Must every woman have children?

BY CAROL NATUKUNDA

CALL them working non-mothers. Those women who have successful careers, good bucks, are well into their 30’s or even 40’s, but have never gotten around to having the one thing every woman supposedly craves — a child.

Motherhood, it appears, is no longer a big deal. Like Condoleezza Rice and Oprah Winfrey, some Ugandan woman are choosing not to bear children.

Isabella, a 39-year-old daughter of a diplomat in Kampala, has it all. She is strikingly beautiful and holds a Master’s degree. Yet she is not planning to have a child of her own anytime soon. At most, she will adopt!

“There are so many children who are being dumped everyday. I can raise one like my own child,”she argues.

Could it be that the eligible bachelors have been scared off asking this powerful woman for a hand in marriage?

“No,’ she asserts. “If I wanted my own baby, I would have got it. I do not need to be married to have a baby. If I got married, it would be because of companionship not babies.”

Yet, some women are not even thinking of adoption. Their lives centre on driving the latest cars, going to the gym and building powerful careers.

New research in the developed world, some of it controversial, indicates there are legions of these women in the corporate world. And their message to their younger sisters is: Get a plan. Envision your life at 45, and if you want that life to include a child, think now about how you will make it happen — either adoption or surrogacy.

Is it really a matter of choice? There might various factors at play, according to experts.

Dr. Nathan Oryem, a gynaecologist, points out that infertility is becoming a common problem among career women. Women are increasingly focusing on their careers and by the time they decide to settle down for a child, they are unable to conceive.

Menopause, it appears, is not exclusively after 50 as we grew up believing. The 2006 Demographic and Health Survey shows that 9% of women aged 30–49 were in menopause, a figure that goes higher with each year of a woman’s life. According to this survey, 43% of Ugandan women, aged 48–49, are in menopause

“At 30, that is when you are settling down, with a good job, qualifications and money. Unfortunately, that is not the case with fertility,” Oryem says.

To some, however, marriages just never came. “Society has brought us to believe that women should be submissive. So some men fear that a powerful woman will despise them,” says Kajumba Mayanja, a psychologist at Makerere University Institute of Psychology.

For other women, career ambitions got in the way. In an era where some employers are against the 60-day-maternity leave in the name of meeting targets, some women worry that if they got pregnant, they might be fired, yet they need their jobs. So, they decide to simply forego child bearing.

Besides, demanding careers, coupled with all the horror stories about househelps, women are at a loss on who would raise their kids.

And yet, childlessness may turn out haunting. Paula, a woman in her 50s and proprietor of a salon, says: “All of my life, I thought I would have children. But I was never with the right person.”

She says motherhood would have made her a lot happier. Inevitably, there are flashes of regret when she finds herself spending her money on another person’s child.

“It is fulfilling, but you do not feel the satisfaction,” Paula says. But this ill-feeling also has some roots in society’s perceptions, as psychologist Mayanja explains. Those with children believe that being childless is being unhappy. They tend to pity their friends who do not have children, and tag them “selfish, inflexible, unfulfilled and lonely.”

So it is not until society appreciates that those without children can be happy that it will be ‘normal’ to have working non-mothers!