The new book “What Are Children For?” might at first seem to be an exercise in overthinking. Written by two young philosophers — Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman — the book investigates the ambivalence many young women feel about having kids by looking at it through the lenses of sociology, literature, culture (high and low), interviews and surveys, and the authors’ own lives.
That sounds like a lot of ruminating, but the result is a smart, fascinating look at one of the most vital questions women face. (Men face it, too, of course, but less urgently: I know two men who had their first kids at 60, with, of course, much younger women.)
For most of human history, the purpose of reproduction was obvious: to have help on the farm or in the shop, to pass along property or power or a name, to please God, to give life meaning, to be welcomed as an adult member of your community, to be cared for in your old age. Your deep thoughts and desires hardly mattered, especially if you were a woman: You grew up, got married, had babies — and before you had time to turn around, you were dead, very likely in or around childbirth.
Now, thanks to birth control and legal abortion, having children is more of a choice, at least for those lucky enough not to live in one of the states where abortion is banned. That means it requires a decision. And decisions are hard: You can spend decades trying to figure out who you are and what you want. You can immerse yourself in the plethora of books and articles about women, work and motherhood, and obsess about what lies ahead. (“Everything I read makes it sound so awful,” my daughter said while she was pregnant. Spoiler alert: It isn’t.) You can even take an online “Motherhood Clarity Course,” in which participants “try to penetrate their ambivalence” by going deep within their psyches.
Berg is skeptical of the introspective approach. The main issues women raised in the interviews she and Wiseman conducted were practical: Where would the money come from to give their kids the advantages they themselves had enjoyed? And what about their careers? And child care? It’s no secret that our society gives remarkably meager help to families, while mostly demanding little of fathers and trying — rather unsuccessfully, the authors claim — to make women feel guilty if they don’t want to drop everything and breed.
Berg and Wiseman (they write in alternating chapters) aren’t satisfied by the economic explanation, and I agree with them that something deeper is at work. I’ve known too many people who have gone to great lengths to have kids despite difficult circumstances (no partner, precarious jobs, no cushion of family money) simply because they longed for them. The authors acknowledge “the mood of precarity, distress and resentment” so many millennials feel, but they point out that, in fact, that generation is not doing so badly economically.
The real issue is that for many of these women, having children is not as crucial as it was for their parents and grandparents. It’s “the cherry on top” after other goals are achieved: youthful fun, career success, a nice quality of life and above all, a really great relationship with a soul mate. Even less than previous generations, millennial women don’t want to settle. (Egg freezing, originally mocked as yet another capitalist ploy to get you to work harder, turns out to be a logical response to the difficulty of finding a mate.)
“Slow love” is the fashion now — spending however long it takes searching for a really compatible person, followed by years of getting to know each other and contemplating a life together. But there’s a catch: You can’t talk about kids until everything else is in place, lest you scare your man away. The paranoid feminist in me wonders if slow love is just another male plot. Men, after all, have plenty of time to have kids. Women don’t.
Ambivalence, the authors show, is a response to genuine conflicts: “But the growing recognition of just how hard it is to pursue both career and family concurrently has hardly led to a revolution in the workplace. For many women today, the worry that it might be impossible for them to ‘have it all’ is giving way to resignation, the sense that we no longer know what it would mean to wholeheartedly want any of it.”
There’s a whole genre of contemporary novels and autofiction about women, usually writers, who confront the baby question through a vague haze of depression and confusion: Sheila Heti’s “Motherhood,” Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” and Rachel Cusk’s “A Life’s Work,” among others. Their protagonists are like contemporary versions of Betty Friedan’s suburban housewives afflicted by a “problem that has no name.” It’s interesting that husbands and boyfriends barely figure in these narratives. I wish Berg and Wiseman had looked more closely at the way gendered inequality factors into women’s fears that childbearing will ruin their lives. Do male writers worry that becoming fathers will mean they’ll never be great? As we saw during the covid-19 lockdown, when dads needed time, a lot of them just took it and left moms to pick up the pieces. Maybe babies aren’t the problem.
Another rising — and legitimate — fear among young people is bringing children into a violent world that is burning to a crisp. For Berg and Wiseman, climate change is rarely the sole reason a person decides to forgo having children, but if you’re already ambivalent, it’s something to add to the negative side of the ledger. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it in a quote cited in Berg and Wiseman’s book, “The actual crisis … is now entire generations are sunk with inhumane levels of student debt, low incomes, high rent, no guarantee of health care and little action on climate change, which creates a situation where feeling stable enough to have a kid can feel more like a luxury than a norm.”
Pessimism — the belief that life is mostly a bad business and it’s better not to be born — goes back thousands of years. Today, thanks to contraception, pessimism has a chance to enact its program: Don’t have kids, let the human race die out.
In “Begetting,” the philosopher Mara van der Lugt brilliantly interrogates the anti-natalist case that reproduction is morally wrong. Not just wrong for some people — child abusers, say, and people with terrible genetic conditions — but for everyone. In the first place, you are bringing into existence a being who is bound to suffer, maybe a lot, because that is the nature of human life. In the second place, by bringing to life a future participant in our consumption (and sometimes extravagant overconsumption) of resources, you are contributing to ecological degradation and global warming. Your future child will both help to destroy the world and suffer the effects, and it will be all your fault.
The first consideration is hard even to think about: how to evaluate the interests and preferences of a nonexistent person? Perhaps if one’s potential future children could be consulted they would say, Life, yes! Bring it on, heartbreak, cancer, roses and wine — I’ll take my chances. Pessimists seem to me too, well, pessimistic about the prospects facing the not-yet-existent baby. Aren’t most people happy they’re here? Does that just show how superficial they are?
I loved this book, which is much too complex and subtle to summarize here. It gave me so much to think about, and in new ways. I’m glad I had my daughter decades before it was written, though, so I didn’t have to take into consideration the possible interests of her pre-existent self and the role I’ve played in ruining the Earth by having her. The ambivalent women Berg and Wiseman write about should read it, if only to further complicate their thinking, because van der Lugt gives no answers to her questions. But they should also be sure to read the last chapter of “What Are Children For?,” in which Wiseman describes her own decision to have a baby, and the intensity and heat and passion and continuing conflicts of new motherhood. If it doesn’t make them want to throw away their birth control, they should just lay the whole issue to rest and move on.
Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist and columnist for the Nation. Her most recent book is “Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.”
What Are Children For?
On Ambivalence and Choice
By Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
St. Martin’s. 336 pp. $27
Begetting
What Does It Mean to Create a Child?
Princeton University. 272 pp. $35
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