In her testimony, Betsy, an academic from the US now based in Vienna, tells us of her experience as a woman who chose not to have children, both inside and outside of marriage, and reflects on the differences between the United States and Europe in terms of reproductive rights.
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BETSY: «My name is Betsy Hall I am from the US, most recently from Brooklyn, New York. I’m 40 years old and I’ve been living in Vienna for the last two months.
I decided at a fairly early age that I didn’t want to have children, although I’ve always been in long term relationships. And as other people around me, when I was living in the Midwest in US, were having children, I became more and more of an outsider. And yeah, so I thought it was important to come here and talk to you, so other women maybe wouldn’t feel alone. I’ve just never felt the urge to have children, I’ve never had the desire. I thought when I was younger that there might come a time where I did have the desire and it never came. And then of course as I got older, I just realized that there was so much that I wanted to do and a limited amount of time that we get to live. So yeah, I just stuck with that choice.
Yeah, I think that living in the Midwest in the United States it’s a pretty clear path of marriage, then baby carriage. And so yeah, that’s what all of our friends were doing. I was married to my ex-husband for 15 years and we had been in a relationship for five years prior to that. So yeah, when we were younger, a lot of people didn’t have kids and then everyone started to have children. And of course, everyone started to ask, “When are you going to have children?” People then started to make assumptions that it wasn’t possible for you to have children and started asking fairly invasive questions. So, it was always difficult to explain that it wasn’t something that wasn’t possible for me but something that I was choosing not to do. And I think that a lot of women, particularly at that time, as I’m talking really about 15 to 20 years ago, just didn’t see that as a valid option. And of course, still in the early 2000s, it was like a woman’s duty to have children. And when I was interested in other things like traveling and writing and theater and music and arts and playing with my dog, people just feel that as selfish as though there’s something wrong with you. I don’t know that this has changed so much over time.
When I read literature from hundreds of years ago, I still see parallels in what’s happening in 2018
in pretty much any part of the world. But I do think that my personal situation is changed because I’ve made more of an effort to change my own situation, to connect with other women who are like me, to seek out new places and experiences where things have clearly changed. However, I don’t know about the Midwest. I haven’t been there for a decade. My perception is that not much will have changed there and I don’t expect it to change with time. I think you need to reach out into a broader circle to find people who are like you. I think that when people feel that they’ll end up alone, I’m not sure that that’s ever been a great concern for me, because to be honest, one of the reasons why I haven’t wanted to have children is because… I love to spend time alone. I love to be alone. I’m not scared about living alone. I’m not scared about dying alone.
In terms of the things that I leave in this world or the impact that I have on people, I can certainly do that through my profession. I can do that through friendships. I can do that through volunteer experiences. I can do that in a lot of different ways. At the end of it, it’s not really about me anyway. For me, when I die, I’m dead. It’s not… I don’t necessarily need to be remembered. I don’t need to have a legacy.
I think the difference between living in Brooklyn and basically living anywhere else in the world
is that there’s so many people that it’s almost impossible not to find people who are like you. When I was living in the Midwest, while I think I had two friends close to my age who didn’t have children, and living in Brooklyn, I didn’t have a single friend who had children. It was really easy for me to connect with people who had made… either made similar choices or just life circumstances made it to where they didn’t have kids.
I’m also an academic, so finding people without children within academia is fairly easy to do. That was always a little bit of a… It was always a place where I didn’t feel alone, I guess, because many of my colleagues didn’t have children and actively made a choice not to have children, particularly the older ones who were coming up in the 70s with feminist waves and that sort of thing. The university or the academy is… it’s not representative of what any city is like, so that was always a different place to be. But yeah, between the Midwest and between New York, I think it’s just a matter of people and how many people there are. Of course, many people are choosing to raise children in New York City. Many people are not.
I have worked in the field of composition and rhetoric for the last 16 years as a full-time professor
in two mainly different programs: one in the US at a small liberal arts college, one in downtown Brooklyn at a huge urban university. Coming here to Vienna, I’m now still an English teacher, but looking maybe to get back into the university, but working with businesses and with individual students right now. I think that, of course, women in academia have more choices, so that’s part of it. But we also have data that shows that women who are more educated have fewer children and often choose to be childless, so I think both of those things are working with each other that we see fewer, not just women, but academics in general. That’s correlated with education level.
Yeah, so the expression that I’m most familiar with in English is child-free by choice. A lot of times you would actually have to explain that to someone when they ask the question and sometimes, they will ask you an upfront question of, “Are you childless or child-free by choice?” But to me, I think the two terms have always been synonymous, but it’s not anything that I’ve studied, so I’m not sure. I just think that it’s important for people to realize that it is a choice, that it’s not just something that is… that is every woman’s destiny. I think that it’s an important conversation to have regularly in many different forums.
So yeah, that’s the reason I wanted to take part in this, just to offer another face and option of what women can do. I think that for me, because I lived it for close to 20 years in the US, it was always an important topic. The moment that I got married, maybe even before I got married, there were already questions of: “When is the first grandchild coming?” “When are we going to have grandchildren?” Every time I would go to my in-laws’ house, “When are we going to have a grandchild?” “When are you guys going to have kids?”
And people never, they never got it, when you said definitively “We are not having children. It’s not something we want to do”. It was always a question.
I’m not sure that I’ve lived here long enough to comment in a very reliable way on how it would be different in Vienna. And I also think it’s naturally different because I don’t look like I’m childbearing anymore necessarily. But I did have a message from my in-laws that they would be very happy to have a grandchild, which is framed slightly differently than when is the grandchild coming. But I don’t know.
Yeah, that was… It’s usually from family that the questions were coming and here… but I think it’s because I’m 40 also. And because there’s language differences and perhaps there’s some kind of… maybe it’s taboo, I’m not really sure. People don’t ask, “When are you having kids?” or “Why aren’t you having kids?”
In my family, my mom’s sister didn’t have children. I guess I’ve never really known if it was a conscious choice or if it was because she couldn’t. So, I’m not really sure. My father’s brother also didn’t have children. Again, not really sure if it was a conscious choice or if it was because he couldn’t. But there was definitely, I guess, some kind of precedent for a life without having children. My brother has also made a conscious choice not to have children. My sister, on the other hand, has five children. So yeah, there’s definitely some precedent in my family.
I mean… it’s hard to be as much of a pessimist as I am at age 40, but I see this cycling constantly. I don’t really see that changing. I think as different people come into power, there will always be an attempt to legislate women’s bodies. The forms of control over women’s bodies have changed over the centuries, but there’s always been some kind of political control mechanism in place. Of course, it’s really frustrating.
I attended the Women’s March in New York City. You see plenty of women who… who don’t have any kind of issue with it, you know, there’s plenty of women in the US, who don’t think that women should be in the White House, in politics. They still kind of see this as a man’s field to dominate it’s okay for other people to make decisions about other people’s bodies. So I mean, for me, living in the US for almost 40 years, you just see different versions of it. You know, the latest Supreme Court debacle, I remember like Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, when I was a child, and to watch like Brett Kavanaugh and people’s responses to that. A part of me can’t believe it, but another part of me can. I don’t see it changing much. I mean… it might change in cycles, but I don’t see it changing much. I do think that it’s interesting in Europe that people have, at least what I know, have less of a desire to legislate abortion, that it’s okay for people to have whatever their beliefs are. Oh my God, I’m talking like an astronaut, a Catholic. That they still don’t feel like it’s their… that is up to them to legislate that, that it’s a personal choice.»
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