Early one morning last spring, my daughter, then 4½, asked me to tell her again how we’d once been connected by her belly button. She had begun to imagine a tiny version of herself drinking from an umbilical cord like a straw, taking in everything I did. I did my best to explain that she had been both part of my body and eventually apart from it, that it was not, to me, a bright line separating our growing together and then apart.
We’d been given a children’s book about what makes a baby, a carefully inclusive book that I generally appreciated but also somewhat resented for how it excised any mention of the physical or emotional labor of pregnancy itself. When I read it to my daughter, I would ad-lib that making her was a lot of work and sometimes painful, but then hastily add that she had been created out of love.
It is hard to tell a nuanced story of pregnancy and parenting at this moment, when the most powerful people in the country talk paternalistically about whether women are having enough children. I’ve spent the past three years reporting a book about how this country makes being pregnant harder than it should be. I wince when talking about what can be beautiful about bearing and raising children, not wanting to sound cloying, preening or prescriptive. And yet I worry that without more of those of us on the left highlighting that beauty, an important piece of the human story is eagerly, and almost exclusively, being told by the right wing.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, recently called people having fewer children “a national security threat to our country.” Vice President JD Vance, who once maligned women without kids as “childless cat ladies,” seems to take every opportunity to urge families to bring “more babies in the United States of America.” And Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, warns darkly of population collapse and has spread misinformation about birth control.
The Trump administration has canceled or put on hold some research on maternal health, is preparing to throw many people off Medicaid and is deporting and separating families. Many of the so-called pronatalists prefer allowing only certain people to participate in reproduction: married, heterosexual, native-born, white. Social media could give you the impression that the majority of people who profess to love having babies are monetizing them — mining tradwife fantasies, hawking supplements — or only exist on the ultra-crunchy left or the Christian right.
I was about eight months pregnant with my younger daughter when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have contended with whether to travel for hours to get an abortion or order pills online to terminate a pregnancy or give birth against their will. Women who want to be pregnant and need emergency care, including abortions, have been turned away by medical providers, costing them their dignity and sometimes their health and their lives.
At the end of 2024, the public opinion research firm PerryUndem asked Americans of reproductive age about their lingering reactions to the fall of Roe. Forty-one percent said the decision and its aftermath had made them think about not having kids at all, or not adding any more to their families.
There are plenty of good, private reasons people choose not to have or to raise children. But for those who long to have children one day, or who are simply curious about doing so, I sometimes wonder if the overdue corrective of talking honestly about what’s messy and painful and unfair about pregnancy and parenting can make choosing it seem almost absurd.
When I think about what my anxieties were before becoming a parent, I remember that I wanted to hear that it was at least possible to temper the drudgery with joy.
For me, pregnancy and birth were a strange cocktail of banal discomfort, the terrifying, the alien and the ecstatic, a matter of reaching what I thought was my limit and going further. If there’s anything pregnancy and parenting have taught me in the past six years, it’s understanding the limits of what is within my control. It has been the chance to learn to love a person, and then another one, whom I had willed into existence. For me, the exercise of that will was foundational. Choosing when and how and how many children to bear, according to my own values, is a potent power indeed. It’s no wonder so many people want to take that right away.
Part of the pleasure of parenting, for me, is how I have shared both the burdens and the delights of the experience, and not only with my husband. It is a privilege to watch relationships develop between my children and the adults who love them — those related to us and those we have chosen — people who teach them and care for them, too.
As our daughters have slowly asserted their separateness, it has occurred to me that almost everything that makes parenting them challenging can also make it transcendent: how much they need us now, and the pre-emptive nostalgia I find in the glimpses we have here and there that they won’t always have that need. The way they intuitively know how to find our weaknesses and exploit them. The curves of their cheeks when they make excuses to crawl into bed with us in those predawn hours. How like us they are, we flatter ourselves, but how much they are entirely strange creatures of their own. The way being responsible for them forces us to explain the world to them even when we don’t understand it ourselves.
Irin Carmon is a features writer at New York magazine and the author of the forthcoming book “Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America.”
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