Odds & ends

• This five-year old TED talk popped up in my Facebook feed last weekend... the speaker, Christen Reighter, is childfree by choice, and her talk focuses on the difficulty she had persuading doctors to perform a tubal ligation on her.  Although she came to a life without children from a very different place than I did, I found her words inspiring. "Motherhood is an extension of womanhood, not the definition," she says. She got a standing ovation.  :)  
• I listened in live as Christine Erickson of New Legacy Radio celebrated International Women's Day with Gateway Women's Jody Day -- fabulous conversation! You can listen here or on most other podcast apps. 
• This coming week, on March 15th, she'll be interviewing Laura Carroll, a longtime childfree activist, about how we can bring together both childless and childfree people to build a shared movement for meaningful change. 
• Pamela of Silent Sorority talked about being an infertility survivor, ethics in the fertility industry, and what happens when fertility treatments don't work, on Slate's "The Waves" podcast. Read Pamela's blog post here and listen to the podcast here or on your favourite podcast app. (Pamela appears about halfway through, around the 23-minute mark -- but the entire episode is worth listening to. Have kleenex handy!) 
• From Elle magazine's March 2022 issue, a rare article that spotlights the experiences of some working women without children during the pandemic. I'm retired (and very thankful for that!), but this echoes the experiences I've read & heard about on various childless/free forums. Sample passage: 

For two years, as COVID fortified the divide between parents and nonparents, women’s respective experiences have been framed in terms of work: emotional work, care work, career work. The image of the exhausted, overburdened mother has been emblazoned on the collective imagination. We saw it in the hard numbers—nearly 33 million Americans resigning from their jobs between April and November 2021, mostly women and extremely burned out. And we heard it in the “primal scream,” as a viral New York Times package called it, of mothers struggling to balance the demands of career and family in a time of virtual schooling, curtailed childcare, and not-so-secret disparities between men and women at home. The childless working woman, presumed frivolous by extension, her problems trivial by comparison, often quietly dissolved into her job. In the absence of contact with family and friends, the remote workplace became many white-collar workers’ stand-in for community. No doubt, work is work and, all told, parents had more of it. But career work, unlike parenting, does not offer love in return....

Throughout the pandemic, childless women who were fortunate enough to keep their jobs, and who could do those jobs remotely, comprised a privileged minority within a privileged minority. Their struggles were different from those of working parents, but they were no less real. Among some high-achieving women, the elimination of boundaries between work and nonwork life became a recipe for disaster—and, from there, a catalyst for a major reevaluation of priorities and purpose.