A polarized debate about the birthrate has been a fixture of Internet discourse for almost a decade, with the right assiduously collecting the demographic evidence of the “birth dearth” and taunting the left with it, and the left performing the popular online rhetorical move of simultaneously denying that a troubling trend is happening while claiming that it’s actually good that it is. But it wasn’t until vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s suggestion that the United States is “run by a bunch of childless cat ladies” was publicized in July that the rhetoric of the very online collided with the sensibilities of the everyday voter. While the Democratic Party mainstream highlighted the pro-family elements of its policy agenda in response, the Internet left instead doubled down, extolling the virtues of childlessness. The prospect of planned human extinction is unlikely to become a winning campaign promise in the near future, however, and the response to Vance’s remarks demonstrates the urgency of a case for natalism from the left.
Into this debate steps Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For?, a well-timed attempt to make just such a case. Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and Wiseman, a writer and managing editor at The Point, sagely counsel at the outset that, although natalism has largely become a preoccupation of the right, “whether or not to have a family is too important to allow it to be a casualty of the culture war.” To rescue childbearing from this fate, they take on the varied strains of anti-natalism on the left: family abolition feminists like Shulamith Firestone and Sophie Lewis, “motherhood ambivalence” novelists such as Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Rivka Galchen, who emphasize the personal costs of motherhood for ambitious women, and the genres of climate catastrophe and eco-lit, which suggest that children born now are doomed to miserable lives in post-apocalyptic societies or even that human extinction is a moral imperative. Berg and Wiseman perceptively critique these kinds of arguments, particularly the novels, for their desiccated didacticism that elevates “theoretical ruminations” or political messaging above every quality of a good novel. That this cardboard quality is also the basis of their appeal—readers identify more easily with underdrawn characters who live entirely inside their own heads and take a kind of perverse pleasure in watching apocalypse unfold on caricatures of people in whose fates they can remain uninvested—is all the more damning.
Cutting anti-natalists down is one thing, but building up the left’s case for children is more difficult, and it is here that Berg and Wiseman falter. Arguing from and for the political left in some ways expands their scope, but in some essential ways, also limits them. It lends them much greater sympathy with the subjects of their investigation, who are mostly educated, left-leaning young women. Rather than reducing their ambivalence to mere selfishness or hedonism, as conservatives like Vance often do, Berg and Wiseman take their stated reasons for delaying or abstaining from parenthood seriously and try to offer the most-sophisticated, steel-manned versions of these objections.
They ably puncture widespread assumptions that these women are forgoing children because of costs, family-unfriendly government policies, or ecological threats. Much more often, they point out, such claims come from those “already leaning against having kids” who “recognized the political potential in representing climate change as a decisive consideration” to motivate others to take action, and so “exaggerate or place extra emphasis on its influence in their decision-making,” especially to their family and the public. In other words, such justifications for childlessness are not genuine motivations but politically strategic just-so stories.
So what are the real reasons? Berg and Wiseman offer varied testimonies drawn from their surveys and interviews, allowing women to put their reasons in their own words. Some of these reasons are preposterous. One woman, for instance, said she “would not want to raise kids if I didn’t feel I could provide them with the same standard of living I enjoyed growing up, which included things like summer camp, sports lessons, vacations, and private college tuition.” Others are sympathetic and troubling. Numerous women describe being trapped in a contradictory dating culture that radically separates romantic and sexual fulfillment from childbearing and makes “sidelining one’s desire to start a family” a prerequisite for finding a partner.
What is notably missing from these testimonies, however, is even a single account from a woman who was not ambivalent about motherhood but straightforwardly wanted children and had them. If we are looking for arguments to counter anti-natalism and motherhood ambivalence, it seems useful to consult not only women who don’t want children but also those who do. This omission is doubly odd because one of the authors, Berg, appears to be among the unambivalent herself: She was “confident in her desire to start a family” and faced mainly logistical, not motivational, obstacles to doing so. Wiseman describes her mother this way as well but attributes her mother’s attitude to an era when reproduction was “not a question.” Yet Wiseman’s mother was someone with a graduate education who had children in the late 1980s, when alternatives—reliable contraception and abortion—were widely available. The implication we are left with is that because Wiseman’s mother did not agonize over the decision, she did not make a genuine or free choice.
Perhaps inadvertently, in their effort to soothe motherhood ambivalence, Berg and Wiseman elevate it from merely a common dilemma to a moral imperative for American women. If motherhood is to be a free moral choice, it requires justification. If you cannot offer philosophically sophisticated reasons for undertaking it, can you really be said to have made a free choice at all? Or are you merely the dupe of social norms, religious dogmas, or reactionary ideologies, an unwitting Handmaid? Rather than something to move past, ambivalence thus becomes the mark of the thinking woman.
The ostensible purpose of their book is to coax the ambivalent to see the good of children, but, broad philosophical claims aside, they find little to praise about parenthood on a personal level.
Here we can begin to see the limitations of an approach to parenthood that relies exclusively on the premises of the left. As a condition of their project, they dismiss any argument bearing even the slightest taint of the right. Political and policy concerns about declining birth rates, ideas about maternal instinct, even popular practices such as natural birth, attachment parenting, and breastfeeding are written off as “essentialist,” “deeply conservative,” the province of “white supremacists.” They are left with at best no account of the many women who deeply, unambivalently want children, or, at worst, the implication that such desires are fundamentally reactionary and nefarious. Berg and Wiseman seem wary of endorsing decisiveness, as though this would mean renouncing intellectual sophistication and free choice itself. Still, there must be something more to offer than what Berg here suggests: “When I try to convey what it has been like to raise our child, I hear an echo of David Wallace-Wells on the climate crisis: ‘It is, I promise, worse than you think.’ Then I go blank.”
But perhaps there are potential arguments for the personal value of parenthood, arguments that Berg and Wiseman gesture at but never quite articulate. One is that the new responsibilities and demands that children impose on us are themselves good for us. By taking responsibility for other people’s well-being in this irreversible, non-contractual way (there is no sending children back once they are here), you become the kind of responsible, trustworthy person who holds communal life together. A friend once told me about a Cub Scouts meeting that she attended where a police officer instructed the kids about what to do if they got lost or needed help among strangers: “First, look for a police officer. If you can’t find one, look for a mother with children, then a father with children, then a single woman.” (Sorry, single men.) This is a blunt statement of the heuristics that guide our social judgments: Parents can be trusted, parents can help. Parents can be expected to be responsible adults. It is socially important and also personally gratifying to become the kind of person who can fill this role.
Berg and Wiseman are beholden to two beliefs that obscure this good. First, the standard by which they measure the goods of life is youth-centric: how much fun we’re having, and how free and open we are for future fun. This is the standard of college life, which our society increasingly tries to sustain far beyond college. By that standard, children are not good because children are not fun in the way carefree college life or single young adulthood on a starter salary is fun. Taking on any irreversible responsibility for another person constrains our freedom to maximize our fun. Berg articulates exactly this youth-centric fear of responsibility when she describes her panic at bringing her baby home from the hospital: “What have we done?” she asks her husband. “Our life was good.” But she also offers at least a hint of an alternative approach to measuring the goodness of a life when she points out, “College doesn’t last forever; you’re meant to graduate.” We do not live by our childhood standards of happiness forever. So it is not clear why those of our twenties should be more decisive or permanent when our lives typically last many decades longer. Shouldn’t our measure of what makes our lives good be updated accordingly?
The other belief that restrains Berg and Wiseman from thinking through the goods of parental responsibility is the implication that people who do not have children, whether by choice or circumstance, are not “real” adults, a judgmental and exclusionary posture that Berg and Wiseman take great pains to avoid. It is admittedly difficult to avoid this implication altogether, but the Cub Scouts heuristic offers a way out—even if you can’t become a parent, you can still become the police officer. You could take this exhortation literally, or in the broader sense that there are other social and professional roles that demand analogous forms of responsibility for others and to which we attach similar levels of trust and status. Doctors, for example. But for many, becoming a parent is much more easily attainable than such careers, which is one reason why poorer women continue to have children at higher rates than wealthier ones. As sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas have shown in Promises I Can Keep (2005), motherhood is an important source of self-worth and social esteem for women who have few other sources. Community standing is a profound good for most people, and one that may even be more lastingly rewarding than mere fun.
Berg and Wiseman briefly raise the possibility that parenthood grants immortality, not in the sense of lasting fame but in the more primal sense that something of your brief life’s efforts will continue after you. Despite the great hopes of writers such as Heti, most people torn between having children and their art will never create enduring art. Nor will the aspirants to other demanding careers leave much of a mark through their endless spreadsheets and memos and articles. Even one additional generation of a family will outlast all that detritus. This is the epiphany that Berg and Wiseman draw from Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, that the writer-protagonist’s “daughters, too, were her creation, perhaps the best she was capable of.”
These are at least the beginnings of accounts that could shift the motherhood discourse beyond the culture wars, suggested but undeveloped in What Are Children For? But it is ultimately unclear if the well of purified left-liberal thought from which Berg and Wiseman draw has sufficient intellectual resources for this project. Once we eliminate religious motivation, obligation to one’s family or country, aggregate economic rationales, “gender essentialist” ideas about the nature of women and their unique necessity in the lives of children, and the biological-sentimental appeal of motherhood as possible justifications for having children, few arguments can be marshaled to overcome the left’s numerous objections. This, combined with the authors’ autonomy-centric reluctance to criticize anyone for not having children, renders the project of encouraging them to do so fragile. Unless the left wants the current party of family values to expand into the party of family existence, it will have to make a case for children eventually. This is a start.