What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice, a new book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman that makes explicit many of the assumptions and values that my friends left unspoken. As writers and academics, Berg and Wiseman make a loftier and more philosophical argument for parenthood than right-wing pro-natalists like Elon Musk and J. D. Vance. But they still advance two of the pro-natalist movement’s central claims: that motherhood is superior and childless lives are comparatively impoverished.
A book written by liberals that conservatives can agree with is hardly novel these days, and Berg and Wiseman are part of a small but growing group: liberal intellectuals who have taken up the pro-breeding cause, often chiding their educated, elite peers for their insufficient enthusiasm for childbearing. Berg and Wiseman might not call themselves pro-natalists, but the label fits. Like others from this camp, they make a critique of liberal decadence that leads them to a qualified admiration for more conservative visions of gender and the family. Wiseman, explaining her own pro-natalist commitments in the context of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, concedes that the territory is difficult. “The conversation has become highly politicized, seeding real, and understandable, aversion,” she says. “But to permit the antiabortion movement to alienate women and men from the very question of whether they want children in the first place . . . only allows conservatives to set the reproductive agenda for the rest of us in yet another way.”
This somewhat undersells Berg and Wiseman’s ambition. Most pro-natalists talk about childless women. Berg and Wiseman talk to them, and their message is not ambiguous. What Are Children For? sets out to grapple with young people’s “ambivalence” over the question of whether to have kids. But if Berg and Wiseman imagine their readers as “ambivalent,” the authors are anything but: this book is designed to convince you to have a baby.
Every childless woman knows that she is expected to have an excuse. Berg and Wiseman explain why these excuses are not good enough. The ambivalent would-be mother might be worried about money, gender inequality, climate change, or cultural depictions of motherhood that make it seem tedious and difficult. But the book’s chapters on each of these topics offer little more than sentimental gauziness and faux-profound inanities that would not feel out of place in a Ross Douthat column. The authors portray a hostile, anti-baby left as a counterpoint to the ineffable value of human life, the importance of sacrifice in building character, and the fundamental supremacy of procreation over other pursuits like career, art, friendship, or ideas. After all, they ask, “How would ideas endure without anyone to examine, share, and transmit them?”
Such facile platitudes do not address women’s real concerns about motherhood. Since the pandemic there have been a number of robust investigations into the excessive demands of motherhood on women’s time and money: the New York Times’s package on pandemic motherhood, memorably titled “The Primal Scream”; the data-driven reporting of writers like Jessica Grose; and the vast empirical study conducted by University of Wisconsin sociologist Jessica Calarco in her recent book Holding It Together. Berg and Wiseman largely bypass these discussions and do not make a case for policy reforms that would make it easier to have babies. They seem to believe that material conditions are largely irrelevant to women’s reluctance to have children. The real problem, they assert, is the fact that millennial women do not want babies enough. Their inquiry is into women’s wrong desires rather than their constrained opportunities. {read}