The child-free influencers waging war on motherhood

At around five weeks into my pregnancy my phone found out about it, and from that point on I was subjected to a barrage of social media content about how much children suck. The first was a video by a woman with the username @childfreemillennial, who filmed herself walking through the children’s clothing aisle at a supermarket. She paused, turned to the camera and gagged. I was so shocked at the sheer nastiness and so hormonal that I cried. According to @childfreemillennial, the most loving thing we can do for our children is to never have them – in this economy, in this society, in this climate.

This woman was not a one-off. In the weeks that followed, I was plagued by posts from influencers goading and laughing at pregnant women and mothers. There were child-free therapists, child-free accountants, child-free authors and endless podcasts and gatherings and conferences. I began to watch these child-free influencers like a spectator sport.

Maggie Dickens is a clinical counsellor from America living in Portugal. She is one of the bigger ‘child-free by choice’ influencers and thinks what we are seeing with declining fertility rates is a generational trend. ‘We have learned to not simply just do as we’re told,’ she told me on the phone. ‘We were taught to have critical thinking, to have individual thought and to question the world.’

The day I spoke to Maggie was the day that the World Health Organisation announced that global fertility rates had crossed below the replacement level. I asked her if she felt somewhat responsible. ‘I grew up seeing the suffering in the world. Poverty was everywhere. I saw the commercials and was fed all this information about how there’s starving children, there’s domestic violence, childhood cancer.