Our difficult time is unprecedented, and yet it isn’t. The world has suffered death and displacement since its genesis. Pick your century, pick your decade — hell, pick your year or week, and you’ll find people subjected to unimaginable tragedy and suffering. We go on living, because that’s all we can do.
Still, an increasingly vocal cohort of women has decided to forgo an essential element of living by choosing not to have children. The reasons are numerous, several of them laid out in the “Childfree” blog section at the Guardian, with recent posts answering “why I don’t have a child;” my climate crisis anxiety; I cherish my freedom; society isn’t built for motherhood; solitude doesn’t scare me; I don’t have enough money.
One of the recent dispatches comes from Jessica Wei, who has decided not to have a child with her partner out of fear that her progeny will be born only to suffer and die from climate change. “When my parents were my age, they had $1,000 in the bank, a baby on the way and boundless optimism for the future,” she writes. It isn’t, but her next line might as well be, “I, however, am a nihilist.”
Others at the Guardian discuss expensive healthcare, hostile immigration policies, the child-as-inhibitor of personal freedom, a changing body — “From the moment of conception, a pregnant person’s body is no longer the same, no matter what romantic fantasy we tell about the miracle of it all” — low wages, and other such reasons.
Having children is obviously incredibly sensitive, and it’s always better to have children within an existing relationship (at least two of the writers hint they agree with this), which several of the women say they do not maintain right now. Even so, none give much of an indication that a change in relational, societal, or meteorological circumstances would change her disposition.
The central theme in these and most other objections to parenting I have encountered resembles a sort of cost-benefit analysis. Having children ends primarily in restriction. There’s no consideration of what it brings, only what it takes away, and no concern for the natural order of things. Wei does mention the “transformative kind of bond that comes with raising a child,” but it’s little more than a wink.
All of it exposes the pervasive fatalism of our age and the impulse which has so many believing that right now, this very second, is the sum, the apex of history; that the pot will boil over at any moment. That impulse finds its reinforcement in a common trope, “now more than ever,” which pops up everywhere: in headlines, campaign commercials, public health advertisements. I heard it from a doctor on NBC this morning: “Getting your flu shot is now more important than ever.” Perhaps it really is this time, but statement x usually isn’t more important than ever. Lots of important stuff has happened in history.
“But while my mother is lucky enough to have children she can rely on, the demands on this generation make this more difficult,” Yolanda Young writes for the Guardian. In these and in Wei’s words, consideration of history seems profoundly lacking.
Frances Harper, a 19th-century abolitionist, offers some wisdom here. Harper was a free black woman who lived through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the turn of the 20th century. Her years, 1825 to 1911, were not an easy time to live as a black woman in the United States. And yet she imbued her audiences — she was also a writer and lecturer — with a sense that motherhood is a woman’s highest honor.
In her 1892 address before the Brooklyn Literary Society, Harper said, “The crown of her motherhood will be more precious than the diadem of a queen,” and she spoke about the “sweet submission” of self-surrender in motherhood.
And her thesis: “The moment the crown of motherhood falls on the brow of a young wife, God gives her a new interest in the welfare of the home and the good of society. If hitherto she had been content to trip through life a lighthearted girl or to treat amid the halls of wealth and fashion the gayest of gay, life holds for her now a high and noble service.”
Harper’s words hardly need analysis, though her point really comes through that having children is a situating event, with a great deal to be gained for the individual character and for societal flourishing.
