Childless Voices by Lorna Gibb review – unflinching on loss, longing and choice

Not long after she was told that she would never be able to have children, Lorna Gibb travelled to Doha, to begin teaching at Qatar University. She had spent time in the Middle East, researching a biography of Lady Hester Stanhope (she has also written a novel, and a biography of Rebecca West). Gibb had some idea, she thought, of what to expect. But she was not prepared for the degree to which a woman only made sense in that culture if she could give birth. Gibb describes the strategies she developed to explain, to deflect; finally she meets Halima, seemingly the mother of one of her students, but, in fact, only a first wife: when she was unable to conceive, her husband married again, and all four family members lived together. Halima points at the dusty ground. “I am like that,” she says with breath-stopping bluntness, “the barren place where nothing grows. Ayesha is like the palm trees … See how the green parakeets congregate and sing and nest in her branches.”

This is a book so much more powerful for Gibb having searched the world for childless voices. It tells the author’s own story, too, as one voice among many: her far from unusual history of undiagnosed endometriosis. “Some women just have bad periods,” as one doctor put it. These “periods” were in reality various organs bleeding in turn, causing so much internal damage that she occasionally collapsed from the pain. Gibb’s account is restrained, coloured with love and gratitude – for the husband who stands by her through her illness (she knows how many millions of men do not); for the fact that early menopause means “I have not had endometriosis for 10 years now and I know how fortunate that makes me”. But at the same time it takes years to come to terms with childlessness: “There is no sleep so deep I will not find you there,” she writes, drawing on Beckett’s Footfalls. “My unborn child, the one who will never be, finds me even in sleep.”

Gibb picks her way through studies and documentaries, and sends out searching emails, looking for those who arrived at childlessness because their bodies, like her own, refused. She looks for those who were refused – those whose genital mutilation renders them infertile, for instance. Those who never met a partner or met one too late. Those who have had children removed (Indigenous Australians have argued that the current rates of removal into care are far higher even than those of the first stolen generation). Women who have suffered enforced sterilisation – for instance, the 17-year-old in Canada (where the Alberta Eugenics Board kept detailed records) who was sterilised in 1946 because she was “bossy and bad-tempered in her own home”. There are people who had one child who then died, a state for which no English term exists. “It’s as though,” says Sally Holland, whose only son Luke died when he was 14, “it’s so terrible they couldn’t even give it a name.” And of course, those who choose: 14% of women in the US; the rapidly growing numbers opting out in countries such as Italy and Japan.

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In Ghana childless women can be called witches, or are believed to have been cursed by witches; they can be sent to “witch camps”, where they are safe but exiled. Everywhere, childless women are abused (often after the first year of marriage, when the issue – always the woman’s – starts to become clear). Over and over again, they blame themselves; shockingly often they choose not to continue living. During the Sri Lankan war the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam fielded combat units of suicide bombers of both sexes; the women, called Black Tigresses, were often childless because, as one peace campaigner puts it, “acting as a human bomb is an understood and accepted offering for a woman who will never be a mother”. In the west, Gibb argues, the punishments include working pay (fathers in Britain earn a fifth more than childless men); longer hours, blatantly inequitable taxation and political discourse that ennobles “hard‑working families”.

Gibb directs a rare outburst of fury at the TV journalist Victoria Derbyshire, who prefaced an interview about the three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, who was found drowned on a Turkish beach, with the words: “If you’re a parent, you might find this upsetting.” What was the assumption, that if you had no child you were somehow “less caring, less kind, and consequently of less value”? In 2015 Pope Francis was only restating a common prejudice when he said in St Peter’s Square that “the choice to not have children is selfish”. The Yoruba stricture that only admits a woman to full adulthood when she has a child is just an overt codification of an internationally prevalent assumption, that the childless are in some fundamental way not properly grown up, without an equal stake or voice. When Andrea Leadsom, running against Theresa May for the Tory leadership, suggested she had “a very real stake” in the future of the country because she was a parent, Gibb found she was “untethered by something illogical, even cruel … and I am lessened in my own eyes”.

The world has devised some patchwork solutions. In the Balkans there are the burrneshas, women who have forsworn sex and in return are allowed to live as men. Gibb discusses Catholic nuns, and the argument that they are spiritual mothers. There are the Kikuyu in Kenya, among more than 30 sub‑Saharan groups who officially acknowledge marriages in which two women form a family together: “You must make yourself a queen,” says one Kikuyu woman. And Gibb offers this book, too, as a small step forward, hoping that, in her acts of listening, fastidious exactitude and unflinching accounts of tragedy (it’s a hard book to read without crying at least once), she can make the case for empathy, imagination and respect as the most viable beginnings.