This is how I’ve felt for my entire life. Even as a kid, I dreaded the day I’d have to have them myself one day, as I’d been brainwashed so hard that I didn’t think it was optional. As a teenager, I prayed to god to make me infertile or give me uterine cancer so I’d have to get a hysterectomy but could still have a normal relationship one day. It never occurred to me that I could get sterilized in a less invasive way and still have a relationship with someone else who didn’t want kids.

In my 20s, I combined birth control with condoms and still believed I’d eventually get the “baby rabies” in my 30s. It wasn’t until my first long term boyfriend gave me an ultimatum to start trying for kids that I snapped out of it and broke up with him, then got sterilized. My current partner hates kids and is thrilled about my tubal ligation.

It still pisses me off that childfree women are gaslit to the point where we think reproduction is compulsory, and that it’s less selfish to bring an unwanted person into the world than to just not have kids. It also pisses me off that the media is now starting to accept it, but only in a conditional way if you have a “selfless” enough reason to be childfree such as climate change or not being able to afford kids. It still paints those of us who just don’t like kids or feel any urge to have them as pathological.