How does being childless by choice make you a rebel?

Recently, a dear woman friend of mine became a mother at the "ripe" age of 31. This friend had, for the longest, convinced me of how she couldn't imagine being a mother and was definitely choosing political childlessness as a way of rebelling against what she and I both call the "entrenched need in patriarchy to turn women into wombs".

Now a mother, she has been posting #NewMom101s on Facebook every few days, and most of her revelations are beautiful epiphanies and contrapuntal discoveries as she navigates her way through the choppy waters of maternity and possible single parenthood.

On the other hand, another dear friend, a man, just can't stop sharing articles from liberal Western publications that rave and lionise the intellectual acumen behind the category "childless by choice". Not the childlessness brought about by medical misgivings, financial uncertainties, chronic familial dysfunction, prenatal and postnatal deaths of children, postponing childbearing at the altar of career needs - realities so omnipresent that they basically drive up the single adult social demographic by the dint of their terrifying forcefulness. Not the childlessness and singleness that is subjected to the grossest socio-medical ridicule and marginalisation, as having unfulfilled the quasi-religious, pseudoscientific "duty of procreation". But the childlessness emanating from the ephemeral incantation of our late capitalist present - choice.

In fact, a recent article posted by the aforementioned male friend of mine, reviews a book called Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not To Have Kids. The article in the Daily Beast, a respected, left-liberal American publication, written by Stefan Beck, a childless male writer, perhaps echoed most of the ideas that my friend has been propagating for long - that is, society is made up of free radical human ions, and it's up to us if we want to carry a positive or a negative charge. Whether I want to reproduce or not, is purely my choice as a thinking, feeling adult, and while, I might be fully capacitated to "do the job", I just don't want to.

So far, so good. Interestingly, both my male friend, (let's call him D) and my female friend (let's call her G), are/were convinced of the permanence of their choice for as long as I remember. Both are atheists, as I am, fiercely tolerant of variations in all kinds of identities, leading lives of postmodern urbane individuals for whom the world unfolds as a narrative. With some thrills and some frills.

It's here that my worldview begins to diverge from theirs. I am a single, childless woman in her early thirties who, while being acutely aware of the cracks in the system, nevertheless, can never opt for childlessness as a matter of pure choice. I look forward to a biological junior both as a visceral extension of myself, and as part of an instinctive need to express. I would treat my baby (if I have one in future) the same way I treat my writing.

I am childless, partly out of choice. But that choice doesn't lend itself to permanence, either of political conviction or of individual Epicureanism. While I respect the "choices" of my friends wholeheartedly, I cannot embrace it. There's no attempt on their part to convert me either.

However, I am bothered by a different problem. The "childless by choice" category is increasingly expanding and has already become a sharply observable trend among upper and middle classes. In this bracket, fall the highly educated, professionally successful, travel-loving, technologically-invested upwardly mobile adults, who have moved beyond the type who are yet undecided about what to do with it all. They are not just postponing the whole thing; they are not figuring it out. They have, in fact, figured it out.

This hypermobile adult, interestingly portrayed by George Clooney in the film Up In The Air, chooses neither a lasting sexual partnership, nor does it wish to create the next most formidable bond, that between parents and children. Instead, this adult reads, travels, sells stocks, computes share market movements, opinionates, consumes art and culture, different food, is drawn to eclecticism, is often erudite, or at least desirous of erudition. This adult is not homosexual and hemmed in by draconian laws that criminalise him or her and the kind of life choices that would steer him or her clear of the heteronormative family. This adult is as "straight" as it comes, even though he or she might occasionally characterise the self as "bi-curious", for reasons myriad.

The rainbow of diversity, however, is in sharp contrast to their bullish refusal to have children. If given examples of Japan, which has more people over 80 than it has persons under 15, they describe it as a national choice. (It's another matter that the age problem in China and Japan are the results of state engineering gone hideously wrong.) Similarly, in their defence, they cite the rising cult of the unattached urban adult in modern-day America and Europe, and the falling fractions of people having children. They describe being "childless by choice" as a pinnacle of contemporary individualism, pegged simply on that shaky but overused premise, "choice".

On the other hand, there are agitations all over the West with LGBT people demanding the civil and fundamental rights accorded to a heterosexual citizen - that of rights to marriage and having children. Exactly as the crème de la crème among educated, liberal heterosexuals opt out of both conditions, the LGBTs are fighting tooth and nail for those very rights. In fact, what the LGBTs are battling for is also "choice" and manifestations of it in their contexts, political and sociolegal.

It is here that I come back to the peculiar burden of the word "choice" and how it affects our divergent, utterly different lives and lifestyles. If we had lampooned the #VogueEmpower video #MyChoice featuring Deepika Padukone and directed by Homi Adjania as having a very flippant understanding of the implications of the word "choice", and how utterly it smacks of privilege, by birth or earned, why should we not also subject the growing tribe of "choice-flashers" to the same grueling critique?

What the "childless by choice" adults are so wont to admit, or which they so glibly dismiss and take for granted, is that the matrix of technology has completely supplanted any traditional pattern of connection. So while they furiously "connect" on social media and live the eternal high of instant communication with anybody, anytime; click selfies at the drop of a hat and breathlessly collect "likes" as trophies; determine a person's sociableness by the index of his/her friends' list and record the day's triumph by the number of retweets; understand social trends via hashtags and literally absorb the surround sound of 24X7 media - these very friends (at least, a few of them) have problems, to varying degrees, expressing themselves before a loved one, or explaining their "choice" to a warm but questioning parent.

While I am definitely not siding with Pope Francis who recently branded the "childless by choice" adults as selfish, greedy and chronically depressed (it's a patently false, socio-medically ill-conceived accusation, solely aimed at expanding the imperium of Roman Catholicism), I have a definite problem with those who fall back on the tired euphemism of "choice" to hide the vagaries of their, often difficult, experience.

In a world that is still battling for human rights to life and dignity in large swathes of entire continents, this choice-flashing is a little exhibitionist, to say the least, and somewhere too self-defensive to be convincing. Is being childless as much a choice as picking a car or a cell phone? Is it a little more complicated than voting for a political party (or refraining from voting at all)?

Is citing overpopulation as one of the main reasons for opting out of parenthood not unlike the national experiments in China and Japan, which have caused further anomie and ennui among its people? Is the biological imperative to say a blanket "no" not unlike the biological imperative of "you must", precisely because it leaves no room for further choice? And when turnarounds happen, as it did with G, is it just enough to drown out the quiet caveats from the more unsure adults with thumping declarations of maternal euphoria? And while consistency is not a virtue, it would do well for the members of the "childless by choice" brigade to understand, if not explicate, their "choice" a little less casually.