To you, who will not be:
I am writing this letter to you, my children who will never read it, because you will not exist. I owe it to you anyway. You have a right to know why.
Nine years ago, in November 2017, when I was in my twenties, I wrote a different letter on this blog. It was called Open Letter to the People Who Don’t Want Children, and in it, I told my child-free peers, kindly and at length, that I wanted you. Both of you. At least both. I had said I wanted to raise siblings. I had said I wanted you in the future, when I was ready, and that I had thought about it carefully enough to have earned the right to that desire.
That letter is still online. I have not unpublished it, and I will not. The woman who wrote it had her reasons, and she deserves to keep her sentence. But she was wrong about you, or rather, the world she imagined for you was a world that has not arrived. And I am the one who has to look that in the face on her behalf.
So. This is the second letter. It is for you. It’s harder than the first, and I am not going to soften it because you are theoretical. I am going to tell you the truth about why I have decided, on your behalf and without your consent, that the most loving thing I can do for you is to not make you.
I. The world, first
I owe you, before anything else, an honest account of what you would have been born into. I will not pretend it is salvageable. It is not.
You would have arrived in a century at one of the high points of its wrathful, inhuman capitalism, and at one of the high points of its patriarchy. A new one, more insidious, more afraid to lose its grips on humanity, therefore more dangerous. Capitalism and patriarchy are not unrelated. They feed each other. You would have been born into a moment in which the rights I assumed permanent have proven, every single one of them, conditional. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the United States in 2022, and several states immediately reinstated near-total bans. Poland has tightened. Italy has slowed. France constitutionalized abortion access in 2024, which I credit, but the gesture was defensive, not triumphant: we wrote the right into the constitution because we knew elsewhere it was being unwritten.
I am lucky not to be American, and you would have been lucky too, on that one count. But luck is not a strategy, and the global current is unmistakable. The world is, at the moment I write this, telling women, in legislation, in courtrooms, in pulpits, in feeds, that their bodies are open for renegotiation every electoral cycle.
I do not want to deliver you into that. And I notice that you, conveniently, are not in a position to vote on whether to be delivered.
II. The numbers, because they are owed to you
I have been asked, often, by people who do not believe me when I say the world is more violent than they think, to give them numbers. I will give them to you too, because you have more right to them than anyone else does. They are the floor of the conversation about you.
In France, every year:
- More than 100 women are killed by their partner or ex-partner. The Ministry of the Interior recorded 96 conjugal feminicides in 2023. The collective Féminicides par compagnons ou ex counted 134 across broader categories. The number has not fallen in two decades.
- Around 230,000 adult women are victims of sexual violence per year (Enquête Genese 2021 + Ministry of the Interior).
- One woman in five has been a victim of sexual violence in her lifetime.
- Roughly 10% of rapes are reported. Of those reported, less than 1% ends in a conviction for rape. The math is what it is.
In the world, every year:
- Around 51,000 women and girls are killed by intimate partners or family members (UNODC + UN Women, 2023 figures). That is one woman killed by someone close to her every ten minutes.
- One woman in three has experienced physical or sexual violence in her lifetime, most often from an intimate partner (WHO + UN Women).
- Sexual violence in conflict zones is a weapon of war, deliberately deployed, in every active conflict at the time I am writing this to you.
I do not give you these numbers to win an argument with the rest of the world. I give them to you because they are part of the inventory of what I would have handed you. If, by some miracle, you had survived the demographic statistics, you would have spent your life knowing them. And the knowing is, in itself, a form of injury.
III. The particular weight of the Black daughter you would have been
There is a sentence often misattributed to Martin Luther King Jr. that, in its real version, comes from Malcolm X, in his 1962 speech in Los Angeles:
« The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman. »
Sixty-four years later, the sentence stands. It has not gotten better. It has gotten worse, in part because public discourse around Black women has shifted from invisibility to spectacle, and spectacle, in the current attention economy, is not a form of protection. It is a form of usage.
If one of you had been a daughter, you would have been that person. Not metaphorically. Not in some softened cultural sense. Literally. The most disrespected. The most unprotected. The most neglected. You would have inherited the body my mother passed to me, with all the public consequences of that body, in this century, in this country, in every country I would have ever moved you to.
I have dated within my race. I have dated outside of it. Both came with their own catalogue of drama and contempt, and neither came with the protection that the romantic ideology promised. Black men, in many of my experiences, acted as if they were entitled to me, to my body, to my love, particularly the moment they saw me with a white man. The reaction was never about me, as a person, my spirit, my heart, my soul. It was about an ownership over me my color and my body, things they had never been granted but performed as if it had been signed somewhere. White people, around the white men I dated, were straight up racist to me, in ways that ranged from the casual to the corrective. The white lovers themselves, when I look back honestly, were either insecure men who needed me as a project, or fetishizers who needed me as a category. Neither of those is love.
This is the romantic ecosystem in which you would have grown up watching me, learning what partnership looks like, deciding what to expect of your own. I would have been your model. And I am not someone whose love life is a model.
If one of you had been a son, the answer is no simpler. I would have carried the statistically non-trivial possibility of producing one of the men who do the harm the numbers above describe. I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it to insult the good men I know exist. I say it because the responsibility of educating you out of becoming the average outcome would have fallen on me, and I do not currently have, in my soul, the patience or the bandwidth to take that responsibility with teh graviry it deserves. You deserved a mother who did. I am not her.
IV. Me, your mother who would have failed you
I am, in my thirties, still a work in progress, and I believe I always will be. I am ripped at every edge, even though I am a masterpiece. I say this without irony. I know my own worth. I also know my own state. The two are not in contradiction.
Again, I do not have, today, the patience that you would have required. I do not have the mental bandwidth. I do not have the room of care in my heart that you would have deserved, and I will not pretend that I do for the sake of a society that will reward me with public approval for lying to you.
I cannot, today, bring myself to trust any man not to lie, not to leave, not to cheat, not to hit. I am working on this. It is hard. I have reasons, many of them documented in my own body. None of them are unique to me. But all of them would have been the climate of the household you grew up in.
And then there is the long companion: my depression has been the most stable, long-term relationship of my life. I do not say that as a flourish. I say it because it is true, and because you, of all readers, deserve to know. If I live every day in a fight against a kind of despair that I will probably never be wholly free from, how could I have brought you into that fight without conscripting you into it? No child should grow up next to a mother who is, in a quiet and permanent way, at war. Some children do. They carry that war the rest of their lives, into rooms where it is no longer needed. I refuse to put that weight on you.
This is not an apology, because it’s not my fault. But this is a refusal.
V. What I am choosing instead, and why you do not get a vote
I want to invest in myself. I have not yet, not in a way that counts. I want to, so much.
I want to travel. I have never, ever, been afraid of being alone, and as a matter of fact, I prefer it. What feels unnatural to me is having someone constantly in my space. The permanent presence of another body in the room, day after day, in the long term, is what tires me. The absence does not. And to be honest with you, the absence of you, in advance, feels less wrong to me than the presence of you would have felt.
Maybe this is misandry. Maybe it is misanthropy. I do not know yet, and I am old enough to refuse to lie to myself or to you about it. You are listening to a mother who cannot rule that out, and I think you have the right to that information.
What I am certain of is this: I want to put the next decade of my life into becoming the woman I almost was at every previous stage. I want the time, the silence, the geography, the resources, the slowness. You would have been, by any honest measure, the opposite of all five of those things. You would have been a vocation, and a vocation is not what I have left in me to give.
I am taking your time and giving it back to me.
You do not get a vote, because you do not yet exist, and you will not exist, because I am the one with the vote, and I am using it now.
VI. The line, which you will not extend
There is a particular pressure that falls on the daughters of African immigrants. I am Senegalese on that side. There is also Islam in the cultural background, and even when one’s personal faith has shifted, the architecture of expectation does not move. The implicit message remains the same: my purpose as a woman is to continue the line. To bear you. To honor the lineage.
What lineage?
I ask this with neither sarcasm nor self-pity. I ask because the question is real. If I do not love myself enough to be uncomplicatedly glad to be alive, why would I extend my own existence into your body, where you would have inherited my doubts, my fatigue, my unfinished work, my discomfort with the world, and on top of all that, the entire structural weight that being a Black person in a hostile century guarantees?
I did not ask to be here. This is not a complaint, it’s a fact. No one consults the unborn. The decision to give them life is taken without their consent, by people who often have not examined whether they were equipped to make it. I do not blame those who made it on my behalf, but I refuse to pass on a decision I am not equipped to make myself, particularly when the world has so visibly diminished its capacity to receive new children with anything that resembles welcome.
The line stops here. Not because the line is unworthy. Because I am not its qualified bearer, and pretending otherwise to please an ancestral expectation that did not consult me either, would be a cruelty I am not willing to perform on you to spare myself a difficult conversation.
VII. The thing nobody wants me to say
There is one more thing, and you in particular have the right to hear it, because nobody would have been more concerned by my honesty than the version of you that this paragraph refers to.
What if one of you had been severely disabled?
I have looked at this question, honestly, in the silence of my own thinking, and the answer I have arrived at, with as much shame and as little flinching as I can manage, is: I could not have done it. I do not have the strength. I do not have enough space in my soul for that kind of fortitude. I have nothing but love and respect for the parents who do, and for the children who deserve that love. I am not one of those parents. I would have failed you, and you would have felt it, and we would both have spent a lifetime carrying that failure.
The honest thing is to not enter a contract I cannot meet. You deserved a mother who could meet it. I am not her, and pretending I would have been is the most insulting thing I could do to you.
VIII. Where this leaves us
It leaves me here. Tired. Tired in a way I am not going to dress up for you, because the dressing up would be the first lie of our nonexistent relationship, and the relationship deserves not to begin in a lie.
The world is loud, and most of the loudness is bad news. The men I might have loved have not, on average, given me reason to revise downward my caution. The country that raised me has constitutionalized one right and is watching others erode it. The countries my parents came from carry their own forms of expectation. The body I live in is read, every day, by a world that has the numbers above on its conscience and continues anyway.
I cannot, in good faith, add you to this.
That is not a tragedy, it is a clear-eyed accounting.
If there is a part of me that grieves, it is not for the children I will not have. It is for the woman who, nine years ago, sincerely believed that the world would, by now, have improved enough to deserve you. She was wrong and I refuse to pass that error on to you.
You are not a loss. You are a decision. The first decision I have ever made on your behalf, and the last one I will need to make. It is no.
Your mother who will never have been your mother,
Sabine.
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**TL;DR**
– This is the second of two open letters. The first, written in 2017, defended my desire to have children. It stays online intact. This one is addressed to those children, and tells them why they will not exist.
– The world they would have inherited is one in which feminicide and sexual violence statistics (51,000 women killed by intimates worldwide per year, one woman in three having experienced violence in her lifetime, 100+ feminicides per year in France) are the floor of the conversation, not the ceiling.
– As a Black woman, the daughter of Senegalese immigrants, raised within Islam, I carry weights that the 2017 letter did not name. I refuse to pass them on.
– The kindest thing I can do for the children I might have had is to not make them. No is my decision, not my loss.
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