I can sort of see that it might be nice to have children, but there are a thousand things I'd rather spend my time doing than raise them. The daily grind of motherhood seems like a prison sentence to me. Though I have nothing but respect for the work of raising children, I don't like being around them. At least, I don't like being around most of them most of the time. Some people say I'll feel different about my own, but I'm not sure I want to take the risk.
Michelle Goldberg, Maybe Baby adapted from Salon
I envy the certainty people like Michelle have when it comes to becoming a parent. With the question of breeding out of the way, she can better focus her energies elsewhere. Since she's written the essay from which this was quoted, Michelle has written about women's issues and women's rights. She's traveled to far-flung places like Jordan, India and Argentina. She also has two books under her belt.
In this essay, Michelle advocates for choice. She notes that in more than one hundred interviews Madelyn Cain, author of The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today, has found that it was "choice, not motherhood, [that was] the key to happiness." Michelle wraps it up with inputs from Rick Hanson, a California clinical psychologist, who says, "The happy people are the ones who wanted kids and had them or didn't want kids and didn't have them."
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