The Opinions - Why Have Kids? A Liberal Case for Natalism

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

With Anastasia Berg. 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. Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. 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 birth rates 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 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,

which is to say 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 would have wanted and the number that they actually have steadily increasing. But I found that the question of children has become the kind of thing that young people increasingly uncomfortable to raise

to think about personally, to discuss socially, in 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. And that for me is the problem. That's what I'm hoping to address and alleviate. So there are a number of factors driving them to ignore the question of children for as long as possible. These include very high standards of success that millennials in particular hold, be it personal, professional, or romantic. In all these aspects of one's life, young, liberal, and progressives especially seek fulfillment and satisfaction and success before they feel ready to start thinking about children. Romantically, they want their relationships to achieve 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, quote unquote, just have fun ourselves, we can start thinking about a child. And so what happens is from especially women's perspective, that we give up the ability and the 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 Orcasio Cortez legitimize worries about having children amid climate change. 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 okay to still have children? But I think as the question gets further and further politicized, concerns about climate change, as well as a kind of concern with 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 and in terms of the cost that we will incur when we have children, it's not a surprise that they're increasingly coming up short. However, I'd like to invite the people who are thinking today about whether or not to have children or how to view having children by other people. To remember that before the personal concerns

of how to fit children into your own life and your own ambitions, and the before we try and reconcile having children with this or that political goal, we have to be able to answer a deep ethical, philosophical question. And in fact, one, that we 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, loss, and grief that we encounter necessarily?

And is it justifiable and is it maybe even good to usher more human beings into existence? It could be really helpful to remember that some of the greatest critics of our own ways of lives coming from the left. So somebody like Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, who was the one to highlight, how motherhood and the raising of children was one of the greatest sources of oppression for women. However, even she said she could not deny that raising children, shaping the intellect and character of another human being,

is one of the most delicate and serious undertakings of all. Confronting the philosophical, ethical question of the worth of human life writ large, I think liberates us to recognize a kind of order of the concerns that's at stake here, whereby there has to be priority to this question of whether or not we have faith in the possibility of a better human future. But we have to realize that the possibility of a better future

is conditioned on the possibility of having a future at all. And that means some people have to be having children. And if you want those children to share in the value, that you yourself hold, you probably want some of those people to be the kind of people that you yourself are. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vichaka, Fiby Lett, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger.

It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, Mixing, and Original Music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuel Lewski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.