Reproduction and the Career Woman

The idea of having children is horrifying to me and mercifully, I never have. However, quite obviously there is nothing so important as policy around childbirth and raising children. What could be more important? Which of course leads people to make openly racist choices to give little Maddie and Connor “the best schools.” So that’s not surprising at least, even if it is racist.

In any case, while this point does not affect me personally, I found this essay by a population policy expert about a number of leading liberal women journalists writing about their fears of motherhood to be quite compelling and thought it worth sharing here.

If boosting fertility rates is important for societal well-being, Matthew unabashedly argues feminists should encourage religious participation, not for the instrumental impact it could have on raising fertility rates, but because women who have kids surrounded by the web of support of a religious community will find it easier than those who go it alone. 

That seeming lack of support for parents in the U.S. is highlighted by Stephanie Murray, a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Based on her experience as an ex-pat, she argues that “when you sign up to be a parent in the U.S., you are signing up to navigate threats to your kids’ safety and your family’s financial stability that you would not have to consider if you lived in any comparable country.” Being a parent in America, she argues, shouldn’t be this hard.

Some of the policies she highlights falls in the “mom dread” category Cohen tries to deflate. High-intensity parenting is a choice that American parents can (and should) opt out of, even if scare stories and social media influencers may tell you otherwise. Some could be addressed by better public policy. Others, like school shooting, are uniquely American tragedies that make parents lives more stressful but remain, blessedly, low probability events. 

It’s true that our infrastructure, policy design, and even built environment (as Murray previously wrote about for The Atlantic) can and should be better oriented around the needs of parents and children. But a warming planet, gun violence, or a lack of family-friendly play areas don’t really explain why so many individuals who may have otherwise had kids are choosing, like Filipovic, through the “lenses of desire and meaning and self-actualization.” 

As I’ve written for the Family Studies blog before, and more in-depth scholarly work has confirmed, the biggest driver of declining fertility isn’t what parents have to purchase, but what women have to give up in order to have a child: in economist-speak, their rising opportunity cost. Perhaps the biggest change in American fertility since the Great Recession is that women without a college degree are now putting off having a child just like their college-educated peers have for decades. 

For them, the opportunity cost of having a child may not be forgone promotions, but a decrease in optionality—a sense that becoming a mother is tying them down, potentially to a partner whose earnings or status isn’t dependable enough to forgo other options. This was tartly demonstrated by the freelance journalist Anna Louie Sussman in a New York Times opinion piece. Though she seemed to paint pro-marriage scholars like Brad Wilcox and Melissa Kearney as foils, they would agree with her that there should be more concern around the seeming decline in marriageability among working-class men. 

Writing about fertility and marriage across a country as diverse as the U.S. runs the risk of overgeneralization. We know more about the concerns and tradeoffs facing college-educated women because the op-ed pages and online journals that publish pieces on fertility and motherhood are more likely to feature the voices of college-educated women. And these pieces, of course, tend to focus on women for the simple, if unfair, fact that men are not faced with nearly the same ticking biological clock. 

But those caveats aside, these essays—written by some of the most talented writers working on family-related issues today—should increase our understanding of the tradeoffs at play. And they can inform what steps policymakers, and the rest of us, can do to make the future more hospitable to would-be parents taking the plunge.