Ross Douthat’s column lamenting the declining American birthrate struck me as creepy when I read it, but I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps as a childless thirty-two-year-old woman—not only an evolutionary dead end, but also a moral zero, in Douthat’s eyes—I failed to produce a response, as I have failed to produce a baby, as result of “late-modern exhaustion—a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies across the globe.” I wanted to tell Ross Douthat that there are many reasons that American women of my generation lag in both time and space, giving birth to fewer children than both our foremothers and our peers in countries such as France and the United Kingdom. Douthat is right that our government’s lack of interest in developing an infrastructure to help working mothers is a large part of the problem, if it is a problem. But so is the moralization of motherhood, which, as writers from Élisabeth Badinter to Pamela Druckerman and Katie Roiphe have recently pointed out, is rife in American society. As Badinter explains in “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines Women,” people have more babies in France, where breast-feeding is a fifty-fifty proposition and ninety-nine per cent of young children are enrolled in free, state-run daycare, precisely because having a baby in France is not such a freighted ordeal. (By the way, Douthat’s notion that the declining birthrate is linked to “a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage” is undermined by the fertile, cohabiting French.)
That’s what I wanted to tell Ross Douthat, but I had just gone for a walk, sapping myself of energy that probably would have been better used in childbearing.
The next day, I read that the Duchess of Cambridge was expecting a child, and that she had been admitted to the hospital with hyperemesis gravidarum. She was very early in her pregnancy, and it felt invasive, hearing such intimate news. The way that commentators felt entitled to have an opinion about her womb, and the way they were rooting for her to reproduce, in the name of God and country, gave me a queasy feeling. Douthat wrote that a sagging population is the result of a society that “embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity,” but might not women also be hesitating to have children, or struggling to find a way to do so, in a culture whose conception of family life is so primitive?
Photograph: Indigo/Getty.
