"Please let me be childless in peace"

Australian writer Laura Thomspon was childfree by choice, and then medical complications made it impossible for her to conceive. But she isn't complaining--about not having kids, that is. What she wishes would stop is all the pressure.

She writes:
Four gynaecologists and two operations later, I have restored health but no children, although it would be possible to risk everything and throw vast amounts of money at the problem in the hope that a miracle would ensue. This, in my opinion, would be truly insane.

Yet society seems to be telling me that this would be a normal thing to do. We all know about the lengths women go to, post-35, in order to defy the fact that they are as fertile as the Kalahari. A treatment such as IVF costs about $A6000 a cycle and, by the time a woman is 42, it has a success rate of about 5 per cent.

It is invasive, distressing and destructive. Yet it has become quite usual to seek such "treatment" because not having a baby is increasingly seen as an affliction, a curse. "God hath taken away my reproach," says Rachel in the Book of Genesis, when after a period of barrenness she finds herself pregnant. The language is different, but the sentiment is scarcely changed.

Check out the entire essay here.