The Parenting Panic

Aaron Bady in Boston Review:

My grandmother was a good Catholic who didn’t go to college and had eight children. Her oldest child went to college and had one child, me. Your own family probably fits this pattern. In a decline that correlates with education and secularism, and is concentrated in the Global North, women across the world are having about half the number of children they had only fifty years ago.

The far right sees this choice as a specific kind of crisis. While anti-abortion, anti-immigrant nationalists like J. D. Vance might not use exactly fourteen words when they rail against “childless cat ladies,” they echo eugenicists like Madison Grant and Theodore Roosevelt in blaming female emancipation for “race suicide.” America was “great” when (white) families were large because (white) women were in the home having children, and (white) labor was cheap enough to make large-scale (nonwhite) immigration unnecessary. It does not mitigate the problem that about half of the current rate of population increase in the United States comes from new immigration; for them, that is the problem.

The liberal counternarrative tends to be a smaller story, about individuals choosing not to be parents. More people are making this choice, they concede, but the important question is whether people are choosing freely. Are those who never wanted children—especially women historically forced into childbearing—finally free to forgo them? Or are those who would want children choosing not to have them, for economic or cultural reasons, or out of anxiety about a war-ridden, warming world?

However strange it may sound to characterize the post-Roe present as overflowing with reproductive choice, the mainstream center-left tends to agree with the far right that this choice is a new phenomenon, and that our predecessors were spared the existential dilemma.

More here.

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