I’m A Surgeon. I’m Also Child-Free — And 6 Words From A Colleague About My Life Left Me Stunned.

I was sitting with a group of my colleagues in a physicians’ meeting, hammering out policy changes and standards for patient care. The conversation wound down as we neared the end of the workday, and chatter shifted from business to our weekend plans. Others in the group shared their family plans for kid’s activities and dance recitals. I shared that I was going to Las Vegas.

“It’s because she doesn’t have kids,” one of the doctors said. Those six words fell out of his mouth with little effort and hung in the middle of the room in the hospital where I had worked for nine years.

Laughter broke the silence, and the conversation moved back to the business at hand. People packed up to leave, but I kept turning over his words, which felt big and heavy.

My reproductive choices had been casually brought up and then discarded in the middle of our otherwise collegial conversation. In an instant, my joy had been made small. My child-free life was the butt of a joke.

As a woman in my 40s, I was no stranger to unsolicited comments about my choice not to have kids. Since these judgments were familiar to me, I usually shrugged them off, but this moment hit differently. Over the next few days, I pondered the tone of my colleague’s words and what they implied. Did he mean that because I didn’t have children, I didn’t have any responsibilities at all, so of course I could run off to party in Vegas?

I’ve frequently encountered the notion that a woman without kids is somehow absolved of all life’s burdens and efforts. A lack of children, apparently, is the only reason I can have fun. Sure, there are perks to not having kids, but the assumption that my autonomy comes without the normal weight of human experience is flawed. As an academic