I was happily child-free
… then Alabama came for me
Jeffrey Denny
I knew someday my deliriously empty child-free life would come to back to haunt me like a child I didn’t know I had.
I enjoyed all the lavish partying, exotic travel, sexy sports cars, endless tennis lessons, five-star dining, bespoke haberdashery, and otherwise luxe living thanks to the estimated $1,000,000 I didn’t spend per child on housing, food, healthcare, and education through college.
I was a mashup of The Bachelor and The Deadliest Catch, without the gleaming teeth and fishiness.
The Alabama Supreme Court put an end to that. They aborted my freedom by protecting children who don’t exist and criminalizing me for not having them.
As I tried to crunch this hard existential pretzel, the old Hughes Mearns doggerel popped to mind with a slight tweak:
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a kid who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
I also wondered if people who believe every human egg is a child should be allowed to make children at all, let alone make Alabama a bigger devolutionary punch line. And what about the U.S. Census when ovaries contain 1–2 million eggs? Count them as real American white ignorant bigot dictator-loving yahoos? Or elite coastal progressive democracy-loving Socialists?
The threat to my very existence won’t stop in Alabama.
It’ll roll tide upon Trump’s reelection as his Supreme Court, Justice Department and MAGA Christian vigilantes track down and smite me with the wrath of a murderously vengeful Jesus. Starting with outlawing my greatest pleasures.
First the Alabama court will join with PETA to come for my Eggs Benedict, deviled eggs, deli egg salad, and (no relation) Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast to stop the genocide of extrauterine chickens.
Then they’ll come for the Easter Bunny for being DEI woke for eggs of color, making white eggs hate themselves. Then Halloween for weaponizing eggs. Then Christmas for pushing eggnog. Then President’s Day for being inclusive of Dwight David Eisenhower and other baldy egg heads.
Then they’ll come for fine Russian beluga caviar until Putin’s bots says nyet to protecting future sturgeon. Smart economic choice. The adult fish is $10/lb. while the embryo is $4,000/lb.
Then they’ll come after everyone who wants to do the horizontal bop just for fun.
Soon criminalized: hooking up, swiping right, friends with benefits, older friends with Medicare benefits, drunk marrieds, wives stirred by “Bridgerton,” Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” Usher and Drake altogether, Walgreens for selling Plan B, paradise by the dashboard light, nocturnal emissions, laundering the soiled linens, side nookie, and kinky stuff like three-ways with a pool boy or trying to get it on with a stranger in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
Exempted will be impeached presidents victimized by Deep State rule of law, evangelical Christian pastors victimized by Satan to prey on the pious, and other powerful wealthy fat white males victimized by traditional Republican values. Priests practicing pedophilia are exempt as well because they’re celibate, God’s chosen representatives, and can’t procreate because boys currently lack eggs.
Then — holy crap — they’ll come for the Bible.
Dirty-minded parents will strip shelves of the Good Book because of R-rated passages that indoctrinate children into being LGBTQ+.
Look no further than Onan “laying” with his sister-in-law and “spilling his seed on the ground” so she wouldn’t get pregnant and the kid would get Onan’s inheritance. It wasn’t enough that he cuckolded his brother.
Then they’ll come for Timothée Chalamet, George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, and other hottest celebrities in Hollywood that make everyone, regardless of selected gender identity, reach for smelling salts as they lurch to the fainting divan and grab the nearest willing bumping partner to help relieve their vapors.
Then they’ll come for the America-hating socialists who demand freedom from censorship, separation of church and state, and the Constitution’s protections from China-style government control and intrusion into our literally most private matters such as reproduction.
Finally, they’ll come for me. For not turning any uterine or extrauterine embryos into humans, denying their Constitutional and Christian rights to be born.
But there will be no one left to speak for me.
They’ll be rendered mute by the greatest existential debate since Onan: To breed or not to breed?
Some say children are the #1 planet killer. Having kids is the top contributor to individual carbon footprints. No amount of green living can compensate. And we shouldn’t bring children into a dying planet.
Others who care deeply about the dying planet also say having kids will fulfill their lives. They get huffy if you even raise an eyebrow over the moral conflict. “The battle to save the planet shouldn’t be waged over the bodies of women,” a New York magazine parenting writer vents.
Some say America will die if we don’t repopulate. Others say immigration — people literally dying to come here — will take care of that.
Some who have kids say it’s really hard. Others who snort at financially comfortable, professional, privileged yet whiny parents say you read the books and blogs and knew the deal when you chose to have kids.
Some say America is not kid-friendly like Europe. Many also don’t want to pay 50% of their incomes for government kid programs or deal with the regulations. Some progressives are tacitly white supremacist because they think the 80% white Northern Europe is utopia.
Some say the childless are selfish. Others say the child-havers are selfish. Few admit that as humans, we’re all selfish.
I’ve gotten the question, “Do you have any children you don’t know about?” Think about it — it’s logically impossible to answer. But if I won a $2 billion Powerball jackpot, I’d surely find out.
The upside would be that the Alabama embryo defenders who set back humanity by being born would take me off their enemies list.
But that damned kid who wasn’t there still isn’t.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
