Naturligt barnfri. Kroppens betydelse i frivilligt barnlösas positionering

Abstract

This article reports on the results from the two first studies on voluntary childlessness in Sweden and draws on interviews with 30 childfree women and 6 men. The article explores how they managed to create a legitimate childfree position in a society permeated by pronatalistic norms proclaiming parenthood to be self-evident in an adult normal life. Failure to conform to these norms results in being negatively stereotyped as selfish, abnormal and a childhater. Women who do not wish to become a mother also risk being called into question as “real” women since the feminine identity and women’s social roles are conflated with ideas about maternalism. Instead of explaining their childlessness with external factors most of the interviewees stressed the fact that they never had the desire to have a child. Insisting on that they always had known they did not want children, they did not even experience they had made a choice not to have a child. In this way they positioned themselves as “naturally childfree”. To some extent the childfree women and men agreed with pronatalistic norms that wanting a child is the natural order of things and that a woman who mothers also has achieved her biological destiny. Although acknowledging an irresistible drive towards reproduction in most people, our informants expressed the total lack of this instinct in their own bodies. However, they also left the door open to the possibility that this biological urge could suddenly appear – therefore rejecting sterilization as being a too drastic contraceptive choice. Important for the naturally childfree position is thus the simultaneous acceptance of, and detachment from, the biological reproductive urge.