened there…?
Anyway, you’ll never seen a lioness rejecting suitors on the basis that her “milk ducts might get clogged from lactation“. Especially if the queen of the veldt then voluntarily injects saline to plump her bosom ahead of the next National Geographic centrefold.
But clogged norks are only 1/118th of Ellie’s problems.
Yes, parenting is hard. The solution for people who don’t like any level of difficulty above “easy” is to let other people do the hard stuff while you spend all of your time and money on yourself!
Be pretty!
Have experiences!
Travel the world!
Buy endless frocks! Pose for endless selfies, and party hard, and …
Yawn.
In an effort to lend pseudo-scientific credentials to Ellie’s diatribe, the author cites research which “shows most women who choose to be childfree don’t regret their decision.”
But I call bullshit on that one.
The tiny study sampled 72 women who were either (a) voluntarily childless, (b) involuntarily childless, or (c) mothers, and found that only one third of the voluntarily childless were happy about it compared with the invountarily childless!
That’s not just bullshit, ABC News, that’s blatant bullshit!
Putting that into hard numbers: only eight women out of 72 were happy to be childless. The truth is actually the opposite of the author’s strident manifesto.
Most women who choose not to have children regret it.
Counterbalance this argument with one from the New York Times, that “having witnessed the “new old age’’ from a front-row seat, I’m haunted by the knowledge that there is no one who will care about me in the deepest and most loving sense of the word at the end of my life.”
Regret is a one-way street.
You came to it after that fork in the road where you could have picked a harder path but went the other way because it with easier and there was no risk of vaginal prolapse.
The usual excuses — some fiction called the “motherhood penalty”, or climate change, or overpopulation, or blah-blah-blah — eventually wear thin.
In five years time (if you have nothing better to do) google Ellie Gonsalves and count how many kids she’s adopted.
I predict three.
That way she won’t grow old and die alone AND gets to keep milking her tits for profit on Instagram.