{"id":31649,"date":"2024-06-11T14:15:03","date_gmt":"2024-06-11T14:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/?p=31649"},"modified":"2024-06-11T14:15:04","modified_gmt":"2024-06-11T14:15:04","slug":"whats-stopping-liberals-from-having-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/whats-stopping-liberals-from-having-kids\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Stopping Liberals From Having Kids"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Success Narratives of Liberal Life Leave Little Room for Having Children<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By: Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, originally published June 10, 2024, The New York Times\/Opinion<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For young, secular, politically progressive men and women, having children has become something of an afterthought. Liberal conventional wisdom encourages people to spend their 20s on journeys of personal and professional self-discovery and self-fulfillment. Children are treated as a bonus round, something to get to only after completing a long list of achievements: getting a degree, forging a satisfying and well-established career, buying a house, cultivating the ideal romantic partnership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The standards of readiness for family are at once so high and so vague that it\u2019s hardly a surprise when people fail to reach them. Indeed, the data suggest<\/a> that people are having children later than they used to and are having fewer than they\u2019d like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For progressives, waiting to have children has also become a kind of ethical imperative. Gender equality and female empowerment demand that women\u2019s self-advancement not be sacrificed on the altar of motherhood. Securing female autonomy means that under no circumstances should a woman be rushed into a reproductive decision \u2014 whether by an eager partner or tone-deaf chatter about ticking biological clocks. Unreserved enthusiasm for having children can come across as essentially reactionary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the past four years, we\u2019ve conducted interviews and surveys with hundreds of young Americans about their attitudes toward having children. These conversations revealed that the success narratives of modern liberal life leave little room for having a family. Women who want kids often come to that realization belatedly, at some point in their early 30s \u2014 the so-called\u00a0panic years<\/a>. If they are lucky, their partner (if they have one) will fall in line. If they are not, they face a choice of returning to the dating pool, freezing their eggs (if they haven\u2019t done so already), single parenting or giving up their hope of having kids of their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this way, the logic of postponement that has been promoted by liberals and progressives \u2014 and bolstered by\u00a0overblown optimism<\/a>\u00a0about reproductive technologies \u2014 robs young people of their agency. How many children they have, and even whether they have them at all, is increasingly a decision made for them by circumstance and cultural convention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not just a recipe for unhappiness; it also reflects a deep confusion. There is nothing inherently unprogressive about embracing the prospect of children. Even Simone de Beauvoir, the philosopher who was among the first to critique reproduction and family as instruments for the oppression of women, acknowledged that shaping the character and intellect of another human being was \u201cthe most delicate and the most serious undertaking of all.\u201d While certain conservative visions of family life \u2014 such as \u201ctrad wives<\/a>\u201d and Silicon Valley\u00a0pronatalism<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 no doubt have little to offer those on the left, our fellow progressives need to stop thinking of having children as a conservative hobbyhorse and reclaim it for what it is: a fundamental human concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The family \u2014 recognized as the seat of customs and traditional values \u2014 has long been central to the appeal of conservatism. Yet it wasn\u2019t that long ago that Republicans and Democrats fought over who could rightfully claim to be the party of \u201cfamily values.\u201d Bill Clinton, while campaigning for president against George H.W. Bush in 1992, assailed the Republican Party\u2019s commitment to families as little more than hypocrisy. \u201cWhere are they,\u201d he asked, \u201cwhen there is no health care for pregnant women? When too many children are born with low birth weights?\u201d Mr. Clinton\u00a0went on<\/a>\u00a0to announce a 14-point \u201cAmerican Family Values Agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in time, liberals and progressives came to shy away from publicly embracing the American family as a symbol and an ideal. After Mr. Clinton was impeached in the wake of his own family-values hypocrisy and George W. Bush was elected with the help of energized evangelical voters, family-friendly rhetoric became anathema to liberals \u2014 perceived as phony, intrusive and toxic. (The notable exception was gay marriage, whose legalization was won with the help of arguments that promoted the virtues of families.) Today, the left proudly defends the sacrosanct right to abortion and reproductive justice while almost entirely sidestepping the question of whether having children is a worthy project to begin with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stark polarization of today\u2019s public discourse has only heightened the left\u2019s wariness of children, both privately and politically. Progressive policy defeats are often met with anti-natalist grandstanding. Members of the ecological activist group BirthStrike, founded in 2018, declared that they were protesting climate inaction by refusing to have kids. The following year, shortly after proposing legislation for a Green New Deal, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York broadcast progressives\u2019 hesitancy to reproduce in the face of climate change to her 2.5 million Instagram followers when she said, \u201cIt does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Supreme Court\u2019s Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, has also made liberals and progressives more uneasy with the idea of starting a family. A year after Dobbs, the reproductive-rights journalist Andrea Gonz\u00e1lez-Ram\u00edrez wrote<\/a> that she had been contemplating having children in her early 30s, before the Supreme Court\u2019s decision put an end to all that: \u201cI have never been sure that I desire to be a mom, let alone that I desire it enough to assume the risks. These days, however, that door is shut. I choose myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That choice is not uncommon. In a recent study, 34 percent of women ages 18 to 39 reported<\/a> that they or someone they know had \u201cdecided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies.\u201d That might sound like a worry about abortion access, but the study suggested that Dobbs intensified ambivalence about having children more generally. Indeed, of the women who said they were forgoing having children because of the Dobbs ruling, about half lived in states where abortion rights were still protected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One can\u2019t help noting the irony: In permitting the conservative movement to alienate them from the question of whether they want to have and raise children, these liberals and progressives are allowing the right to shape their reproductive agendas in yet another way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the partisan framing of the issue is flawed at a more fundamental level. The question of children ultimately transcends politics. In deciding whether to have children, we confront a philosophical challenge: Is life, however imperfect and however challenging \u2014 however fraught with political disagreement and disaster \u2014 worth living?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be sure, having children is not the only way to address this question. But having children remains the most basic and accessible way for most of us to affirm the value of our lives and that of others. This is in part because becoming a parent represents one of the greatest responsibilities one human being can assume for another. And it is also because the perpetuation of human life is the condition of possibility for every other thing we care about.<\/mark><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Committing oneself to long-term leftist causes like economic, environmental, racial and social justice is more than just compatible with embracing children and family life. It presupposes a willingness to take personal and collective responsibility for the next generation \u2014 raising, nurturing and educating those who will decide the fates of our country and our planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surely, progressives and conservatives will give as vastly different answers to the question of what raising children ought to look like as they will to the question of how American society ought to be governed. But progressives must not let partisan loyalties stop them from thinking about the ways in which having children does or does not express their values, and what shape they really want their lives to take. Children are too important to allow them to fall victim to the culture wars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and an editor of the magazine\u00a0The Point<\/a>, where Rachel Wiseman is the managing editor. They are the authors of the forthcoming book \u201cWhat Are Children For?<\/a>: On Ambivalence and Choice.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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