Laura Carroll is the author of The Baby Matrix, Families of Two: Interviews With Happily Married Couples Without Children by Choice and Finding Fulfillment From the Inside Out. After Families of Two, she wanted to dig even deeper into why society finds people who have no children by choice hard to totally accept. She also wanted to get to the bottom of why there were so many stubborn stereotypes about those who make this choice.
Laura’s research led her to learn about a set of beliefs called ‘pronatalism’ which means the overarching idea that parenthood and raising children should be the central focus of every person’s adult life.
“The more I looked into pronatalism,” she says, “I realized the picture was much larger than just those who don’t want children.”
She began to see that pronatalist ideas affect all people, whether they are parents or not, and not in a positive way. “I found the negative impacts of pronatalism’s influence distressing,” she continues, “and was very surprised that many people aren’t aware of this. What surprised me even more was that most people didn’t even know what pronatalism is.”
Laura believes that we can learn a lot from the movie, The Matrix.
“In the movie, the matrix is something that feels so real we don’t know it is there, and don’t think to question it. But we find out that is isn’t real – it’s not what reality is at all. The more I dug into pronatalism, the more I saw it’s the same with pronatalism. In this case, it’s a set of beliefs that we’ve come to believe so strongly they feel ‘real’ or true, when they are really not.”
The realization that there is a baby matrix out there was the fire that prompted Carroll to write her book.
“Like the genesis of all books,” she says, “there is magic at work; the person who is somehow destined to write the work becomes called to write it. The deeper I got into the pronatalism, the more I felt that call. The Baby Matrix is the manifestation of that calling. May it help readers discover the truths that need to be told about pronatalism, and why it’s time for us to shift our thinking!
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Laura Carroll is the author of The Baby Matrix: Why Freeing Our Minds From Outmoded Thinking About Parenthood & Reproduction will Create a Better World, Families of Two: Interviews With Happily Married Couples Without Children by Choice, and Finding Fulfillment From the Inside Out.
You’ll also find her online at her nonfiction book site, LiveTrue Books, and her top blog, La Vie Childfree.
