Why I Am Not A Pronatalist
And a rant about think pieces on why we aren't having enough children
Do you ever see a headline where you’re like, wow, this feels tailor-made to just ruin my day?
A few weeks ago The New York Times published a guest essay that felt uniquely suited to fill me with a blinding rage:
“There’s a link between therapy culture and childlessness.”
The thrust of this article1 is that millenials are not having babies due to the increasing social-media-fueled and stereotypical therapist narrative that our parents fucked us up, that many of us are estranged from our parents because we believe they fucked us up, and the flawed logic that because of all of this, we don’t want to have children for fear of fucking them up. The writer weaves in her own personal history with therapy and becoming a mom to suggest that, hey, maybe we would be better off as a society if adult children felt like we owed our parents more than we do and that having kids is worth the uncertainty of whatever harm we may or may not inflict on them.
There are parts of this article that are not complete trash. I’m not in love with the weaponization of therapy talk and overextension of concepts like trauma and abuse in mainstream discourse. Of course the mental health field has a checkered past when it comes to blaming parents (particularly mothers) for their children’s difficulties. While I disagree with this author’s insinuation that the majority of adults who are estranged from family members do so capriciously, I also don’t think that estrangement is the solution to most disagreements one may have with family members - and, importantly, I would never preach such advice as a mental health professional.
However, this article ended up being the straw that broke the camel’s back for me when it comes to the increase in public handwringing over WHY AREN’T MILLENIALS HAVING MORE BABIES?!
Stop Blaming Women for the Declining Birth Rate
Intensive parenting practices. Negative portrayals of motherhood in pop culture. Your mom friend not spending enough time extolling the joys of motherhood. Therapy culture. Week after week, there’s a new think piece that argues that this is actually the culprit for why more and more women are opting out of being parents, and this is what needs to happen to fix it.
If I were to take each individual article in good faith (including this most recent one), I imagine these writers are grappling with a very real cultural shift in how people in general and women in particular perceive the benefits and consequences of parenthood. They are trying to reconcile their own desires (or lack thereof) with the fact that there is increasing attention to the societal implications of a generation of people deciding to have less children.
However, the prevalence of these pieces in our current political climate points towards something more odious: An eagerness to blame individuals - specifically, women - and their choices for the declining birth rate and basically the end of humanity as we know it. It’s no coincidence that these pieces are emerging in a world where women have less reproductive freedom than our mothers did, with an administration that continually wants to eradicate even more rights and that consults with pronatalists who encourage eugenics on the best course of action for forcing women to have more children.
As a psychologist, I believe in the importance of understanding how individual choices reflect and impact our broader society and addressing how to change individual’s thoughts and behaviors in service of broader societal goals. Understanding the psychology behind, say, vaccine skepticism is an important component of addressing vaccine rates nationally.
However, I would never argue that addressing individual choices by themselves are the solution for population-level issues such as vaccine acceptance rates or a nation’s birth rate. Convincing more people to use vaccines only works if vaccines are available. Convincing more people to have babies is only effective if our society is built to support modern parenthood.
And we are just not there yet.
I will never be convinced that a fix for a societal issue is best implemented through changing individual minds (“More women should have babies!”) rather than structural incentives (“How can we make parenthood more affordable and accessible for more people?”)
Further, as a psychologist, I’m well aware that blaming and shaming people for their individual choices is a terrible strategy for convincing people to change.
It’s upsetting to see liberal-leaning outlets peddle in this blame game rather than take the more obvious (yet less clickbaity) stance that liberal policies are better for parents and children than conservative ones. Policies like promoting more accessible reproductive health care (including abortion), a national parental leave policy, more investment in education, and more affordable child care are policies that are popular with voters and would help ease the very real burden that disproportionally falls on mothers. Concerns around population decline and the quality of life for parents is as much a progressive issue as a conservative one, yet we continue to let the loudest and most hateful voices dictate mainstream discourse around it.
And there’s plenty to talk about related to the cultural forces at play that make parenthood a bad sell these days that don’t unilaterally blame women for their personal choices. Want people to have more kids? Make society more kid-friendly. Call out the idea that being anti-kid is being anti-community, and how people without children can (and should) show up for the parents and kids in their lives, just as parents can (and should) show up for the people in their lives who don’t have kids. Continue to dissect the continued gender gap in household and child rearing practices, and the different expectations we have for fathers versus mothers (maintained by systematic and legal differences in how we treat nonbirthing parents). Let’s continue talking about how birth rates are worse in more sexist societies. People are writing these takes, but I want to see more of them.
Pronatalism vs. Reproductive Justice
So why are women constantly being blamed? Well, because these think pieces are inherently pronatalist. Pronatalism in the broadest sense is a social and political ideology that emphasizes the importance of reproducing human life. Thus, we should understand why people aren’t having babies to help convince more people to have more babies.
I’m a mother. I have vague concerns about the economic and cultural consequences of our nation’s declining birth rate. I guess on most days I care about the survival of the human species as a whole.
However, I refuse to align myself with pronatalism, namely because its ideologies are antithetical to two of my most cherished personal values: reproductive justice and bodily autonomy.
Reproductive justice is the belief that one has a right to have or not have a child, and a right to raise children under safe and dignified circumstances.
Bodily autonomy is the fundamental right for an individual to make their own decisions about their body without external coercion or interference.
As outlined in a recent Nature article discussing reproductive choice and fertility:
The current pronatalist discourse is problematic as it tends to overlook individual autonomy and the complexities of family planning and places an excessive emphasis on promoting childbearing. This may pressure individuals or couples into making decisions that do not align with their personal desires, lifestyles, and economic circumstances, as well as potentially stigmatising those who choose not to have children.
The author further states that pronatalists tout “the moral, patriotic, and economic pressure on women to procreate” and emphasize “motherhood as a core aspect of a woman’s identity,” which is why so many of these think pieces I hate have the implicit argument that it’s up to women to fix population decline.
All of which doesn’t even scratch the service of the eugenics bent to some pronatalists, where the worry is less about population decline and more about the supposed declining rates of specific demographic groups. If those who preach “pronatalism” the loudest truly cared about population decline, we would be talking about pro-immigration policies to address our declining birth rate, or ways to practically and financially support all parents (not just white, heterosexual ones).
You might be shocked to learn that I don’t actually spend a lot of my time in therapy sessions extracting from my clients all the ways their parents messed them up. I don’t go digging for hidden traumas or convince my clients that they need to be estranged from family members who are “toxic.” I don’t have some hidden agenda to convince people that they are too messed up to have children.
When a client talks to me about whether or not they want to have children (or if they already have one, whether they should have more), the main things we talk about are their fears and insecurities around the decision. As a therapist, if I’m excavating for anything, I’m trying to understand whether a client is running towards or away from something - whether their anxiety is in the driver’s seat in a decision, or whether they are. I try to provide a nonjudgmental space for people to say whatever seemingly trivial or abstract or selfish reason they may have for a given decision, and I allow them to consider what having a child (or not) can give them in their life, as well as what it may take away. I let them know that regardless of the decision, they will likely mourn a life not lived.
Usually, as with most things in life, people know what they want, even if they can’t articulate it. They just need someone to give them permission to want it. I also let them know that there is no right or wrong answer, not just because it helps provide that permission, but because it happens to be true.
You know what an acceptable reason is for someone to decide not to have children?
Anything. You can choose not to have children for whatever reason. That is your right.
You know what an acceptable reason is for someone to decide to have children?
Anything. Again, it’s none of my business. I am never going to tell someone that they have more or less of a right or obligation to have children than anybody else.
Deciding whether or not to have children is such a thorny and fascinating question because of its seeming paradoxical nature: it is both incredibly personal while being tied up in the biggest social and political forces that surround us. It makes salient more than possibly any other life decision the cliche that the personal is political.
However, it does not mean that this decision is anyone else’s business but yours. I will never ascribe to an ideology that tries to convince me otherwise.
I refuse to link to it. Feel free to read it on your own time. OR BETTER YET, DON’T!