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Childfree
I Don’t Feel Guilty About Not Having Kids
Should I?
I read something that other day that really got on my wick. In it, the author opined that people who are childfree by choice are all psychologically damaged by the “guilt” we feel over being so “selfish”.
A lot to unpack there, huh? I know we’ve all debated a hundred times whether being childfree is selfish or not (spoiler alert: it’s not), but what I’d like to interrogate here is the meaning of the word itself.
From the Oxford English dictionary:
“Selfish: lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.”
And for the US Americans, from Merriam Webster:
“ Selfish: seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others.”
I would like to know what dictionary people who accuse the childfree of being selfish are using, because theirs doesn’t include half of the definition: the lack of consideration for others.
Instead, these people imply that not having children because you simply don’t want to is selfish, regardless of the fact that it has no effect on anyone else’s life, but that raises two considerable problems.
