Katie Roiphe on the childfree

I don't know why I read anything by Katie Roiphe. Everything she writes just pisses me off.

This article about attitudes toward people who choose to be childfree starts off okay, but then she concludes:

The semi-moral imperative to grow up does seem sort of arbitrary and unfair. After all, why should you have to grow up if you don't want to? Why do we feel the need to impose or foist this very particular variety of grown up life on other people?  It seems likely that there is an element of envy in those who have taken on responsible, burdened, parenting lives. . . . [T]hat freedom can be something of a reproach, if we are honest. If we weren't taking this freedom personally, as a sort of criticism of dullness or drabness or routine, a kind of red pencil in the margins of our more mundane stories, we would be a little better, as a culture, at letting the childless (or as Badinter calls them, "the childfree") go in peace.

First of all, implying that people choose not to have kids so they don't have to "grow up," or that you can't be a "grown-up" without kids, is just another way of saying that it's somehow selfish or irresponsible not to have kids.

And then, saying that there's so much societal pressure to have kids because those of with us kids envy those without, doesn't make sense. I'm sure that to some extent, nearly all parents envy the freedom of their peers without kids. But it doesn't follow that because of that envy, parents would pressure others to become parents. There is so much history and context here that she ignores.