Children are Still Worth Having
If you can, be fruitful and multiply.
I recently stumbled upon a piece by the hilarious
that claims that the fertility crisis is inevitable and men should get over it. In her article, she lambasts men who adamantly attempt to convince women to have children so they can satisfy their lizard brain impulse to reproduce. According to her, women are the only ones who truly recognize the trade-offs of childbearing and birth, and men are underappreciating these risks and drawbacks.While I agree with the author that men do not completely understand women’s apprehension around childrearing and birth (how could they — they’re not women and never will be), I find it more than a little disingenuous to claim that (1) only men are concerned about the fertility crisis, (2) women are en masse afraid to have children and (3) women have always preferred having fewer children than their male partners.
She anticipates this rebuttal, stating, “If there has ever been a time when it was NOT the case that men wanted more pregnancies and women wanted less, we should all wonder why, as it violates every biological and evolutionary principle.”1 The one theory she posits is that women were simply ignorant or powerless to take charge of their fertility. Now that we have Fertility Awareness Methods and contraceptives, we’re more able to space pregnancies or avoid them altogether, much to our husbands’ alleged chagrin.
The author claims that other than a few “ultra broody and maternal women,” most women will realize that pregnancy is a terrible deal for women and choose against it.2 This claim beggars belief as there are so many exceptions to it. Most women having children today are not doing it to be popular; the pressure to have children is probably at its lowest ebb in history. In addition, the social pressure against having more than two children is immense. Women are also not all Mother Hen-type figures who have always loved babies. Yet, many of them are embarking into motherhood anyway, with much less experience and help than was on offer in generations past.
What Kryptogal fails to recognize is that children are an unqualified good that men and women seek regardless of the trials of parenthood. Pregnancy and childbirth were far more dangerous in the past, women were well aware of that fact, and yet they still lamented their inability to get pregnant. They were not just concerned about their inability to continue the species; they were heartbroken that they would never experience the most profound love on offer in the human experience — the love between mother and child.
However, in a secular worldview, Kryptogal is right — infanticide, exposing your child to the elements to be eaten by street dogs, and contraception use were and are common methods to eschew one’s caregiving duties. In our time, we cannot ignore both the more valid and the more invalid reasons why women are choosing infanticide. Some (seemingly) valid reasons include not having the financial or emotional support from the father or family to raise the child or the child being conceived in an abusive situation. Some invalid reasons include hating children, worrying about a child affecting your lifestyle, or cutting down on the stress of pregnancy by “selectively reducing” a twin or triplet.
However, the women Kryptogal highlights in her piece are usually not yet undergoing the realities of pregnancy; they’re child-free in advance. The reasons these women cite when they discuss their decision to go child-free usually revolve around their lifestyle. They prefer cuter (and less time-consuming) animals and they want money, freedom, and no stress. They don’t like mess, screaming, or sleep disruptions. They especially don’t want to get pregnant or give birth.
Thankfully for child-free folks, their parents made these sacrifices so that their children could even aspire to a “stress-free lifestyle.” Still, despite the general selfishness of the childfree movement, I agree with the author in one respect; pregnancy and childbirth are messy. They can be painful processes consisting of numerous hospital visits and expulsions of bodily fluids. Indeed, our culture is particularly inclined to portray birth as a universally horrific experience, complete with backs arching off stiff hospital beds, screaming, and teams of doctors yelling “push!”
Don’t get me wrong — traumatic births exist and need to be addressed because not “all birth is beautiful.” But just because birth and childrearing can be stressful does not mean it’s meaningless or not worth the hassle. Any level of greatness we achieve in this life can sometimes entail temporary or chronic physical, mental, or emotional stress, and you will not know how much will be involved until you embark on the journey yourself. The only person who ever fully anticipated His incoming suffering was Jesus, and He still chose to go ahead.
Kryptogal shows her hand by mistakenly characterizing our collective history as one long sequence of us “learning to exercise more and more dominion over nature” so that we can avoid pain, discomfort, and inconveniences. This desire actually compromises only a small, virulent slice of our history, specifically the time since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Both occurred after Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the father of technocracy, popularized his idea of the domination of nature. Since then, humans have devolved from harmonizing with nature to violently controlling it.
The more conservative view of nature is that while God gave us the right to subdue the world right from the jump — only after his injunction to be fruitful and multiply, mind you — this world and our rights to it are ultimately His. And since nature is His, it’s arrogant to try to change it substantially from its inherent properties and ends. This natural law philosophy prioritizes small adaptations and preservation, while Bacon’s view embraces technological optimism and a ruthless desire for man to craft a “second nature within nature” i.e. play God.
We live in the wake of Bacon’s utilitarian worldview. Now, any inconvenience, pain, or stress is another scientific problem to be solved with a new technology. Pain is not meaningful; it is pointless. This is why childbirth is viewed, by Kryptogal and others, as a question of pros and cons, dollars and cents. On balance, they cannot understand why the vague dream of procreating and loving a child is worth the hospital bills, nausea, pain and the giving up of your hot, youthful body, alcohol, and drugs. And without a transcendent worldview in which you recognize that your life (and yes, even your body) is not your own, having a child seems like the rawest deal in the world. I mean…you have to care about someone that is not yourself. Wouldn’t artificial wombs be preferable to this?
It is natural to be nervous about childrearing and childbirth, and women rightly want this to be understood and appreciated by their male counterparts. Let’s face it, men do not have to weigh whether or not to share the news of their pregnancy with their boss for fear of getting fired (although even this is changing). They do not have to worry about the possibility of intimate partner violence while they are in their most vulnerable state. They do not have to be utterly dependent on anyone the way a pregnant woman is. At the end of the day, the author is asking for this reality to at least be part of the conversation, and I support her in that aim.
Of course, mothers need to be appreciated more; that’s a given. But until we stop treating the fruits of motherhood (i.e. children) like inconvenient parasites and accept that parenthood is more important than any career, mothers will not be appreciated and young women will not want to become them. This is why articles like Kryptogal’s are ultimately counterproductive. It’s perfectly fine to be realistic about the challenges of pregnancy and birth, but taking a magnifying class to just the negatives will only lead people to blame the child (and by extension the man who gave you half of that child) for causing these ailments.
It is no wonder that amidst a baby-hating culture such as ours, women are deciding to put all their eggs – figuratively and literally — in the career basket. But Kryptogal left out so many positives. For one, there is the indescribable joy of seeing the world through your child’s eyes. We are so jaded as adults, but children keep us active, hopeful, optimistic. You get to comfort them, steward them, play pretend with them. You become a better version of yourself: more patient, more selfless, more kind. You learn the joy of having a crowded dining table where interesting conversations take place. You get to watch your children have their children, and you get to celebrate their successes. Most importantly, you get to play a part in creation and know just a little bit more about how much God must love you.
You cannot quantify these experiences because they are priceless (plus, children are inherently a long-term investment, if we have to use market-based terms.) But if you voluntarily eschew marriage’s natural gift of having a child, you are in essence spitting on your parents’ sacrifice. You are saying that your life, with all of its ups, downs, and snarky Substack posts, was not worth the second-degree tear or C-section scars. You are pridefully severing the long line of your ancestors’ sacrifices and offering up the spoils for the sake of your vanity.
You cannot know what you are missing out on if you do not try. But trust me, living life in fear of the unknown will ensure you do nothing worthwhile whatsoever. Not everyone is called to have children, but they are the natural fruit of marriage, no matter what society says. If you spurn this gift, you may only know its value when you’re sitting in a quiet house, on another quiet Christmas Day, with no one there to pass the salt.
Questions for You:
For parents: If you could go back, would you have children again? Would you have more or fewer and why?
For those without kids: Do you plan to have children? Why or why not?
For those with infertility: What are some things women take for granted about their fertility?
But it doesn’t violate every social or religious principle.
As a side note, this is classic red pill/manosphere language that is often used to condemn marriage as a bad deal for men, despite evidence to the contrary. Claiming that children are a bad deal for women is just another manifestation of the horseshoe theory where feminists and meninists meet and make their adherents miserable.
Feminists forget that some men long for children as much as their wives or girlfriends. Years ago an Oxford student had an affair with a young woman, who got pregnant. This was at an inconvenient time in her life and she wanted an abortion. The young man involved was desperate to save the baby's life and went to court, only to discover he had no legal rights at all.
However, the young woman finally agreed to give birth - on the condition he took total charge of and responsibility for the baby. He gladly accepted this condition and the baby flourished with him, especially when he later married happily, had more children and his oldest daughter took her place within the family.
Yes I was a little hyperbolic and bombastic there...it came from annoyance at reading/listening to ten million pieces and podcasts about the fertility crisis from 98% men where they mostly act like it's either some big mystery or because feminism and women having careers and education is bad. But even just in the few months interim, a lot more women have joined the conversation.
To clarify, I don't at all think that most women don't want kids. I think probably about 90% eventually will. But I also think most don't want more than 2, and also most don't want them when they're very young (and neither do most men, btw, now that they're expected to participate and bear more of the burden of raising them). I'd say the most common desire is one boy and one girl (very notable how when you see a big family of 4 or 5 nowadays it's almost a certainty that the first several kids were all the same sex and clearly thevparents kept going in hopes of getting one of the other). Then you have a smaller portion who just want one, and another smaller portion who want 3+. But when you go to the one extreme where it's people who want 5 to infinity children...in that arena men are probably 20 to 1 (partly because it's so much easier to achieve that as a man, if one has the means, a la Elon Musk).
The other thing is that among the 10%ish minority of people who truly don't want kids, ever, those forums are about 95% women, so it's the total reverse of what I was seeing from people worrying about the "fertility crisis". Even though there are men in that category too, it doesn't usually cause them tons of angst and no one's pressuring them or criticizing them like they do with women.
Anyway, I appreciate you disagreeing and being critical of my essay while still being civil! 😊 That's the other thing you might've noticed, is that the critical commenters who felt the need to be really nasty about it were all men (not that that was a surprise). Women of course can be nasty in many contexts, but this topic isn't usually one of them...I find it's generally men who are the ones who get very angry about it, which is part of why it seems to be that amygdala/reptile brain firing up.