Why do the 'child-free' want EVERYBODY to devalue motherhood?



When my mother lost her temper, her most frequent complaint was the existence of her children.

“I could have been someone if I hadn’t been saddled with three kids and no damned man to help me,” she’d yell between puffs on a cigarette.

Lacking their own firsthand experience of motherhood, some of these women bolster their arguments by remembering the hell they put their own mothers through.

Back in the '80s, I didn’t know any other mothers who blamed their children for ruining their lives, or who said out loud that they regretted that their children were born. They surely existed, but decent people didn’t express such dark thoughts in public.

Ball and chain

We’ve come a long way, baby. In the 21st century, it’s socially acceptable to talk about children as a ball and chain, a fetter on freedom, the reason a mother’s life never took off. Children were once thought of as a gift. For an increasing number of women, they’re seen as a burden.

Modern women are telling each other and the world how they refuse to have their lives ruined by children. Those who have had them and wish they hadn’t confide their resentments to magazine reporters.

Last month, the Cut published an article titled “I regret having children.” The writer speaks to three anonymous mothers who relate their depression, frustration, and resentment at how having children derailed what they thought their lives would be.

One says having kids made it harder to enjoy her “stressful but fulfilling” job as a nonprofit executive. For a whole year, her baby was colicky and wouldn’t stop crying. In fact, her child was so unbearable that even the babysitter said, “I can’t do this anymore," and quit.

Mother load

Childlessness also used to be a private matter. Not now. Everywhere you turn, there's another middle-aged woman with a brittle smile proclaiming how happy she is to have forsaken motherhood in favor of her hobbies, her career, and her ability to sleep in.

Lacking their own firsthand experience of motherhood, some of these women bolster their arguments by remembering the hell they put their own mothers through. As a child, 40-year-old Victoria Peel Yates

watched my mother work six days a week running her esthetician business while doing all of the cooking, cleaning, and child care at home. She was so busy being a working wife and mother to two kids that she put off many of her dreams until retirement.

Yates never tells us what these unfulfilled dreams were, just that her mother "loved her work" (only retiring when the U.K.'s COVID lockdowns forced her to) and that her "lifelong wish was to become a grandmother."

The life Yates remembers sounds hectic, but also rich; through a different pair of eyes, this balancing act could look like "having it all." Could it be that her mother found meaning and fulfillment in her life of "sacrifice"?

Birth dearth

It doesn't seem to occur to Yates, who needs a cautionary tale to justify her own choices. What kind of life did not having kids allow Yates to have, anyway? She's vague on the details, mentioning something about a freelance writing business. Mostly, it seems to be about what she avoids — the "upheaval" that would make dealing with her grief, anxiety, and financial precarity even more difficult.

Business Insider filed Yates' essay under "Parenting." This seems like an odd choice, until you realize that the whole "child-free" movement is about turning a lack into something more like an equally productive alternative.

National Public Radio’s “It’s Been a Minute” podcast puts it plainly. It’s a bit painful to listen to or read given the Valley Girl dialect of host Brittany Luse. Here’s how she opens the March 24, 2026, episode on being “child-free.”

Childless implies that being a nonparent may be a matter of circumstance, like maybe you wanted kids, but it didn't work out. But the term child-free is much more rooted in the choice to be a nonparent. That's the group of people we'll be discussing today.

They're not just people without kids; they're nonparents. Instead of lives, they nurture their own freedom, modernity, and self-determination.

RELATED: My mother was evil; here's how I help others face their own abusive childhoods

Neil Libbert/Getty Images

Ma'am Solo

Luse’s guests include author Emma Gannon, who wrote a novel about being “child-free by choice.” Gannon wants us to know about the vital contribution she's making by not reproducing:

I feel like child-free women bring a lot to society. You know, if someone is sick, if someone has aging parents, if someone needs someone with free time, someone with more finances 'cause child-free women normally have more money, I think it's sort of like, well, let's celebrate the auntie figure. Let's celebrate the godmother. Like, these are people in society that I think get stuff done as well.

Like, yeah. It sounds less like a celebration and more like whistling past the graveyard. Any honest adult who gets to middle age knows that we look back on some of our choices with regret. But the child-free advocacy ladies put on their brightest smiles and assure us (themselves, really) that they won’t regret not building a family. They won’t feel lonely in their old age when they have no one to care for them but a low-paid staffer at a nursing home.

Womb and doom

It’s no surprise that the “child-free” discourse attracts the more extreme end of the feminist spectrum. A surprising number of these feel no shame in weaponizing their wombs. Such feminists treat the children they might or might not have as bargaining chips in the never-ending war between left and right.

This woman put out a 30-second social media video telling the world — presumably all the misogynistic, white, conservative patriarchs — she wouldn’t be having any babies for the oppressive regime we call the United States of America. She’s surprisingly confident in her fecundity for a woman of 44:

I have lots of eggs left. I’m very fertile. I got it tested. And I want you to know I’m not going to have any of your babies. Not going to reproduce my amazing genetic composition for this country. ... And you’ll kill me before you rape me.

Something is profoundly wrong with a culture in which it’s not only acceptable, but applauded, to discuss child-bearing as a jail sentence and a buzz-kill for women. As a culture in general, we barely even give lip-service any longer to the idea that we adults have a moral responsibility to children. Look at how "The Simpsons" turned the expression “Won’t somebody think of the children?” into a joke — the kind of thing only a stupid, pearl-clutching “Boomer” would say. It’s gross and cringe to think of the children, right?

As a former child who knew from birth that his mother experienced his existence as an assault on her personhood and her dreams, I can confirm that these attitudes have sad and lifelong emotional and moral effects on a person. Say a prayer for America’s children; God knows many of their mothers won’t.

'Anti-natalist' bombing suspect kept secret explosives lab inside home: Report



Law enforcement authorities reportedly uncovered an explosives lab in the home of Guy Edward Bartkus, the FBI's sole suspect in the Palm Springs, California, fertility clinic car bombing on Saturday.

Agents discovered "huge quantities of highly explosive materials," including PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, the New York Post reported, citing law enforcement sources. PETN, a chemical compound used in commercial detonators, has been utilized for decades in terrorist attacks across the globe.

'Basically, it just comes down to, I'm angry that I exist and that nobody got my consent to bring me here.'

Thomas Bickel, Bartkus' neighbor, told the Post that FBI agents evacuated his Twentynine Palms neighborhood after the bombing attack.

"Five FBI agents came knocking on my door. ... They told me, 'The house behind you has suspected bomb-making materials,'" Bickel told the news outlet. "I talked about it with agents. There was a full-blown bomb lab in this guy's house."

Bickel, a father and Army veteran, stated, "I know how powerful and destructive IEDs can be."

He added, "Sitting here with my kids, knowing that this guy was 50 feet away — a bomb of that magnitude could have destroyed our house. Just knowing that he was working on that right here while I was hanging out with my kids — it was pretty insane."

RELATED: Fertility clinic bombing suspect declared war on 'pro-lifers' in alleged manifesto

Photo by GABRIEL OSORIO/AFP via Getty Images

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Saturday's bombing targeted the American Reproductive Centers, a fertility clinic, resulting in severe damage to the building and other nearby structures.

Bartkus, 25, died in the blast, and at least four others were injured. According to the fertility clinic, no embryos were destroyed.

"DNA testing of the decedent's remains found at the scene of the Palm Springs vehicle explosion is a positive match to Guy Edward Bartkus, the suspect in the clinic attack," the FBI stated.

Akil Davis, the assistant director of the FBI's Los Angeles field office, confirmed that the attack was an "intentional act of terrorism" motivated by "nihilistic ideations."

Bartkus was described as an "anti-natalist" who was active online, including online forums such as Reddit.

His alleged online manifesto read, "The end goal is for the truth (Efilism) to win, and once it does, we can finally begin the process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life."

"Life can only continue as long as people hold the delusional belief that it is not a zero sum game causing senseless torture, and messes it can never, or only partially, clean up," it continued. "I think we need a war against pro-lifers."

The alleged manifesto encouraged viewers to "download the recorded stream of my suicide & bombing of an IVF clinic."

RELATED: Wyoming abortion ban blocked hours after suspect arrested in connection to clinic fire

— (@)

The suspect allegedly shared a 30-minute audio recording explaining why he decided to "bomb an IVF building."

"Basically, it just comes down to, I'm angry that I exist and that nobody got my consent to bring me here," he allegedly stated.

He noted that he was "very against" IVF, citing that it is not possible to obtain consent from those who are not yet born, according to the recording.

"Basically, I'm anti-life," Bartkus allegedly said. "And IVF is like kind of the epitome of pro-life ideology."

Bartkus' estranged father told KTLA that his son had a history of setting fires as a child, including burning down their family home at 9 years old.

The anti-natalist movement

Simone and Malcolm Collins with the Pronatalist Foundation, an initiative dedicated to raising awareness about demographic collapse, detailed the anti-natalist movement and its growing popularity across online forums.

They told Blaze News, "Antinatalism is a negative utilitarian philosophy, meaning they either believe positive emotional states have no value or are trivial experiences and the core goal of all life should be the eradication of suffering."

They noted that the fertility clinic bombing was not the first suicide attack motivated by the anti-natalist movement, citing the Sandy Hook shooting.

'Their ultimate goal is to see all of us dead and human civilization snuffed out in its infancy.'

Simone and Malcolm Collins explained that antinatalism "has always been the logical end state of the urban monoculture that dominates progressive culture."

"However, we would be remiss to not mention that antinatalism appeals disproportionately to individuals who have unusually high amounts of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy as has been confirmed in multiple academic studies," they added.

"Their ultimate goal is to see all of us dead and human civilization snuffed out in its infancy," Simone and Malcolm Collins stated.

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AP has to fix headline for its hit piece on DeSantis nominee to UWF board, Scott Yenor



Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made eight new appointments to the University of West Florida's board of trustees on Monday. Among them was Scott Yenor, a professor of political science at Boise State University and a Washington fellow at the Claremont Institute.

Whereas individuals at the university appear happy to have Yenor aboard, scandal-plagued liberals such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz and elements of the liberal media were prickled by the appointment of a conservative both supportive of the family and keen on "dismantling the rule of social justice in America's universities."

In its rush to discredit Yenor ahead of his likely confirmation by the Florida Senate, the Associated Press distorted the truth this week and found itself having to correct another headline.

The Thursday article appears to have originally been titled, "DeSantis appointee to university board says women should become mothers, not pursue higher ed," but has since been retitled, "DeSantis nominee for UWF board says women shouldn't delay motherhood for higher ed, career," and fitted with a correction noting that Yenor has advocated prioritization of motherhood, not for women to opt out of education altogether.

'There can be no great countries without great families.'

In the hit piece, the AP's Tallahassee-based education reporter Kate Payne clutched pearls about the professor's warnings about the dangers of DEI — which a damning Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University study revealed in November "may foster authoritarian mindsets, particularly when anti-oppressive narratives exist within an ideological and vindictive monoculture" — as well as about the declines of traditional marriage and American birth rates.

After trying her best to tether Yenor to the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, about which the Associated Press previously spread falsehoods, Payne quoted from Yenor's 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando in an apparent effort to damn him with his own words.

Payne was evidently prickled by Yenor's Chestertonian critique of America's denigration of the institution of motherhood and his characterization of universities as "indoctrination camps."

"Our feminist culture points women, especially young women, away from marriage and family life through its celebration of careerism. Thus more and more women, every generation, delay marriage and increasingly forgo marriage," Yenor said in his speech. "As women delay and forgo marriage, they're increasingly likely to delay and forgo having children."

"We lie to young women when we tell them that it is easy to become pregnant whenever one wants in life," said Yenor. "Never does anyone say to the young women that the peak period for pregnancy is between the late teens and the late 20s. Rarely are young women told that their ability to conceive children declines quite a bit after their late 20s and declines rapidly after the mid-30s. Ancient people used to pray to the gods of fertility. We pray to infertility gods."

"There can be no great countries without great families," emphasized Yenor. "And today, America is destroying family life."

Yenor, whom leftist journalists have long been trying to get fired for membership in religious, pro-family groups, told Blaze News last year that the anti-natalist messaging he has railed against largely comes down to a "set of mores and manners that are the natural result of our sexual revolution and its associated ideology."

'My most important work of my life was being a mother.'

"'I think you need to wait to get married until you have a job and are stable.' Well, that's a great way of delaying marriage, and marriage delayed and deferred is much less likely to happen. That's a form of cultural messaging that's widely accepted," said Yenor. "Whereas previously, it was thought that marriage would be a foundation for life; that you kind of learn to live together with another person and go through life's struggles and have moments where you weren't prosperous. And now we have marriage as a kind of capstone to all of life's achievements."

"That new cultural messaging obviously leads to different kinds of marriages and later marriages and fewer children and more fertility problems. The fertility problems themselves are the result of waiting until you're 30 to get married," continued Yenor.

Payne packaged her AP article with comment from a single and, of course, critical voice from UWF, faculty union president and earth sciences instructor Chasidy Hobbs, who called Yenor's comments "disheartening" and "offensive."

"My most important work of my life was being a mother," said Hobbs, unwittingly reinforcing Yenor's argument, "while also working as a professional woman in a career that I find almost as important as motherhood — to help the future generation learn to think for themselves."

"Publishing quotes pulled off the sparsely stocked shelves of dirt every time Yenor successfully advocates for reform in higher education (which he does often!), [Payne] has done the intrepid journalistic work of adding a new headline to his @NatConTalk speech of 2021!" tweeted Andrew Beck, vice president of communications at the Claremont Institute and partner at Beck & Stone.

"Given the current decline of vast swaths of America's higher education institutions and the decay of its culture, I'm not sure how many, except for the most militant, reality-denying feminists, would naturally think these statements are unfounded, outrageous, and worthy of broadcasting when you can hear hundreds of women saying the same thing on social media every day," continued Beck. "All this shows that it is not Professor Yenor or Governor DeSantis who are out of line, but Kate and the Associated Press, who are out of touch with Floridians and what they want out of their universities: to do better, so that America can be better."

Yenor noted on X, "What @AP's reporter considers awful are things that are increasingly music to people's ears."

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Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson get to the bottom of the West's 'civilizational suicide'



Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently identified three key drivers of the "civilizational suicide" underway in the West: a "parasitic mindset," climate alarmism, and false religion.

Musk noted midway through his interview with the titular host of the Tucker Carlson Network that while leftist billionaire George Soros is "senile," he has bequeathed a powerful nongovernmental system to his son Alexander Soros and other "like-minded people" who may continue his "anti-civilizational" campaign of normalizing criminality and dismantling borders.

While open borders and unchecked crime are certainly ruinous, Musk intimated that they are merely symptoms of a greater civilizational sickness — a sickness that leaves the body politic tolerating the Open Society Foundations' agenda, spurns life, mutates empathy, and glorifies an unmanned nature.

When asked to assess the current state of Europe, Musk bemoaned the collapse of birthrates.

"My biggest concern for Europe is that their birth rate is half replacement rate," said Musk. "So Europe is rapidly becoming with each passing year older and older with fewer and fewer young people. ... At the most fundamental level, unless Europe has a birth rate at least roughly equal to replacement rate, it is in population free fall, population collapse."

'Their main sort of domestic social policy is convincing you not to have kids.'

In May, a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet revealed that fertility rates have declined in all countries and territories since 1950 and that "human civilization is rapidly converging on a sustained low-fertility reality."

The fertility rate references the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime. The replacement rate Musk referenced is 2.1. This is necessary for a population to maintain stability and replenish itself without requiring replacement by foreign nationals.

Blaze News previously reported that in 1950, the global fertility rate was 4.84. In 2021, it was 2.23. By the end of the 2100s, it is expected to drop to 1.59 globally.

The average fertility rate for the European Union as a whole in 2022 was 1.46. Italy and Spain were among the European nations with the lowest rates — 1.24 and 1.16, respectively.

While Europe is on the greased track to collapse, Carlson reflected on the situation stateside, noting, "It does seem like the U.S. government — if you take three steps back — is pretty committed to making fewer Americans. There's a lot of anti-fertility propaganda. Actually, that seems like their main sort of domestic social policy is convincing you not to have kids."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the general fertility rate in the U.S. reached a historic low of 1.61 in 2023. By way of contrast, in 1960, the U.S. fertility rate was 3.7.

Despite these staggering statistics, the Biden-Harris administration has continued championing the slaughter of the unborn and the effective sterilization of vulnerable populations while Democratic lawmakers work to dissuade some young couples from becoming parents.

A big driver of Western anti-natalism in recent years has been climate alarmism.

Morgan Stanley analysts told investors in 2021 that the "movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline."

'It's infecting people and making it impossible for them to make rational decisions.'

"The environmental movement in the extreme is fundamentally misanthropic and anti-human," Musk told Carlson. "They start seeing humans as a plague, a blight on the surface of the earth — that earth would be this paradise if only the humans weren't here."

Musk noted that some climate alarmists are forthright about their desire to see humanity destroyed in a massive "holocaust," whereas others have not admitted as much out loud or to themselves.

"A lot of people believe that the earth can't sustain this level of human population, which is utterly untrue. It may seem that in a crowded city there are a lot of people, but actually, if you look down in an airplane and say, 'Am I over a person at any given point in time?' when you're in an airplane, the answer ... 99.9% of the time is 'no.'"

Musk emphasized that the world is in fact underpopulated and that the suggestion to the contrary was the result, in part, of the successful anti-human depopulationist propaganda advanced by biologist Paul Ehrlich.

Despite having had the primary claim in his magnum opus proven wrong by real-world trends, Ehrlich doubled down on his anti-human mania in a "60 Minutes" interview last year, stressing the world has "too many people."

Musk said, "I hope he burns in hell, that guy. Seriously. Terrible human being."

After Musk highlighted that amidst the West's activist-supported population collapse, leftist governments — particularly the Starmer government in Britain — are actively censoring those who would dare criticize the native population's replacement and sporadic rape by immigrants, Carlson said, "You've used the phrase 'mind virus,' but it's behaving like a virus. It's infecting people and making it impossible for them to make rational decisions."

Musk recommended the work of evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad, who has argued that the West "has been parasitized by a set of idea pathogens that negate reality and common sense."

Saad noted last year in the National Post that chief among all idea pathogens now plaguing the West is postmodernism:

It is a form of intellectual terrorism as it posits that there are no objective truths since apparently all truth claims are tainted by subjective relativism and personal biases. Postmodernism opens the door to questioning the 'antiquated' reality of what constitutes a man and a woman. Until fifteen minutes ago, the 117 billion people who had ever lived, as a sexually reproducing species, knew exactly how to identify these two phenotypes. This is no longer true.

The other pathogenic ideas Saad suggested are now crippling the West are the "DIE cult (diversity, inclusion, and equity)," cultural relativism, and suicidal empathy.

Saad noted that suicidal empathy is what animates that class of people who would excuse the illegal entry of criminal noncitizens into the homeland despite their track record of preying upon the citizen population.

'The woke mind virus — it takes the place of religion.'

"Progressives are driven by misplaced and hyperactive faux empathy," wrote Saad. "According to the tenets of progressivism, criminals are victims of society. Hence, to severely punish them for their acts presumes that they have personal agency."

Musk contrasted the kind of "deep empathy" that would entail a desire to see civilization thrive and continue with this shallow or "suicidal empathy," which he suggested "results in the destruction of civilization."

According to Musk, there is a link between the implantation and spread of this parasitic mindset and the decline of religion.

"Nature abhors a vacuum. So when you have essentially a decline in religion and increase in the secular nature of society, for most people, they need something to fill that void, so they adopt a religion. It's not called a religion," said Musk. "The woke mind virus — it takes the place of religion, and they internalize and they feel it with religious fervor."

Musk indicated that the adherents of this woke pseudo-religion then wage a "holy war."

Blaze News recently discussed the implications of America's de-Christianization with Dr. Joshua Mitchell, professor of political theory at Georgetown University.

'Identity politics is the latest iteration of an incomplete religion.'

Mitchell, whose thesis in "American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time" pre-empted Musk's realization by a few years, indicated that identity politics has absorbed much of the attention and energy previously invested into traditional religions.

"So when the Pew Charitable Trusts notes that American church attendance is going down, I say, 'You don't know where to look,'" said Mitchell. "If we call religion 'institutionalized Christianity,' well, then of course the numbers are going down. But if we call religion 'the search for a way to think through purity and stain, innocent victimhood, and historical sin in order to find atonement,' then in America today we're having a religious revival."

Mitchell borrowed a term from Alexis de Tocqueville to describe the woke pseudo-religion Musk recently identified:

We didn't move from Christianity to a secular world. We moved from one incomplete version of Christianity — complete with a designated innocent victim and a moral economy that says who's purified and who’s damned — to the next. Identity politics is the latest iteration of an incomplete religion.

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