Childless Voices: Stories of Longing, Loss, Resistance and Choice

By Lorna Gibb

Published by Granta

Is childlessness the loss that dare not speak its name? Even in 2019, it feels that way. We avoid the subject more than we do death, wary of causing offence. Enter Dr Lorna Gibb, a biographer and senior lecturer at Middlesex University, with this timely book, which asks why we still fail to value those who are not parents. Ours is a world where “hard-working families” are lauded and women such as MP Andrea Leadsom make jibes (aimed at childless Theresa May in 2016) about only mothers having “a very real stake” in Britain’s future.

Fortunately in Gibb we have a writer perfectly placed to demystify the one in five women who remain childless, either out of choice or for medical or social reasons. Gibb begins her survey with her own story, of how endometriosis left her unable to conceive. With that one diagnosis, this successful writer and much-loved wife became an “object of pity”, her identity inextricably linked to her “recalcitrant womb”. She then sets out to tell the stories of childless women around the world. If the result of not having children in the UK is to be “ignored by the state they have contributed so much to” (parents get preferential tax treatment), the consequences are much worse elsewhere.

In Qatar she speaks to Khadiga, a banker who had to undergo a complete hysterectomy in her early teens and is hissed at in the street by those so superstitious they believe childless women are harmful. In India, the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai reveals there are more negative social, cultural and emotional repercussions for childless women than for any other non-life-threatening condition. Gibb talks to Bhakti, an Indian mother whose childless daughter Sur was beaten by her husband and verbally abused by her in-laws until one night she hanged herself in a forest.

In southwest Nigeria, a childless Yoruba woman is valued so little that when she dies her body is left out for animals to devour. Nor would you want to be childless in Zimbabwe. One women Gibb spoke to only narrowly avoided being forced to have sex with her husband’s brother to increase her chances of motherhood — a common practice.

Then there are those countries guilty in the past of state-sponsored involuntary sterilisation, among them Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Peru and Canada. During the 1990s, almost 300,000 Peruvians were sterilised, mostly without consent.

Many of the childless voices Gibb interviews speak of worthlessness. The book also catalogues some of the desperate (and at times bizarre) measures taken to avoid the stigma. In Naples couples still queue for hours to sit on a fertility chair blessed by nuns, while on the Greek island of Tinos they crawl uphill on their knees for a kilometre to a shrine. The quacks are more avaricious in America, where one clinic ran a competition called “I Believe” for a single free cycle of IVF, with “contestants” posting desperate videos of why they are worthy of a baby.

Childless Voices is a dense book, packed with statistics and anecdotes, and I will certainly never again include “Have you got children?” in my small talk. Yet at times Gibb seems to cast her net too wide. She spends too long making tenuous connections between female suicide bombers and childlessness, and explaining how nuns can be “spiritual mothers”, too. A tighter edit would have helped.

She is at her most tender when describing her own thoughts on motherhood and the child she never had. Only towards the end does she question how she too is perceived in society. “Do they ever think — silent, unshared thoughts — ‘She’s not a mother, she doesn’t understand?’ ”

For a time she has no confidence that this isn’t so, and it is her husband Alan Wesselson, to whom the book is dedicated, who rescues her. Fittingly, she saves the final sentence for him: “For all it has taken me to write it, it seems a tiny, insignificant thing in the face of what he gives to me.” Gibb’s words suggest a love so big that it outweighs her sense of loss.