Madeline Bunting argues in the U.K. Guardian that a bias against having babies has permeated British culture, resulting in a birth rate falling below replenishment levels. Her argument applies with equal force to the United States and other civilized nations that currently are failing to replenish their own people.
Bunting notes that an announcement of a pregnancy is often followed, not by congratulations, but by anxious questions about childcare:
Watch how the announcement of a pregnancy among women is followed within minutes by the "What are you going to do?" question. We've replaced the age-old anxiety around life-threatening childbirth with a new - and sometimes it appears just as vast - cargo of anxiety around who is going to care.
Bunting believes that this is because pregnancy "sabotages three characteristics highly valued by our culture":
First, independence: pregnancy heralds at least one relationship of dependence, and there is often greater dependence on partners, mothers and, eventually, childminders and the like. But you've spent much of the previous 10 years attempting to eradicate any hint of dependence, either of your own or of others on you. Secondly, pregnancy is about a long-term commitment, and having avoided all such (including probably to your partner), you are, at the very least, uneasy about it. Finally, the big bump in your stomach spells out one thing for sure - a huge constraint on many choices, and choice has been integral to your sense of a life worth living.
If becoming pregnant means becoming having others become dependent on you and becoming more dependent yourself (it does), making a really long-term commitment (it does), and accepting huge constraints on your own future freedom of choice (it does), it is almost amazing that we have as many babies as we do.
Bunting blames the anti-baby bias at least in part on "a culture driven by consumerism and workaholism." New mothers often can be "failures" in the workplace -- if you measure their success or failure only by the standards of the workplace.
Much of the discussion of "equal pay for equal work" assumes that women, whether mothers or not, will continue to make identical contributions in the workplace regardless of how many children they are simultaneously raising at home. That is not necessary a benevolent assumption. As Bunting puts it, referring to a summit on women's productivity urging that women had to get into better jobs and work harder, "You could hear the lashing of whips from these well-meaning slave drivers."
We need to give anti-baby bias -- what Bunting dubs "anti-natalism" -- more thought and attention.
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