Here, Nobody Has Children Anymore

Yet, another portrait of Portugal

When asked about potential parenthood in my college days, all my classmates' answers were the same: nobody wanted children.

It was practically a given among all of us. If someone did want them, they were seen as some alien or someone rooted in conservative traditions that were quite foreign to us. Either that or someone with the money for it. This almost never happened because in Portugal, as in many places, we tend to relate to people of the same class, and as such, we’re all a bit poor and have the same desires.

The years passed without me noticing, but this feeling of unwanted parenthood remained with all of us. And this feeling can be extended to the entire middle class, which finds itself struggling to stay that way.

Of my close friends, no one is a parent or wants to become one. Not even the only one who once said she had maternal feelings talks about being a mother anymore!

I’m talking about the generation that was born in the late 80s and early 90s in Portugal. And now, we’re all roughly between the ages of 34 and 37. And if we look more specifically at women’s fertility, we’re all starting to pass our sell-by date, or at least those years when we thought that anything would get us pregnant are long gone.

And although this feeling of invalidity could also apply to men, we women feel the pressure to decide most strongly. The phrase ‘now or never’ hangs over all of us, and as such, there are compelling reasons to become a mother. (I believe that many, like me, would like to pause their lives and not have to deal with this issue).

I, on my way to 34, like many other women, am feeling this pressure like never before, as if every day, the passage of time is now becoming a ticking time bomb.

It’s an even more complicated decision when conceiving doesn’t seem easy to me. It’s not enough to decide and do it tonight. In my case, the decision involves various medical factors and a highly complex process. Consultations, surgeries, illnesses that make the complicated process of pregnancy even more impossible.

But the decision to become a parent doesn’t stop there either, with the fear of conception or even childbirth. There are many more factors involved that go beyond that.

When I look at my friends, I see that this decision is made of their own free will, a deliberate choice by someone who doesn’t want to give up their life and have a life similar to that of their parents. In our case, a life of working to survive.

And in one of the oldest countries in the world, such as Portugal, these private decisions have a profound impact on the life of an entire country, clearly showing how, once again, the private is political.

And all of this, even the absence of children and young people in society, has become normal. The lack of children, young people, and new life in our villages, towns, and cities is commonplace.

Walk down any street, and you can feel it. We see walking sticks instead of baby carriages. We see a pregnant woman and find it peculiar, almost associating this state with something painful or even that may have happened accidentally.

We have also lost the ability to remember what childhood is, what children are, and how they see the world, forgetting our own childhood.

Television is also made for old people. There are no more cartoons or clown shows to fill the afternoons after school. The generalist channels are a vast procession of sadness, drama, criminal ‘fait divers,’ and something to kill the loneliness of the thousands of elderly people who live alone.

In the rural world, this is even more acute in villages like mine, where every week, the village bell rings loudly, not for a christening but for yet another death.

Here, death is painfully constant every week, reminding us of our short existence and plunging us, without our wanting to, into a kind of unwanted melancholy.

Progress also passes us by in a place without youth, poverty remains, and the burden of maintaining an aging population increases.

As in many other parts of southern Europe, this economic poverty has become cyclical and endemic, with the few young people here forced to flee these shores in search of something better. They leave young and return when they’re old.

My friends who have made the decision to remain here are full adults but within a life entire of ciclical new beginnings. A kind of “now I’ll be able to save” or “now I’ll have a good job.” A now that becomes never.

The economy has a massive impact on all of our lives, and from time to time, we are struck by a massive feeling of insecurity that could push us into a worse life. Whether it’s homelessness or not having anything at all.

And for those of us who have already achieved some stability (despite having ridiculous salaries), I can see that we don’t want to make any more extraordinary sacrifices to become parents.

And honestly, why should they? Why should anyone give up having a minimally decent life only to pass on their genes? Or to give a child poor living conditions just for being a parent?

These are the choices facing young Portuguese people of childbearing age: not having children and having an average life, or having children and giving up as little economic comfort as possible. Or, of course, the freedom we have struggled to gain for so long.

This has also been one of the generational clashes between older people who don’t understand why anyone would want to live life freely and younger people who don’t understand why they should give up a good life to have a worse one.

As a Portuguese, the choice seems obvious.

And these decisions, namely the one of not wanting children in a country that is changing but where wage poverty remains a constant, make this corner of the world a dying country.

A country already short of young people but which expels the few that it has. A country that is a paradise for foreign retirees, who contribute little or nothing to its development (nothing against that).

Of course, it wasn’t always like this.

We go back to the times of the dictatorship or in the aftermath of the revolution, and the children added up one after the other.

However, it’s common knowledge that this didn’t mean they had a better life.

Quite the opposite.

Those who had a lot of children (apart from the upper classes and elitists) had a sour life— especially women.

Those who had many children had no access to education or contraceptives. Back then, especially in rural areas, more children meant more manpower to help their parents in the fields. Fortunately, society has become more aware of its mistakes.

Looking at generations before mine, I immediately come across this phenomenon, even more so in my family. My maternal great-grandmother had twelve children and a life of tremendous poverty and ignorance that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

My maternal grandmother — the only one who advised me not to have children — had seven children and a life equally marked by poverty from her childhood to the present day.

My mother had my brother and me, and at the age of 33, she became pregnant a third time and had a miscarriage. At the time, as a nine-year-old myself, I thought this was because my mother was already very old and, therefore, too old to have children — little did I know!

I’m her age now. The age when she had a miscarriage.

Although I believe that half of my friends don’t want to have children because they don’t feel any paternal affection, I also know that their lifestyle and meager Portuguese salaries immediately turn them off. And things don’t tend to get any better.

At the moment, the vast crisis that Portugal (and a little of the entire Western world) is facing in the education sector, and this case, in the health sector, is also deterring many young people from deciding to become mothers or fathers.

I speak for myself when I say that I’m terrified of the potential lack of medical care during pregnancy, the sloppiness of health care during childbirth, or, of course, living in a rural area and not even being able to find an open hospital where I can have my child.

All of these factors hang over our heads, coupled with the fact that we want to distance ourselves from the lives our parents had. My generation that studied, the one that can be said to have come from the people for the first time and gone further than them, has parents who fought hard for us to get where we are.

Parents who had no access to education and who were born under a dictatorship. Parents who sacrificed everything to give us a good life and who, in turn, could not really live theirs.

This is how I and many like me grew up, associating parenthood with worsening our living conditions, as an obstacle to our dreams, and finally, with an impediment to our continued educational development.

And anyone in their right mind wouldn’t wish that on themselves or anyone else. When I look at my small town in the countryside, I see that this perception is ingrained in my generation of Portuguese. Not that this is good or bad.

It’s a generation that has had access to higher education, and between studies, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and even doctorates, hasn’t had time for relationships. A generation that is constantly starting over, whether at 25, 30, or 35. A generation that for too many years hasn’t known what it means to belong to a functioning society. A generation that doesn’t manage to be young and that is already starting to be too old.

When I see immigrants walking in the parks, and I see women in their twenties who are already in their second or third pregnancy, I confess that I get scared for them.

I think of the lack of opportunities, the lack of planning, or the lack of the simple thought that they could have been something else.

I also think about them, so young and pregnant, and I wonder why they have decided this so early.

Then, I think of myself at their age, traveling alone through South America or living in France or Italy. I think about my life, trying out various careers and wanting to discover myself. I think about all this, and it makes me shudder that they haven’t experienced it all.

But then I also look at myself, at the age of being a mother, and all the things I won’t be experiencing either.

Now, I also see the immigrants who pass by my apartment. They’re smiling on their way to school and come back hand in hand with their children or when those little arms wrap around their necks. I see all this and look at myself a little sadly.

Soon, both I and those friends of mine who used to exude youth will become part of an old people’s club with no one to complain to.

Portugal is becoming a strange place.

Hello, I’m Araci, a female writer from Portugal. I like to write about my country, Portugal, and about my life in this corner of the world. But I also enjoy politics, economics, and issues concerning the climate crisis I’m witnessing in my life and where I live.

If you have enjoyed this article, maybe you would like to buy me a “coffee” here: https://ko-fi.com/joanaaraci.