Take it easy, baby

Whether or not women have children should be a matter of their personal choice, not societal pressure.

If you don’t have children, you are not necessarily infertile. Perhaps you don’t want one, for whatever reason. Yet the Nepali society continues to treat couples without children as odd, and somehow medically defective. And in a still highly patriarchal setup like Nepal’s, the blame for childlessness invariably falls on women. They get asked intrusive questions about their reproductive health. Often, men in such childless unions are asked to remarry so that they can have babies and take the family lineage forward. According to a 2020 study , Nepali couples are often put under pressure into having a child in the first year of their marriage, even when both husband and wife don’t want a baby. Even if one or the other member of a couple is infertile, another research in West Africa suggests, infertility in itself is not a cause for women’s anguish, it's also what is known as the Social Pressure for Pregnancy (SSP). Most women who failed to conceive cited external pressure from families and society as the main cause of their distress.