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Having children has become increasingly “coded as conservative and reactionary,” philosopher Anastasia Berg argues. She makes the case for why young liberals and progressives should take the decision back — and stop delaying it.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the audio piece. To listen to this piece, click the play button below.
Anastasia Berg: I’m Anastasia Berg. I’m a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine and the co-author of “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice.”
It’s easy to dismiss declining birthrates as the kind of thing that conservatives who are worried about family values or the national population should worry about. But I think that there is something here that liberals and progressives should care about and, in fact, worry about.
Increasingly, young people from progressive and liberal circles are finding it harder to navigate the question of whether or not to have children, one of the most important personal decisions they’re going to be making in their lives, and one of great ethical and political significance.
We see the gap between the number of children that people say they want, and the number that they actually have, steadily increasing. But I found that the question of children has become the kind of thing that people are more and more uncomfortable thinking about personally and discussing socially.
This situation is exacerbated by a political climate in which having children becomes increasingly coded as conservative and reactionary. So people are finding themselves paralyzed by indecision. That, for me, is the problem. That’s what I’m hoping to address and alleviate.
There are a number of factors driving young people to ignore the question of children for as long as possible. Those factors include very high standards of success that Millennials hold in particular — be it personal, professional or romantic. In all these aspects of one’s life, young liberal progressives especially seek fulfillment, satisfaction and success before they feel ready to start thinking about children.
Romantically, they want their relationships to achieve a level of stability that guarantees that they will not fall apart. So we wait longer to become committed, we wait longer to move in together, we have to have a pet before we even start thinking about our marriage and only then after having some time to “just have fun ourselves,” can we start thinking about a child.
So what happens — especially from the perspective of women — is that we give up the ability and power to determine what shape we want our life to take when we postpone that decision to the very last moment possible.
But there are also moral and political reasons why, especially progressives and liberals, are delaying children and family. The two dominant factors here are climate change and the conservative assault on reproductive freedoms for women.
We have young, charismatic politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez legitimizing worries about having children amid climate change.
Audio clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, is it OK to still have children?
Berg: But I think as the question is further and further politicized, these concerns about climate change, as well as a kind of concern about conservative assaults on reproductive freedoms for women, cause anxiety about the possibility of bringing more human beings into the world.
Today, having children has become the kind of thing that you need to justify to yourself and to others. And when you think of kids in terms of the possible benefits to our well-being, or to our level of happiness, or the cost that we will incur when we have children, it’s not a surprise that people are increasingly coming up short.
But I’d like to invite the people who are thinking today about whether or not to have children, or how to view having children, to remember that — before the personal concerns of how to fit children into your own life and your own ambitions, and before we try to reconcile having children with this or that political goal — we have to be able to answer a deep ethical philosophical question.It’s one that human beings have been asking ever since we started asking philosophical questions at all, and that’s the question of the worth of human life.
Is it worth the trouble, the pain, the loss and grief that we encounter? Is it justifiable and is it maybe even good to usher more human beings into existence?
It can be helpful to remember some of the greatest critics of our way of life coming from the left, like Simone de Beauvoir for instance, who highlighted how motherhood and the raising of children was one of the greatest sources of oppression for women — even she said she could not deny that raising children and shaping the intellect and character of another human being is one of the most delicate and serious undertakings of all.
Confronting the philosophical and ethical question of the worth of human life writ large liberates us to recognize the order of the concerns at stake here. There has to be priority to this question of whether or not we have faith in the possibility of a better human future.
We also have to realize that the possibility of a better future is conditioned on the possibility of having a future at all. That means, some people have to be having children. And if you want those children to share in the values that you yourself hold, you probably want some of those people to be the kind of people that you yourself are.
The post Why Have Kids? A Liberal Case for Natalism appeared first on New York Times.