Saying No: Women’s Experiences with Reproductive Refusal

Abstract

The experiences of intentionally childless heterosexual women are often misunderstood and misnamed. Women who purposefully do not have children are not taken on their own terms but are measured by the idealized standard of motherhood and thus found deficient. Guided by the assumptions of a feminist poststructuralism, two contradictory experiences that are predictable for many non-mothers are redescribed. One experience, the ‘wavering no’, has to do with unexpected and short-lived disturbances in women’s otherwise comfortable relationship with childlessness. The other has to do with childless women’s subjective experiences of openness and freedom, the ‘saving no’ feelings that are related to the generation and perpetuation of a life without children. The article ends with reflections on the importance of reproductive diversity as a political goal.