Why aren’t Americans having more babies? Inquiring minds — by which I mean, a certain breed of nervy social conservative — want to know. New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, for whom today’s historically low birthrates are a national catastrophe, says the answer is not the dire economic straits faced by millennials but something soggier and more sentimental. “Deeper forces than the financial crisis may keep American fertility rates depressed,” he speculates darkly in a representative column. “The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion.” The column in which this plangent cri de coeur appeared bears the subtle title “More Babies, Please.”
Despite the steady stream of alarmism from Douthat and his ilk, it can often seem that babies are the most powerful lobby in America. Politicians are forever clambering to demonstrate their “family values,” while the rest of us are consigned to weather a constant barrage of exhortations to do it — whatever it happens to be — “for the children.” The verdict in favor of compulsory motherhood was delivered perhaps most memorably by Theodore Roosevelt, who told the National Congress of Mothers in 1905 that women who choose not to reproduce are as useless as “unleavened bread.”
So, which is it? Are we drowning in propaganda for pregnancy, or is our society hostile to would-be parents and awash in late-modern malaise? The answer, according to two unusually thoughtful new books about birth, is that motherhood is simultaneously over- and undervalued. It is “venerated in places like the U.S. and the UK except when it comes time to pay the bill from the maternity ward, offer maternity leave, feed a mother’s children, or come up with solutions to the child care conundrum,” laments Jennifer Banks in “Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth.” Historian Peggy O’Donnell Heffington reiterates this claim in her probing study, “Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother.” “Despite the expectation we all become mothers,” she writes, “we receive little support once we do.”
Just as motherhood is both an obligation and an afterthought, it is both a national obsession and the stuff of cheap talking points. There is no end of hand-wringing over careerists who forgo the delights of cherubim in favor of corporate paychecks, but careful interrogations of parenthood are few and far between. Both Banks and Heffington struggle to break with the established scripts, even linguistically. Banks begins by noting that “there is still no single, alternative word to express for birth what ‘mortality’ expresses for death,” namely “how birth shapes all human life, defining its limits and its possibilities,” while Heffington opens by reflecting that “we have a term for women with children, which is mother. What we don’t have is a great term for a woman without children other than ‘a woman without children.’” “Natality” and “woman without children” may be unfamiliar — even clunky — phrases, but they are appropriately jarring rebukes to the glibness of our usual rhetoric, which rarely seems to move beyond entreaties for “more babies, please.”
For all the panic about fertility rates, few evangelists of reproduction have paused to pose the question: Does it matter that we are born, rather than spawned or deposited in the world fully formed? This question could mean: Does it matter that we are bounded creatures, bookended by twinned expanses of nonexistence? Or alternatively, that each of us initially lived inside another person? Or alternatively again, that we depend so wholly on our caretakers for the first decades of our lives? Unfortunately, Banks never clarifies which of these many aspects of birth is central, and “Natality” is unwieldy as a result.
By her own admission, the book “isn’t a comprehensive or broadly representative study” so much as a preliminary exploration. Banks is at her least evasive in the introduction, where she argues that sociality is baked into the fundaments of life: “We may die alone but we were never born alone.” But instead of developing this intriguing insight further, or explaining its connection with birth in particular — after all, most of us continue to rely on others well after we emerge from the womb — she proceeds by homing in on seven notable figures and providing overviews of their thinking about natality: Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison, who appear in not-quite-chronological order.
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Banks is a lively writer of capsule biographies and a deft interpreter of thorny philosophical concepts, but she rarely ventures a view of her own. Sometimes she seems sympathetic to the notion that birth’s significance is metaphorical: She admires Arendt, who saw new life as a reminder of our “supreme capacity,” and reveres Nietzsche, who wondered, in Banks’s words, if we could “love our lives so entirely” that we’d be “willing to be infinitely reborn.” Yet some of the feminist firebrands she extols in later chapters would have rejected these abstractions. Rich regarded motherhood as “a relationship between her body and the bodies she had birthed,” as Banks puts it, and Wollstonecraft, who died of postpartum complications, would no doubt have resented the reduction of a physical ordeal to an ethereal emblem.
Such pointed disputes demand resolution, but Banks refuses to take sides; instead, she leaves readers with the anemic conclusion that the thinkers she considers “were all shaped by birth” (who isn’t?) and that “they in turn have shaped our collective understanding of what it means to be born human” (shaped that understanding into which configurations?). “Natality” asks long neglected questions but shies away from volunteering satisfying answers.
Heffington, who takes it upon herself to speak on behalf of the “unleavened bread” derided by Roosevelt, is more assertive. “Without Children” is a feat of diligent research and, better yet, blazing argument. It begins by debunking the persistent myth that Americans do not place a high premium on procreation. On the contrary, “the expectation that people sexed female at birth would become mothers was forged by a long history that sought to make reproduction into white American women’s primary civic contribution.” In 1873, a Justice of the Supreme Court wrote in a concurring opinion that “the paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother,” and as recently as 1974, a couple who confessed that they did not want children on “60 Minutes” received death threats after the segment aired. The centuries-long cultural campaign in favor of procreation is one side of a historically eugenicist coin, and the other is even darker. Before America graduated to telling upwardly mobile White women that, if they decline to reproduce, they are avatars of late-modern decadence, it was forcibly sterilizing Black women in the Jim Crow south.
Heffington goes on to rebut several unsubstantiated yet persistent explanations for America’s increasingly childless estate, which range from mawkish (“late-modern exhaustion”) to downright conspiratorial (feminism is a plot designed to transform tender matriarchs into corporate mercenaries). In chapters that focus on common reasons for forgoing parenthood, Heffington shows that institutions assumed to be timeless and immutable are in fact historical anomalies, whereas practices presumed to be novelties are in fact longtime staples.
She notes that “present-day conversations around non-motherhood tend to frame today’s young women as a historical aberration,” a population with unprecedented reproductive freedoms, but long before the development of hormonal birth control, more exotic contraceptives were available: “Medical treatises dating back to the Middle Ages in Europe list dozens of herbal contraceptives and abortifacients,” and an “Egyptian papyrus from nearly four millennia ago, 1900 B.C., includes a recipe for spermicide made by mixing hydrated sodium carbonate with crocodile droppings.” Nor is “having it all,” in the sense of working while raising children, a modern innovation: “Most women, for most of history, would have been expected to have children and contribute economically to their families.”
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Unlike working mothers and contraception, the nuclear family is a relatively recent invention. Earlier Americans preferred “communal ways of child rearing that spread the burden more evenly across the adults who had the bandwidth and the homes that had space.” These collaborative arrangements demonstrated how easily motherhood and natality can be disentangled: In discussions of relatives and community members who cared for children they did not bear, Heffington makes a strong case against fetishizing biological parenthood. Yet in the 20th century, more collective approaches to child care withered, and our expansive sense of motherhood wilted along with them. President Richard M. Nixon cemented the insular turn in 1971, when he vetoed an act that would have funded day-care centers, claiming that the legislation would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”
Each chapter of “Without Children” is vivid and informative enough to fascinate in its own right, but by the end its strands have braided into a broader thesis. “Most explanations for why women aren’t having children focus on individual choices made by individual women,” Heffington writes, but this solipsistic emphasis is misguided. Insofar as there is any truth to the stereotype that shrewish “girl bosses” do not have children because they work too hard, it is that women have often had to refrain from becoming mothers for economic reasons, and not just in the wake of second-wave feminism: During the Great Depression, “a greater percentage of women remained childless than at any other point in American history.” Fertility rates are declining globally, but they are declining more slowly in Western European countries that “tend to have generous maternity leave policies, prenatal and postpartum support, free day care, and shorter workdays for nursing mothers.” The lesson is refreshingly practical: There is no need to appeal to misty mystifications to account for a trend that is easily explained by economic hardship and social isolation.
For an apologia for women without children, Heffington’s book is surprisingly silent when it comes to the question of agency. There is a chapter on women who choose not to have children, but it is by far the thinnest in the book, and Heffington’s entertaining foray into the history of contraception is less about women’s rationales for averting pregnancy than about the technologies that enabled them to do so. Then again, her point is that the vast majority of women do not feel they have any choice: a staggering statistic that the Douthats of the world routinely neglect to cite is that only 7 percent of American women are “voluntarily childless,” per a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rest either have children already, plan to have children in the future or do not feel they could, even if they wanted to.
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Both Banks and Heffington make plain that what we need is not more babies, more breathless calls for more babies or more calcifying cliches about anomie. Instead, give us more resources and more social support for would-be parents, more expansive conceptions of what motherhood might entail, more sophisticated thinking about the significance of birth and, not least, more books as fresh and reflective as these.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.
Natality
Toward a Philosophy of Birth
By Jennifer Banks
Norton. 251 pp. $27.95
Without Children
The Long History of Not Being a Mother
By Peggy O’Donnell Heffington
Seal Press. 245 pp. $29
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