This Might Be a Turning Point for Child-Free Voters
NEWS | 20 November 2024
When Shannon Coulter first started listening to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she thought it seemed fairly standard. “All women,” he said, “should have the freedom to make their own decisions, freedom over their own bodies, freedom about whether to pursue IVF.” But then he said something that she rarely hears from political leaders: Women should also have “freedom about whether to have children at all.” Beshear was recognizing that some Americans simply don’t want to be parents, Coulter, the president of the political-advocacy nonprofit Grab Your Wallet, told me. And that handful of words meant a great deal to her as a child-free person, someone who’s chosen not to have kids. “People are just looking,” she said, “for even the thinnest scraps of acknowledgment.” By some estimates, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults are child-free—which is about three times the number of people who are childless, who want kids but cannot have them. Yet politicians have long ignored child-free adults, perhaps out of strategic necessity: The majority of the voters they’re trying to reach either have kids or want to someday, and the nuclear family is exalted in American culture. In a Pew Research Center poll from earlier this year, roughly half of respondents said that if fewer people chose to have children, it would negatively affect the country. As a result, the child-free rarely come up, Zachary Neal, a Michigan State University researcher who studies that population, told me: “Politicians don’t even want to touch it.” The run-up to the general election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has underscored that point. Harris has no biological children, but her campaign has highlighted her role as a doting stepmom. Abortion has been a major issue, but pro-choice politicians tend to emphasize the stories of women who need one for, say, life-saving medical reasons, rather than those who simply don’t want a child. When a 2021 Fox News interview with J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, was re-aired—the one in which he calls Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”—much of the resulting conversation focused on childless adults, not child-free ones. Read: The post-liberal Catholics find their man So far, politicians haven’t had much reason to pander to the child-free; the group has been too fractured to be called a voting bloc. But when I spoke with child-free people for this article, they told me that Vance’s “cat ladies” comments were upsetting enough to inspire political action. Coulter believes that his remarks amounted to hate speech. Yet the response among many Democrats, she said, just seems to be We like babies too!—not exactly the defense she wanted. She founded a nonpartisan group called the Alliance of Childfree Voters and posted about a webinar with a panel of speakers; not long afterward, 500 people had registered—the limit for the Zoom call. The alliance is still new. But the portion of American adults who say they don’t want children could amount to as many as 60 million voters, and that population has been growing. Eventually, Neal predicted, there will come a time when ignoring child-free voters will be riskier than acknowledging them—and “we may be approaching that sort of tipping point fairly soon.” Child-free people are a pretty varied bunch. Politically, they’re quite diverse, skewing slightly liberal overall but encompassing plenty of conservatives; in surveys, many of them say they’re “moderate,” Neal told me. Data he collected with his colleague Jennifer Watling Neal show that not wanting children is more common among those who are men, white, or identify as LGBTQIA—but not by any overwhelming margins. And child-free people care about a wide variety of policy issues, not all having to do with being child-free. “There’s not really an effective way to speak to them as a single bloc in a way that would matter at the ballot box,” Neal said. A scattered array of voters can consolidate, though; it’s happened before. Take evangelical conservatives. In the 1960s, evangelicals were seen more as a ragtag assemblage of hippies than as a Republican bulwark; abortion was not a political rallying point for them. But the group started shifting rightward in the ’70s, and some white evangelical leaders began to dream up how they might gain a political foothold. By the ’80s, they were organizing around a “pro-family” platform that included an anti-abortion agenda. Today, white evangelicals are one of the most powerful voting blocs in America; in 2016, 81 percent of them voted for Trump. Of course, evangelicals already had something crucial in common: religious belief. If child-free adults are largely just connected by a lack of interest in something—well, that’s not necessarily a strong bond. When I interviewed Alan Cooperman, the director of religion research at Pew, for a story on why secular congregations have struggled to take off, he told me: “Being uninterested in something is about the least effective social glue, the dullest possible mobilizing cry, the weakest affinity principle, that one can imagine.” I was reminded of that insight when Neal told me he’s found that child-free adults report feeling pretty neutral about other child-free adults, whereas parents say in surveys that they feel very warmly toward other parents. Amy Blackstone, a University of Maine sociologist and the author of Childfree by Choice, told me that when she and her husband started a local group for child-free adults, they pretty quickly ran out of things to talk about. “After a few meetings,” she said, “we realized we didn’t really have much in common with each other other than we opted out of having kids.” But recent events may be giving the child-free a stronger emotional tie. Vance’s suggestion that parents should get more votes than nonparents, the many Republicans claiming that only people with kids care about the country’s fate: This is the kind of rhetoric that could make child-free adults feel excluded from the cultural norm—and that they’re together on the margins. Studies suggest that when members of a group sense discrimination from the rest of society, it can increase the degree to which they identify with one another and feel proud of their collective identity, which can be politically mobilizing. One reason, researchers believe, is that members might feel they have a “linked fate”—regardless of other differences, they have certain shared interests or vulnerabilities that need protecting. (That’s one theory for why Black Americans, a historically marginalized group, tend to vote fairly cohesively despite being more and more economically diverse.) Read: One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgment of the child-free Child-free people have long been societal misfits to some degree. Studies have shown that nonparents tend to be perceived as less warm than parents, and couples understood as unlikely to have kids are viewed less positively than those seen as likely to have them. The child-free people I spoke with told me that they’d overcome a lot of shame in their own disinterest in having kids. Therese Shechter, a documentary filmmaker who directed My So-Called Selfish Life, about women who choose “not to become a mother,” told me that for a long time, she believed that she would have children, despite having no desire to do so. She spent her 30s filled with dread, imagining that parenthood lurked in the near future. Blackstone told me that when she finally decided not to have kids, she dealt with intrusive questions and inappropriate comments about her choice, something she finds many child-free people relate to. And yet, Blackstone said that until this election, she had trouble convincing people that any stigma about the child-free exists. Now, with political rhetoric making animosity toward child-free adults plainly visible, such skepticism may finally have been squashed. “I think J. D. Vance did us a favor, because he made very public what most of us who are child-free have known our whole lives,” she said: “that there are people who are extraordinarily hostile toward us.” With that prejudice confirmed, ironically, some child-free people may finally feel empowered to embrace their own choice—because if they don’t, who will? After Vance’s screed blew up, women started posting pictures or videos of themselves, sometimes with their actual cats, declaring themselves child-free and ready to vote. Shechter told me that it “was a great moment of solidarity”; Coulter said her feed was “lit up like a Christmas tree.” Around that time, she deleted the phrase cool aunt from her X bio. “I realized I had it there as kind of an apology,” she told me, a “way of softening myself for people who don’t know me.” For a population to become a voting bloc, it needs shared policy goals—and the child-free have plenty. The people I spoke with said they care deeply about reproductive freedom, and specifically the freedom to not reproduce at all. Their concerns include not only abortion rights but also access to birth control, which many fear could be threatened by the 2022 Dobbs decision striking down federal abortion protections. Democrats introduced the Right to Contraception Act in Congress shortly after the decision, which fell short of the votes it needed to advance in the Senate; all but two Republicans voted against it. Meanwhile, many doctors refuse to perform permanent birth-control procedures, such as tubal ligations, for fear that a patient will regret it—a concern that often seems grounded not in actual legal barriers but in paternalism. Birth control should fit squarely within the reproductive-rights conversations Democrats are already having. Yet politicians tend to focus on emotionally potent but less common stories—of emergency abortions, or IVF granting long-yearned-for families. Blackstone remembers hearing Tim Walz talk about how his family wouldn’t exist without fertility treatments, and thinking that she could say something similar about birth control. “My family of two”—herself and her husband—“would not have been possible had I not had access to the reproductive health care that I did,” she said. But “I don’t know that Tim Walz had families like mine in mind.” Read: More people should be talking about IVF the way Tim Walz is Another policy priority could be workplace equity. Many child-free people believe that they’re expected to work extra hours, or that they’re paid less than their colleagues with kids; in one 2022 survey, 74 percent of respondents—parents and nonparents alike—reported that people with children are treated better in their workplace than those without. That doesn’t mean child-free adults want flexibility taken away from parents: They’d like everyone to have fair working conditions, for pay to be transparent, and for people to understand that child-free adults have obligations outside work too—say, taking care of their own parents or babysitting godchildren. “We do all actually have families,” Shechter said. “They just might not look like someone else’s family.” It’s unclear how Coulter’s group, the Alliance of Childfree Voters, will push for these policies. She’s polling members to figure out where their priorities lie; whatever comes next, this nascent voting bloc probably won’t swing the November election. But if one thing can pull the child-free population together in the future, Coulter told me, it might be “finally feeling pride.” Child-free adults don’t just want to be seen. They want to be seen as valuable—as mentors to the kids around them, agents of social change, volunteers in their communities and emotional rocks for the people in their life. “I would love to hear a leader one day refer to my family as a family, which I don’t think I will in my lifetime,” Blackstone told me. “If that happened before I die, I would just be overjoyed.”
Author: Faith Hill.
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