Biological-clock warfare by JULIET WATERS I discovered I was pregnant about a week after I joined the mailing list of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. VHEMT is a bit like a death cult. It was created by Les U. Knight, a radical environmentalist who believes that abstaining from reproduction is the best thing we can do for the planet. They have slogans and bumper stickers that read "Thank You For Not Breeding," "Vasectomy Prevents Abortion" and "Live Free and Die Out." The immediate goal is to prove that the desperation to breed is just social programming. The ultimate goal is to encourage the human race to die out peacefully. I found them extreme, but I joined on a whim. For about a year I'd been experiencing this weird phenomenon that doesn't get much media--what I call "the winding down of the biological clock." This happens when you hit the other side of 35. Those baby-crazy days of your early 30s feel more and more like some bad acid trip. You still get the occasional dark night of the soul, when you see yourself alone on your deathbed, childless and abandoned. But more often you get these glimmers of a peaceful and exciting life with no responsibilities to anyone but yourself. Gradually they start to become semi-regular daydreams. When younger friends start babbling on about the joys of jolly jumpers, you start to feel like a refugee from a cult. This is a legitimate life stage I'm sure, but for some reason I felt the need to package my new feelings in some kind of fancy idealism. Ergo my interest in VHEMT. Les, who moderates the mailing list, sent me approximately 10 e-mails a day. By day 5, I was sold. I'd never felt so sure of my destiny, so centred or deeply at peace. Day 6, I was filled with fantasies of my new child-free life, a life of travel, financial laissez-faire, and total dominion over my own space. On day 7 I noticed I was feeling a bit queasy and that I'd been feeling this way for a while. In retrospect, my deep feeling of serenity was probably a tremendous rush of hormones. My positive pregnancy test shocked me, but it was a happy kind of shock. Still, there were problems, one of which was that I wasn't sure what I was going to tell the kind, though radical, people at VHEMT. I knew I could still remain a member. Lots of members had children. To be part of the movement it was sufficient to swear off reproducing any more children. But I felt sleazy, like I'd managed to slither in on a technicality. Also, being happily pregnant put a significant damper on my neophyte fanaticism. I knew I should unsubscribe, but whenever someone unsuscribed they gave their reasons and Les would forward their note to the other members. I thought about writing something pithy about the problem with movements being that they inevitably spark countermovements, using my reproductive system as an example. But I just never got around to it. Instead I deleted approximately 4,200 unread e-mails. Finally about a month ago this problem was solved. I got an e-mail from Les announcing that the group was moving to an e-group format. Members would have to re-subscribe. And that was it, almost a year to the day since I'd subscribed, VHEMT just exterminated itself. Being a single mother has, of course, presented many other problems, far more complex and overwhelming than this one. In fact, relative to those problems, I kind of miss this one. But when one of those baby-crazy, 30-something women want fertility advice from me, I think of that old saying: "If you want to make God laugh, make plans," and direct them to www.vhemt.org. "I, Single Mum" will appear monthly