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LAURA CARROLL
USA
'In the late 1990s, little did I know where looking for a book on childfree married couples would take me. I was a happily married childfree woman in my late 30s and wanted to find a book about long-time married couples without children by choice and could not find one. I decided to find out for myself, ended up interviewing 100 couples across the US, and publishing Families of Two: Interviews with Happily Married Couples Without Children by Choice. It brought me to my next question: why does society find the childfree choice hard to accept?
My research led to me to dig into the history of pronatalism, and its negative effects on all of us and the natural world. What I learned motivated me to write The Baby Matrix: Why Freeing Our Minds From Outmoded Thinking About Parenthood & Reproduction Will Create a Better World. While researching The Baby Matrix, I met renowned conservationist, Dave Foreman, and learned so much from him on the impact of too many humans on the natural world. It passionately inspired me to do a second edition of his book with him, Man Swarm: How Overpopulation is Killing the Wild World.
These books helped me more deeply understand the connection between our overpopulation problem and pronatalism, which includes negative beliefs about not having children, and even about having one child. Pronatalism promotes reproduction and exalts parenthood. It influences people to believe that having children is what we are supposed to do if we are normal adults, and that it is the key to true fulfillment in life. It fosters continued population growth, and works against values that support population reduction and stabilization.
For over the last twenty years, I have made it my mission to help people see through pronatalist beliefs (for that is all they are), to the truths about parenthood and reproduction so they can make the best reproductive decisions for themselves and our world. I want people around the world to know that having children is a choice, and that not having them is just as normal as having them.
I have also worked toward having more people realize that when it comes to bringing children into the world, we have more than reached the point where we first need to think beyond ourselves. Because we’re already overpopulated relative to the earth’s natural resources, we need to make our first obligation to humans already here and the planet on which we live. This requires moving past an anthropocentric point of view, which puts humans above all other species, to a biocentric one that values humans and all living things equally. We must see that reducing and stabilizing our population is essential for the survival of our own species as well as all other beings with which we share our now threatened planet.
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Laura is the author of six books, including A Special Sisterhood: 100 Fascinating Women From History Who Never Had Children, 25 Over 10: A Childfree Longitudinal Study, Man Swarm: How Overpopulation is Killing the Wild Word (co-author), The Baby Matrix: Why Freeing Our Minds From Outmoded Thinking About Parenthood & Reproduction Will Create a Better World, Families of Two: Interviews with Happily Married Couples Without Children by Choice and Finding Fulfillment From the Inside Out. She is also a contributor to Childfree across the Disciplines: Academic and Activist Perspectives on Not Choosing Children and Voluntary and Involuntary Childlessness: The Joys of Otherhood?
Learn more about Laura at:
X Twitter @LauraCarroll88
Facebook Families of Two: Childfree & Beyond Page
Facebook The Baby Matrix Page
