SIX MONTHS AGO, I was sitting in the San Jose kitchen of a woman I was trying to like. We were new friends, and I had been invited to dinner. As she flitted around me cooking, her young son would occasionally appear at my elbow and then disappear into the living room in a peal of giggles. My hostess was telling me about a woman she hated, a professional rival of hers I’ll call Mary. Mary was accomplished, beautiful, and corrupt in some way I could not follow. “She thinks she’s my equal,” my new friend said. “But she doesn’t have a child.”
I don’t have a child, as my hostess was well aware. I’ve never desired one. When I was younger, people told me that one day I’d change my mind. I didn’t. Until recently, childlessness was not a salient part of my identity: not much more important than having freckles or brown hair. But lately something had changed. As I sat there with my new acquaintance, I remembered all the biting little remarks from women with children that had accumulated over the past year. At a Fort Greene playground one afternoon, a woman I’ve known for years brushed me off when I started talking about a movie, saying that as a mom, she didn’t have time for “trivial” things. On the phone one evening, I told another friend about a woman I admire who experienced horrific violence in childhood, offhandedly mentioning that my hero had an adult daughter living in Europe. “That’s how you know someone has overcome their shit,” I heard my friend say. “If they’ve had kids.” Motherhood was a mark of adulthood, of moral seriousness—and childlessness, by contrast, took on a stigma I’d never felt before. I realized that I’d failed a test of these women’s esteem that I hadn’t known I’d been taking.
Maybe they have a point. If mothers feel that childless women have it easy, it might be because their own lives have gotten so hard. Childcare is prohibitively expensive, and mothers often find themselves “mommy tracked” at work, diverted from the higher-paid positions that would allow them to pay for daycare. Standards of parenting have become more intensive, but most husbands haven’t picked up the slack: men still do much less childcare than their wives. It makes sense that women in this position would look at my childless life and roll their eyes. Still, my new friend’s comment settled uneasily over me. If the woman she hated couldn’t be her equal without a child, I guessed that I wasn’t her equal, either.
I THOUGHT OF THESE CONVERSATIONS OFTEN while reading 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.
BERG AND WISEMAN CAN BE PATIENT, curious, rigorous, and skeptical thinkers. But it’s not really an investigation if you know the answers ahead of time. This is most evident in their chapter on the real-world obstacles to parenthood (antiseptically titled “The Externals”). Here, the authors show that financial anxiety is a persistent worry among millennials considering having kids. They wave that worry away, arguing that “many millennials are not as financially stressed as they are often assumed to be.” Berg and Wiseman make their case by focusing on earnings and assets. But this leaves untouched millennials’ real financial obstacles to parenthood, namely the skyrocketing costs of childcare and housing—things that cost disproportionately more than they did for previous generations.
The authors hang heavy claims on thin data:
While in absolute terms millennials are still poorer than their predecessors—owning 72 cents in 2023 for every dollar boomers had when they were the same age, back in 1989—according to economist Jeremy Horpedahl, when adjusting for the significant differences in generation sizes, as of 2022, millennials were roughly equal in wealth per capita to boomers and Gen Xers at the same age.
It’s not clear what the “ambivalent” women Berg and Wiseman are trying to reach are supposed to do with this information. It won’t bring much succor to someone who is trying to figure out how she will pay her rent.
But that is not the kind of woman that Berg and Wiseman are talking about. That much is clear from the writers’ methodology. Much of their discussion of millennials’ financial anxiety is derived from surveys that the authors conducted themselves, distributing questionnaires “through our social media platforms, friends, and acquaintances.” This turns out to be a narrow demographic. A shocking number of the respondents are referred to as “diplomats.” The way such people see the financial burdens of child-rearing is perhaps not representative. “I think about student debt a lot,” says one of their informants in a typical missive. “Because I don’t have any.”
Having dispatched with the material objections to parenthood, Berg and Wiseman set to work refuting the ideological ones. A chapter addressing climate change as a justification for childlessness suggests that these concerns conceal selfishness behind a pretext of virtue. “It’s easier and more socially acceptable to say ‘climate’ than ‘I’m really ambivalent about having children,’” they note, quoting Ann Davidman, “a parenthood ambivalence counselor.” “Among the many reasons one might be reluctant to have children, being concerned with the fate of the world and the people one would doom to live in it is perhaps the only one that advances a widely recognizable moral claim,” Berg and Wiseman conclude. This sounds reasonable at first but does not stand up to scrutiny. Nearly all rationales for not having children draw upon moral claims: to women’s dignity and equality, to self-determination, to the pursuit of other relationships, other loves, other dreams.
Berg and Wiseman reject the climate rationale with a high-minded vindication of human life and its continuation through parenthood. But this requires radically misinterpreting why millennials would decline to have children for the sake of the planet. It is not out of a rejection of a future for humankind. On the contrary, it seems both more generous and more reasonable to interpret such a gesture as a hopeful one, intended to ensure humanity’s best chance at survival—even without the contribution of one’s own DNA.
It is a telling mistake. Throughout the book, Berg and Wiseman collapse parenthood into a symbol of all optimism, all investment in the future. They see it as the ultimate rebuke to mortality. “Every life is a life that will be lost. We grow up, we grow old, we lose our youth and strength,” they write. “This is true whether or not we have children. If we have them, along the way, we can at least pass on something of what we lose to someone else.” Because this passage is so maudlin, it is easy to miss the problem with its reasoning. It should be obvious that motherhood is not the only way to shape another human being, and having children is not the only way to pass along the treasured parts of yourself. In my own life, I have picked up the mannerisms of acquaintances, been moved by mentors to change my mind, felt inspiration from others’ courage. I am chided daily into action by the remembered voice of a beloved friend, whose words still echo in my mind long after she died. All of these people have passed on something to me. I never called any of them “mommy.” It is not difficult for me, a childless adult, to see an abundance of love and communion available outside the nuclear family. Why is it so difficult for Berg and Wiseman?
This kind of ungenerous reading is found throughout the book but feels particularly acute in “Analysis Paralysis,” a survey of books that touch on motherhood as a site of alienation, resentment, conflict, or disgust, taking on the likes of Elena Ferrante, Maggie Nelson, and Torrey Peters. Rachel Cusk becomes an object of particular ire. “I often think that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like,” Berg and Wiseman quote her as saying. Later, they note how many times Cusk, in her memoir A Life’s Work, compares babies to unexploded bombs. Cusk’s book was praised upon publication for its honesty about the tedium and annihilated identity of early motherhood—subjects that have long been taboo. Berg and Wiseman would apparently prefer them to remain so. They conclude that contemporary women authors are not portraying motherhood enthusiastically enough. “While ‘ambivalence’ connotes a vacillation between options, the motherhood ambivalence narrators do not ultimately have much to say that is genuinely compelling for the decision of having children,” they write. Ladies, why don’t you smile more?
Liberal pro-natalists like Berg and Wiseman often complain that millennial mothers are too whiny about the difficulties of parenthood. But shouldn’t alleviating those difficulties be a central pro-natalist concern? It is conspicuous that Berg and Wiseman, like most pro-natalists, focus almost all their attention on childless women and the supposed necessity of convincing them to give birth. They have remarkably little to say about what happens after those babies arrive. Maybe they take issue with mothers who speak frankly about the difficulty of their own lives simply because such testimonies are not helping the PR effort. The pro-natalist goal, after all, is not to make mothers happier. It is merely to make them more numerous.
PERHAPS THE MOST REVEALING PART of Berg and Wiseman’s project is “The Dialectic of Motherhood,” a chapter on feminist reckonings with reproduction. Berg and Wiseman lead readers through a survey of twentieth-century feminist thought, touching on thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, bell hooks, and Adrienne Rich, and casting each as a hero or a villain depending on how enthusiastic they are about the liberatory potential of caregiving.
The argument here is that feminism’s successes render its potent critiques of motherhood largely moot: the movement, they argue, has made broader swaths of public life more available to women, and made life beyond marriage and parenthood more thinkable. Berg and Wiseman claim that feminism’s success means that women no longer face meaningful pro-natalist pressures. Their interviewees, they say, “attest to no more external pressure to have children than having to listen to their mothers’ fantasies about becoming grandmothers, or simply none at all.” They counter that if anything, feminism’s rise means that now women are pressured not to have children. But Berg and Wiseman’s claim that many women do not experience pro-natalist influences can sound strange, to say the least, coming in the wake of the Dobbs decision, when many women are compelled to become mothers by no less a pro-natalist influence than the law.
If the authors want to position themselves as the bold tellers of an unpopular truth, they may suffer from poor timing. For one thing, they are hardly the only pro-natalists who put out a book this year. They are joined by a broad spectrum of inquiries into birth and how to promote it: from Jennifer Banks’s Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth to Mara van der Lugt’s Begetting to Jade Sasser’s Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question. What Are Children For? was published in mid-June; on July 15, Donald Trump named Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate. Vance’s aggressive pro-natalism quickly turned the presidential race into a referendum on the value of childless women. His ascent to the top of the Republican Party came on the heels of the Natal Conference, a splashy gathering of pro-natalist figures in Austin last December that featured many far-right and Republican Party luminaries. And this is to say nothing of the innumerable recent media profiles of Malcolm and Simone Collins, birth rate crusaders and media gadflies who have made a public spectacle of themselves by pledging to have at least seven children. If Berg and Wiseman feel that women do not face enough pressure to become mothers, there are plenty of people working to change that.
Why the rise of pro-natalism now? It seems particularly conspicuous that the pro-baby cultural push would arrive so quickly on the heels of Dobbs. It may be that on some level, perhaps not always a conscious one, the millennial pro-natalists are trying to convince American women that the freedom they lost with Roe v. Wade was not worth having.
For their part, Berg and Wiseman do not hate the childless woman, as J. D. Vance does. Instead, they pity her. In “The Dialectic of Motherhood,” the authors bemoan the false dichotomy between career and family presented by liberal feminists. They prefer, instead, to claim that what is at stake is a kind of broad cultural malaise. “For many women today, the worry that it might be impossible for women to ‘have it all’ is giving way to the sense that we no longer know what it would mean to wholeheartedly want any of it,” they say. The childless woman, to Berg and Wiseman, is not one who has chosen a life that doesn’t include childbearing; she is someone who has proved herself incapable of choosing anything at all.
It may be true that Berg and Wiseman know many such rudderless adults, people unable to determine what they value and desire. Perhaps their social world contains such women. Mine does not. The childless women I know are determined and principled; they know how to live with integrity in the face of social disapproval. If I were to encounter such listless people as Berg and Wiseman imagine, I’m not sure that I would trust them with a child. But to the pro-natalists, it is a given that children are what such women need. The question, then, is not so much “What are children for?” It is about what women are for.
NOT LONG AFTER MY AWKWARD DINNER in San Jose, I saw Mary, the woman whom my hostess had railed against, at a conference. Even from across the room, I could immediately sense why Mary had made my friend insecure. She spoke in a confident voice that sent her companions into titters of laughter. When she presented, her work was original and compelling. It dawned on me that the emotion that had been directed at me by my friends was perhaps not simple contempt. Maybe it was envy.
Mostly, it seems to be mothers, not the childless, who are ambivalent. Mothers want both things at once: their own children and the freedom of a childless existence. The painful and unjust conflict between motherhood and full participation in the public world is worthy of a real inquiry. But all that Berg, Wiseman, and the rest of the liberal pro-natalists offer is scolding, judgment, and condescending pep talks. Mothers—women—deserve more.
Moira Donegan is a writer and feminist living in San Francisco.