baby registry: In age where it's all about baby, the childfree are fighting back

By Candace Murphy, STAFF WRITER

LIKE A LOT of parties Bonnie Powell goes to these days, there are kids. Lots of kids. And these kids, the spawn of her hyperfertile friends, come in every shape and size. There are gurgling infants. Tantruming toddlers. Preening pink princesses.
But as eyebrows raise when Powell, 34, makes a beeline for a particularly adorable little swaddled squawker in the corner, and the party guests start nudging Powell's husband and saying, "Mmmmm hmmmmm, that's you guys... any day now," the record is swiftly set straight.

Powell doesn't want kids. Ever.


"Those are people that don't know me," says Powell, who works at UC Berkeley and lives in Oakland. "It's people that don't know me that say I'll change, or that I have to have kids, that it's my biological responsibility. That annoys me. I don't want to have kids. And I don't want to be labeled a freak because I don't."

Blame the stalker-like media coverage of Angelina Jolie's pregnancy. Blame the new generation of navel-gazing parents who act as if they've invented childbirth. Blame all those baby blogs. Because childfree adults are lashing back, refusing to drink the baby-making Kool-Aid and are aggressively asserting that they're not abnormal for not wanting to procreate.

For lack of more erudite words, these people are mad as hell and they're not taking it anymore. And they don't care if they use the word hell in front of your kids, either.

"What about the 'Where's Suri?' thing?" says Adrianne Frost, author of "I Hate Other People's Kids," referring to the tabloids' plea for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes to show their child to the paparazzi. Us Weekly, for example, has a ticking clock on its Web site, complete with minutes and seconds, underneath the headline "When will we see Suri?" At press time, it had surpassed 102 days.

"It's really disgusting, don't you think?" says Frost, who's in her early 30s. "I wrote my book just to give this whole thing a voice. I mean, how many times have people been on a plane and the tray tables are going up and down, up and down, and the parents aren't doing anything and you've just thought, 'I hate that kid.' Or how many times have you seen Dakota Fanning's face in a magazine and you've just said, 'I hate that kid.'"

Baby backlash is everywhere. Books like Jennifer Shawne's "Baby Not on Board," Nicki Defago's "Childfree and Loving It!" and Frost's "I Hate Other People's Kids" all were published within the last year, and interestingly, when ordered on Amazon.com, can be added to a baby registry by the prompting of an ill-placed one-click button.

Also gaining in popularity are childfree groups, like No Kidding!, founded in 1984, as well as and not limited to, the International Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, Kidding Aside and the World Childfree Organization.

"We've started to find each other," says Vincent Caccio, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., but is the spokesperson and director of strategic planning for No Kidding! in New York. "It's definitely not a support group, but there's definitely moral support knowing there are other people who live like you do."

While it's only natural that baby backlash would occur, there's much debate how the societal climate became such a perfect petri dish, a breeding ground, as it were, for it.

Brian Misso, a copywriter who lives in San Francisco with his partner, thinks the current child-centeredness of our society stems from uncertain, volatile times, where people are worried not only about their own futures, but about the future of the country and the world.

"I wonder if people are trying to convince themselves that the situation isn't all that dire," says Misso, 33. "It's like they're saying, 'How bad can the world be when all these cute babies are being born?' It's like the orchestra playing on the sinking Titanic. It's definitely not helping the problem, but it's a way of distracting people from having to think too much about it."

Similarly, Frost points to Sept. 11, 2001.

"Do you think it has anything to do with Sept. 11? And how precious people realized life was?" says Frost. "But that doesn't mean that you have to think that your life is the only precious life. You have to pay

attention to people around you. Including those that don't come from your uterus."

And that's what's really getting under the childfree adult's skin. Whereas generations, for generations, have wanted children, had children, raised children and talked about their children, this one seems more preoccupied with the feat than any other. And that's not hyperbole: Visit YouTube.com, a site where average computer users post their own amateur videos, and there are dozens of birth, C-section and ultrasound videos available for friends, family and complete strangers to view.

Shawne, author of "Baby Not On Board," thinks it's because of a convergence of Generation Xers becoming parents, along with the explosion of personal media. Generation X, after all, made a name for itself almost solely due to the paramount importance of self-expression — at any cost.

"These people are looking for ways to express themselves," says Shawne, "and what better way than to talk about their children?"

But because the Gen Xers are all grown up, that talking — or rather, the showing and telling — is different. Owing to a youth spent staring goggle-eyed at televisions broadcasting the sarcasm of David Letterman and the relentless irony of shows like VH1's "I Love the'80s," today's modern parents are all about proper packaging. And that means everything has to be hip.

Snapsuits are sassy and say "I'm Not a Boy." Nurseries are stylish, have luxe linens, and as Lily Kanter of Mill Valley's

Serena & Lily baby boutique says in this month's San Francisco magazine, "with no cartoon characters on the wall." Even baby blogs, where discussion can devolve into the nuances of a proper poop, insist that having baby has not moved Mom and Dad one step closer to the grave.

"You still rock!" says one. "Life doesn't have to end when you buy a minivan."

"There's a lot of consumerism around children, a lot of products, a lot of effort going into this to show that they're still cool, even though they have a baby," says Shawne, 32. "This is a generation that doesn't want to be like their parents. They're saying, 'We're not becoming boring people.' But they actually are. They're just blogging about it now."

And that's the climate that's cultivated the baby backlash. The global warming of adulthood, the hot topic of everything baby has gotten the childfree steaming mad. Mostly because of the pressure put on those in their late 20s and 30s to procreate.

"There's this expected inquisition among people where they ask you how many kids you have, and if you say none, then they give you advice," says "No Kidding!'s" Caccio, 29. "They tell you about infertility — not that you may have it — and they intertwine womanhood with motherhood."

Caccio, who made the choice not to have kids official when he and his wife decided he should get a vasectomy in 2001, also thinks the current focus on celebrities and the ubiquitous tabloid "Bump Watch" is anathema to his organization's cause.

"These actresses say things like 'I've done a lot of good with my life, but this is the most important thing I've ever done,'" says Caccio. "Granted, it's obviously important to be a good parent, but there's an idea that somehow they discovered it. Like, 'Look what I found.'"

In the Bay Area, the peer pressure for parenthood has also found its way into the gay community, just another infuriating happening for Misso, the San Francisco copywriter who wouldn't have stuck around to listen to the orchestra on the sinking Titanic.

"Having a family has certainly become a viable option for gay couples, especially in progressive places like the Bay Area. And maybe among some circles of gay people there is a bit of peer pressure to have kids since I think some gay people see having a child as a status symbol," says Misso. "Once you've got your house in the city, your second home in Sonoma, and your two Lexuses, what else is left to acquire?"

The more appropriate question may be how much more baby can the baby-free take? As writer Joseph Epstein warns that with today's child-centeredness "family has become the rivalry of friendship," and as the child-free feel more and more marginalized with the addition of every Baby Gap at the local mall, some wonder when, or if, baby mania will cool off.

Frost, the author, sees no light at the end of the birth canal.

"Mine's not a manifesto — I don't think my book can turn anything around," she says. "As long as George Bush calls stem cells 'little snowflakes,' we're going to have a problem."