Back in the days when I was a ferocious feminist and fallen-away Catholic, I jumped on board the “child-free” bandwagon. As a married woman who clung tightly to the use of birth control, I couldn’t come up with a compelling reason to stop using it.

I didn’t believe that children were a gift from God, since I didn’t believe in God. And every time I would list the advantages of having children, I would discover an equal number of disadvantages. This went on for years, and even when I came back to the Church, I returned as a “cafeteria-style” Catholic, and continued using contraception.

Today, I find it tragic to think that a life without children is something to be celebrated. I think children are one of life’s deepest joys, and I regret that I missed out on motherhood. I also have no problem telling someone that I am “childless” and would never use the term “child-free.”

I think this group’s insistence on being called “child-free,” rather than “childless,” is quite telling. True, couples without children do indeed savor liberties that parents do not. A childless couple can go to the movies at a moment’s notice without hiring a babysitter.  They also can spend more money on pricey restaurants than, say, parents who are saving money for Junior’s college tuition.

Still, the folks waving the “child-free” banner aren’t merely making a point about how much extra time and money they have. Instead, they want to celebrate their lack of children, which is why they shun the traditional word “childless.”

After all, adding “less” to a word shows that something is missing. And, generally, when a person lacks something, there is a human tendency to feel sympathy for that person. For example, if we see a legless man, even if he is doing remarkably well with artificial limbs, we still may feel sad that he lacks legs of his own.

It is hard to imagine a legless man insisting that people call him “leg-free.” This would be as absurd as calling the penniless widow “money-free” and the lonely man “friend-free.” But this verbal sleight of hand is the hallmark of the “child-free” movement, and it is easily dismantled. To a man with five children, the Joneses’ lack of a family will surely seem a great loss. It would be hard to imagine a father of five calling the Joneses “child-free,” even if they insisted that they were overjoyed at having produced no little Joneses. 

Thus, even if the term “child-free” is the Joneses’ preference, they are going to have a hard time converting the man on the street to their point of view. And this is because they are locking horns with common sense and tradition. To the ordinary man and woman on the street, childlessness is a big minus, and no wonder because, taken to its logical extreme, childlessness implies the end of the human race.

To get back to the man without legs: Perhaps he personally doesn’t think of himself as lacking anything. It is still true, though, that any reasonable person will sense, in their heart of hearts, that the man is best described as legless, rather than leg-free. And this is because his life would have been inestimably fuller and richer with his limbs than without.

In the fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes, it took a child to state the obvious truth about the emperor’s nakedness. Children are very good at seeing what adults so often miss. Being loveless or legless are sorrowful states, and a child knows that if you call someone “friend free,” that doesn’t take away the loneliness.

A child also knows that celebrating emptiness, whether it is a bare larder, a penniless purse, or an empty nursery is an offense against logic, as well as the human heart.  

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Lorraine’s latest book is “Confessions of an Ex-Feminist” (Ignatius Press).