In age where it's all about baby, the childfree are fighting back

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jul 30, 2006 | by Candace Murphy, STAFF WRITER

LIKE A LOT of parties Bonnie Powell goes to these days, there are kids. Lots of kids. And these kids, the spawn of her hyperfertile friends, come in every shape and size. There are gurgling infants. Tantruming toddlers. Preening pink princesses.

But as eyebrows raise when Powell, 34, makes a beeline for a particularly adorable little swaddled squawker in the corner, and the party guests start nudging Powell's husband and saying, "Mmmmm hmmmmm, that's you guys... any day now," the record is swiftly set straight.

Powell doesn't want kids. Ever.

"Those are people that don't know me," says Powell, who works at UC Berkeley and lives in Oakland. "It's people that don't know me that say I'll change, or that I have to have kids, that it's my biological responsibility. That annoys me. I don't want to have kids. And I don't want to be labeled a freak because I don't."

Blame the stalker-like media coverage of Angelina Jolie's pregnancy. Blame the new generation of navel-gazing parents who act as if they've invented childbirth. Blame all those baby blogs. Because childfree adults are lashing back, refusing to drink the baby-making Kool-Aid and are aggressively asserting that they're not abnormal for not wanting to procreate.

For lack of more erudite words, these people are mad as hell and they're not taking it anymore. And they don't care if they use the word hell in front of your kids, either.

"What about the 'Where's Suri?' thing?" says Adrianne Frost, author of "I Hate Other People's Kids," referring to the tabloids' plea for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes to show their child to the paparazzi. Us Weekly, for example, has a ticking clock on its Web site, complete with minutes and seconds, underneath the headline "When will we see Suri?" At press time, it had surpassed 102 days.

"It's really disgusting, don't you think?" says Frost, who's in her early 30s. "I wrote my book just to give this whole thing a voice. I mean, how many times have people been on a plane and the tray tables are going up and down, up and down, and the parents aren't doing anything and you've just thought, 'I hate that kid.' Or how many times have you seen Dakota Fanning's face in a magazine and you've just said, 'I hate that kid.'"

Baby backlash is everywhere. Books like Jennifer Shawne's "Baby Not on Board," Nicki Defago's "Childfree and Loving It!" and Frost's "I Hate Other People's Kids" all were published within the last year, and interestingly, when ordered on Amazon.com, can be added to a baby registry by the prompting of an ill-placed one-click button.

Also gaining in popularity are childfree groups, like No Kidding!, founded in 1984, as well as and not limited to, the International Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, Kidding Aside and the World Childfree Organization.

"We've started to find each other," says Vincent Ciaccio, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., but is the spokesperson and director of strategic planning for No Kidding! in New York. "It's definitely not a support group, but there's definitely moral support knowing there are other people who live like you do."

While it's only natural that baby backlash would occur, there's much debate how the societal climate became such a perfect petri dish, a breeding ground, as it were, for it.

Brian Misso, a copywriter who lives in San Francisco with his partner, thinks the current child-centeredness of our society stems from uncertain, volatile times, where people are worried not only about their own futures, but about the future of the country and the world.

"I wonder if people are trying to convince themselves that the situation isn't all that dire," says Misso, 33. "It's like they're saying, 'How bad can the world be when all these cute babies are being born?' It's like the orchestra playing on the sinking Titanic. It's definitely not helping the problem, but it's a way of distracting people from having to think too much about it."

Similarly, Frost points to Sept. 11, 2001.

"Do you think it has anything to do with Sept. 11? And how precious people realized life was?" says Frost. "But that doesn't mean that you have to think that your life is the only precious life. You have to pay

attention to people around you. Including those that don't come from your uterus."

And that's what's really getting under the childfree adult's skin. Whereas generations, for generations, have wanted children, had children, raised children and talked about their children, this one seems more preoccupied with the feat than any other. And that's not hyperbole: Visit YouTube.com, a site where average computer users post their own amateur videos, and there are dozens of birth, C-section and ultrasound videos available for friends, family and complete strangers to view.

Shawne, author of "Baby Not On Board," thinks it's because of a convergence of Generation Xers becoming parents, along with the explosion of personal media. Generation X, after all, made a name for itself almost solely due to the paramount importance of self- expression -- at any cost.