Dredging up past childfree commentary

Because judgment hasn’t changed in a decade

Remarking on that one famous childfree cover story in TIME magazine’s Aug. 2013 issue — When Having It All Means Not Having Children — Yahoo! Shine writer (and mother) Beth Greenfield writes,

What does “having it all” mean? Not having kids, according to the latest sure-to-be-controversial issue of Time magazine.

I’m not sure why it was “sure-to-be-controversial,” since it’s not as if childfree people want to bite parents as part of their childfree lifestyle, but it seems one person’s decision to not have children must have raised “controversy” hackles in others(?) ten years ago as it still does today.

In a decade-old Yahoo chat session between Greenfield and Yahoo! Shine Senior Writer Sarah B. Weir (Greenfield recorded the chat), Weir — with no apparent fear of being tacky — expresses sentiments that persist today in her negative perception of childfree people (well, women, really), beginning with her description of the couple on the front cover as “lazy yuppies” (surely a different reaction than she’d have had if the subject were, “Parents take a vacation”).

The lazy yuppies (who I believe ended up having a child just over a year later):