MY SO-CALLED SELFISH LIFE weaves together interviews with the so-called “selfish” women who have said no to motherhood, a vivid tour through pop culture’s obsession with birthing babies, and Shechter’s own reckoning with her choice to remain childfree.

You’ll meet a childfree Brooklyn rapper who wants to grow old like the Golden Girls, to a professor teaching a class on ‘not having children’ at the oldest women’s college in the US, to a woman whose unsuccessful IVF treatments led to a total life transformation–with side trips to bust myths about the biological clock and the fertility rate. MY SO-CALLED SELFISH LIFE arrives at a time when global media teems with dire warnings about both declining birthrates and unsustainable overpopulation due to climate change—as well as ongoing threats to reproductive rights. Entertaining, thought provoking, and very timely, the film invites you into a conversation about who’s really in control of women's identities and bodies.

Director Bio:

Therese Shechter is an award-winning filmmaker and writer, and the founder of the feminist production company Trixie Films. Her work fuses humor, activism, and personal storytelling to disrupt what's considered most sacred about womanhood. She is a Canada Council for the Arts grantee for her documentary "My So-Called Selfish Life,” releasing in 2021. The film examines what it means to say no to motherhood in a society that assumes all women want children, and exposes what’s at stake when women are denied the right to control their own reproductive lives. It is the third part of a trilogy which includes her films How To Lose Your Virginity (2013) and I Was A Teenage Feminist (2005). These documentaries have screened from Rio de Janeiro to Istanbul to Seoul, and her work is in the collections of over 300 universities, non-profits, and libraries. She’d love to screen at or speak to your class or organization.