Raised in a violent home by an alcoholic and regretful mother and mostly absent father, Steve knew from an early age that he did not want to become a parent. His journey as a young man from the U.S. to Venezuela led him to found a family planning organization serving rural women, work that brought him both purpose and healing. His choice to be childfree and vegan reflects enduring concerns about overpopulation, environmental limits, and animal rights, and has helped him build a life of meaning, community, and deep gratification.

Steve (00:00):
Neither my mother or her twin sister were ever really that comfortable having children, and they were very explicit about that. They both felt very thwarted in their lives and in fact both became alcoholics. And I grew up in a very dysfunctional family, rife with alcoholism and some violence. My life was just very, very stressful. And I remember as a very young person observing my parents' friends and so forth with their children and seeing a lot of ambivalence. I remember watching couples in the car with screaming kids in the back of the car and both the parents looking miserable in front and just thinking to myself, I never want this. I really don't want this.
Nandita Bajaj (00:56):
That was today's guest, Steve. Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me. My name is Nandita Bajaj and I'm the host of Beyond Pronatalism: Finding Fulfillment With Or Without Kids, an interview series in which through intimate conversations with people from diverse backgrounds, I explore how they are courageously and creatively navigating pronatalism - the often unspoken pressures to have children, whether from family, friends, or the culture at large. Each episode features a personal story born out of liberated and informed choice about redefining what family means, including being childfree or childless, having biological kids, adopting or fostering children or animals, or creating close-knit communities of friends and loved ones. Hi, and welcome to Beyond Pronatalism, Steven. It is really wonderful to have you here.
Steve (01:54):
Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity.
Nandita Bajaj (01:56):
Yeah, and I was so moved when I was reading your story and really glad that you decided to share it. And we can dive right into it. If I can have you share a brief introduction about yourself, just to give listeners some context.
Steve (02:14):
So I'm 77, and I grew up in the northeastern United States between Boston and New York City, was raised and educated there with kind of normal middle-class opportunities and everything. I got a college education. But then I moved for various reasons to Venezuela, the South American country where I've spent most of my adult life and started a foundation which concentrates on family planning to offer especially rural women in Venezuela the opportunity to define the size of their families and if they want to have families at all. And I came to that through a direct experience of observing rural campesino, what we call families who cannot control their fertility because they're given no options in an underdeveloped country without adequate medical services. So I experienced very firsthand what it was like for these women. And because I came from a more educated background, I had soon developed in Venezuela connections with professionals, doctors, and so forth, which allowed me to be a bridge to help these women receive these services. But that was my experience and what the women wanted more than anything else from us was family planning.
Nandita Bajaj (03:36):
Wonderful. That's really great work that you're doing. And I think that was what was so interesting about your stories. There are a lot of shared interests between you and me and the work that we are doing. And can you share a bit more about your upbringing and the messages that you were receiving around planning your own family, marriage and children, et cetera? What were the cultural norms with which you grew up?
Steve (04:05):
I think the cultural norms when I grew up were fairly normal and the expectations were having children, but my own experience was very different because neither my mother or her twin sister were ever really that comfortable having children. And they were very explicit about that. And they shared that. And my mother had four children and my aunt had two children. They were raised in the south of the United States. They were subject to all the kind of chauvinistic pressures of the South, including sexual abuse, supergendered definitions that didn't allow them to grow beyond that. Their mother, who was my grandmother, was very depressed and beaten down by all of this. They both felt very thwarted in their lives, and in fact, both became alcoholics. And I grew up in a very dysfunctional family, rife with alcoholism and some violence. So my experience around family was not necessarily all that positive.
(05:12):
I'm the oldest child and I played a pretty major role in raising my younger siblings because in a lot of ways, no one else was there. My mother was not just alcoholic, but actually had mental health problems and was in and out of hospitals. My father was a kind of noble political activist in the civil rights movement, and he was very responsible financially, but he just wasn't around that much. He was out doing very good things, which also was a huge part of my background. And my parents never pressured me around having children. My mother, she used to cite this Anne Landers column where Anne Landers asked people if they would have children over again, and over 70% said no. And that column was later criticized for this or that, but it did not erase the fundamental truth, which were that huge amounts of people of that generation were highly ambivalent about the situation they found themselves in.
(06:11):
My mother would cite this to me, and my aunt was probably even less enthusiastic about the whole deal of being a mother than my mother. I was very close to my aunt, and she was very honest with me, and even with my cousins, her two daughters. Both of these women were alcoholics. So the whole family background was extremely dysfunctional. And I remember as a very young person observing my parents' friends and so forth with their children and seeing a lot of ambivalence. I remember watching couples in the car with screaming kids in the back of the car and both the parents looking miserable in front and just thinking to myself, I never want this. I really don't want this. But I was just a kid and I didn't really think about it. I just registered. And that continued because as I got older and into my 20s, some of my friends obviously did have children and I saw just how stressed they were.
(07:13):
By the time I was in my early 20s, I was pretty clear that I did not want to have children. I married someone and we were a good match in a lot of ways, but she really did want to have children and we kind of like struggled with it. I was kind of in denial. I did not want to deal with the issue and we just couldn't bridge it. So we ended up in a pretty messy breakup, although we're basically still friends. So I always carried a certain feeling that I was kind of abnormal or weird and was disappointing people. I actually like children and I do fine with them, but not twenty four seven in a world that I feel is overpopulated. I was very clear about that. I didn't want that to be what I was going to give the world. All these feelings were underground in me.
(08:07):
And when I first found Population Balance and pronatalism, that was a moment for me. Although I was already years into running a family planning foundation and I was years and years of dealing with women whose most desperate desire was to not have any more children than they had, but I never really thought about it in the terms that you first framed it. It was a very important moment for me because not only around being childfree, as they say, or not having children, but also around population issues, demographic issues is certainly not the way most of the world is processing what's going on. So just to get that reinforcement was very strong. Then later, I began to hang out a little bit on these Reddit networks, what they call subreddit, childfree and everything. And that was like kind of eye-opening for me and especially the vehemence of some of these women who did feel pressured and who absolutely did not want to have children and their vehemence about sticking to their guns.
(09:13):
My situation was also more complicated on a personal level because I didn't have a very maternal mother. It was very clear. She really did her best when she wasn't drinking. So I was very attracted to kind of maternal women. So that's a problem because maternal women might want to have children. So I was kind of in this bind that way because my emotional needs were very attracted to that. It was something that I had not experienced very much. After some years of separating, I got together with my current partner. She's Venezuelan. She already had three children, but they were already in their teens when I got together with her. And since then, I have played a significant role in those young adults' lives. I mean, they're now not so young because we've been together a long time. So I was able to play a role somewhat raising children, but it didn't have this intense sense which I see in other parents of responsibility, and to me just more than I would ever want to take on. But I did play very active roles and I actually play a pretty significant role with the grandchildren. I mean, my current partner, my life really partner, she would've wanted to have a child with me too, but she accepted that I didn't want to. We were older. And then I got a vasectomy, which was something I should have gotten way long before that.
Nandita Bajaj (10:47):
Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all that background, which certainly sounds very intense. It couldn't have been easy for you as a child to experience that level of lack of care or even neglect from your parents, but then also to take on the responsibility of helping to raise your own siblings. Was the environmental condition more of like a reinforcement to your already established feeling that you just didn't want to become a parent and you didn't want to repeat that cycle?
Steve (11:23):
Yeah, really good question. From probably about 16 or around then, I became very aware that overpopulation was driving a great many of the world's problems. And I became very aware of that very early on. And in part, I was like a math person. I was very focused on math and science as a young person and through my early college years. And you could do the numbers, you could just do the numbers, you understood what exponential growth was, you understood the impact Paul Ehrlich's work and stuff. So that was very, very significant for me. I would say the thing about my childhood was that it was incredibly stressful. And frankly, I began to run with some unsavory people. I was using drugs. My life was just very, very stressful and it was kind of twenty four seven stressful. It just never let up because whenever I went home, my mother might be drunk and then specifically violent episodes would follow and so forth.
(12:28):
And then when I observed young parents with this kind of twenty four seven stress of taking care of newborns and so forth, it was very different, but it was the same kind of never getting away from this kind of tenacious or tentacle contact, which you just could not disengage from in which it was exhausting. So I would say emotionally, the stress was something that was a major factor and just not wanting that kind of responsibility that creates that kind of stress, that I moved to Venezuela to get away from it all. There were a lot of things in the States. There was the Vietnam War at that time. I was drafted. I had problems around that. And I grew up in the northeast corridor, which is extremely aggressively ambitious about what they expect of people. And I was kind of successful in that world, but I didn't buy it on some level.
(13:25):
So there were a lot of factors going on. And when I came to Venezuela, I lived for the better part of a year on a farm, seven hours walking from the nearest road where there were no other people nearby. And I lived there mostly alone. And that was, I consider one of the major de-stress things I did. I wanted to be in nature and I wanted to get away from it all.
Nandita Bajaj (13:51):
How old were you?
Steve (13:52):
I was in my early 20s, 23, 24. I had traveled a lot in Venezuela. We had lived with remote Indian tribes. We were deeply into the nature part of things, but I finally had that experience and I just lived almost completely alone, way up in these mountains. Probably the nearest people were hours walking away, no roads, nothing like that, no electricity. In those days, the internet didn't exist, but marvelolous experience for me. So I understood that somehow from my own spiritual growth or development and emotional recovery from everything, I had to just get away and kind of slow down to nothing. And I managed to do that to some degree. I mean, it was a hard life. It wasn't very easy up there, but the environmental part was always huge. I wanted to go back to nature. I wanted to live in a world where nature predominates, where nature is at least as equal factor as human beings.
(14:52):
And that's no longer the case. I mean, if you look at any studies of wildlife of anything, the extinction crisis going on and everything, human biomass and the biomass of raising animals and so forth is totally taking over and dominating everything else. Later, when I started the family planning foundation, then I began to understand what reproductive health rights were, that everybody should have the children that they want to have - no more, no less. They shouldn't be obligated to have more and also they shouldn't be obligated to have less. And if we could achieve that in the world, most demographic issues, population issues with self-resolve. So it all kind of came together for me, the work I was doing and from the global overpopulation thing, it also became an extremely local, personal thing of helping people be free to have what they want. And we've had some fascinating experiences, if I can just say this, but like young couples in Venezuela, we do surgery campaigns where we do tubal ligations and vasectomies, mostly for older men and women who don't want to have any children, but who have their families.
(16:07):
But one of our issues is dealing with younger people who come in and want to be sterilized at a very young age. And we, of course, want to be very sure that they're sure that they understand what they're doing, because especially in Venezuela, there's no reversing the procedure. We kind of screen them and help them think about it. And then if they're still very clear, they have the total right to be sterilized if that's what they want. And we also have some great stories of like young couples coming in together, childless couples, and both of them getting sterilized together because they're so clear about it. And then they come out and they're both like thumbs up, they've solved this big issue. So it's very rewarding. So I think in the end, you don't counter pronatalism being anti-children or anything like that, just with reproductive health freedom, just with allowing people to really choose for themselves what they want to have, everything is going to balance out right. And I actually don't think it's much more complicated than that.
Nandita Bajaj (17:15):
I couldn't agree more. It's one of the main reasons we don't support antinatalism as a philosophy because it is at the heart of it, it's still anti-choice. You're still telling people what they should be doing. And then, Steven, it's so good that you've discussed some of these aspects of your own choice. And you brought up a number of times that you felt abnormal choosing to not have children and feeling like you didn't fit in. I wonder if you can speak to how that feels for you today, the fact that you stayed so steadfast in your decision, despite some of the backlash that you received, even internal questioning that happened for you.
Steve (17:59):
Right. I mean, when I was struggling with my ex- wife, I really tried to find a way to talk myself into having a child because I felt like she was perfectly entitled to have a child, but then I would look at my mother. It was like I saw myself. I not only could not do that to myself, but I could not do that to a child. I felt like if I had a child, I would leave the marriage and then this child would have to be raised by a single mother, would have every right to come back and ask me what the hell was I doing. I feel like what I have done and what I'm doing now with this family planning foundation and everything has actually been very, very healing for me. And not just because I believe so deeply in it and frankly, because I get a huge amount of positive approbation from the people we help, some of whom have absolutely no other alternatives to get help.
(19:00):
And so we are, in many ways, they're salvation. So it's extremely gratifying to be able to know and hear that. And the young couples who don't have children, they like look at me as a model. What has really helped me and sometimes helps me almost on a daily level is the work you do, getting that reaffirmation and these subreddit things. I swear I look at them almost every day. I'm kind of getting addicted to them. And I don't even agree with everybody, but it's just, I have this feeling of like, Yeah, we're okay. So that's been very healing, not only for giving people these opportunities, but also when you grow up in a traumatic childhood, it batters your sense of self-esteem of who you are. And so I feel like doing the work I'm doing has really helped me to rebuild my self-esteem, to feel okay about myself, and to feel okay about myself around issues like wanting to be childfree, because that's one issue, but you have to feel okay about yourself in general.
(20:09):
You have to kind of lift every part of yourself up to where you feel like you're worthwhile and you're offering the world something consonant with who you are and so forth. And this planet is not that easy a place to be on for most of us. Maybe a few of us have it easy, but most of us really struggle to find our place and to survive and everything. And the world's probably a kinder place than it's ever been and saying that and looking around at everything and me looking at Venezuela, which is in a terrible humanitarian crisis. So I just think I wouldn't want to bring another human being into that. I'm perfectly glad to be here and I'm going to do my best to make it a little better place, but I don't feel it's all that great a place that I want to put another person in it.
(21:02):
And the other thing, I have been a vegan probably for 20 years or so as the whole consciousness evolved, and I am a pretty serious animal rights person. And I feel like there's enough human biomass on the planet and it's time to let the animals come back and have a little bit more space too. And I literally look at that. If I were to put another human being on the planet, I would be taking away the rights for other beings of which there are so many amazing other beings on this planet to exist. And there's some very direct trade-offs like that that you have to consider and make. So I feel like all these decisions, it really is a synergy. All the right things come together to make for a better world.
Nandita Bajaj (21:48):
Well, those are really wonderful words to end this conversation on. I want to thank you so much, Steven, for taking the time to share so candidly, so many parts of your life that are going to help many of our listeners, I think, find healing in the way that you have through your own incredible contributions, and also find validation in their lives.
Steve (22:15):
And thank you because I feel like the work you're doing is really at the forefront of consciousness, and it is so much what needs to be said that people aren't saying. When I found your website and you, I told you that you were a hero of mine. That's the first thing I said to you when I met you. So this is a privilege for me. It's an honor for me to do this with you.
Nandita Bajaj (22:39):
I appreciate that so much. Thank you very much, Steven. That's all for this edition of Beyond Pronatalism. To share feedback about the show or a particular episode or to share your own story on the podcast, please get in touch with me using the link in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one-time or a recurring donation. Thank you so much again for joining me today as we collectively discover and celebrate the many different pathways to fulfillment beyond pronatalism. This podcast is brought to you by Population Balance, the only nonprofit organization advancing the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet by confronting pronatalism and other harmful ideologies. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Nandita Bajaj, with the support of my production team, Josh Wild and Alan Ware.