What Are Children For?:
On Ambivalence and Choice
by anastasia berg and rachel wiseman
st. martin’s press, 336 pages, $27
Two beings are now only one, and it is when they are one that they become three.” So wrote Maurice Blondel on the topic of love and procreation. The formulation expresses a faith in and desire for fecundity that was once a given. Today, however, the response to this mysterious arithmetic among many Millennials is, essentially, That doesn’t add up. Hence, the much-discussed fertility crisis.
This crisis is well-documented. The American fertility rate in 2023 was the lowest it’s ever been, and our replacement rate, 1.6, is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. Clearly, the kids are not all right—otherwise, they’d be having kids. Most of these Millennials are not averse to childbearing; they are ambivalent toward it. All trends indicate that the arguments conceived to shake them out of this ambivalence have been insufficient.
Even more worryingly, as Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman point out in What Are Children For?, merely bringing up the topic “comes across at best as gauche” to these adults, who generally consider the issue to be right-wing coded and therefore noxious. Berg and Wiseman are certainly not right-wingers. But they are fellow-traveling natalists who have written a book intended to convince their progressive peers of the value of children. The unstated challenge they set for themselves is to do so while avoiding any language that could be construed as conservative or religiously inflected.
Instead, they seek an alternative language in feminist theory, literature, philosophy, and personal narrative to affirmatively answer the question, “Is human life still worth the trouble?” This effort designed to sway minds otherwise out of reach is a noble one enabled by the parameters the authors set themselves. But the limitations are apparent.
Childless Millennials typically put forward material-rational explanations for their decision, citing economic constraints and inadequate state support. Berg and Wiseman begin by exposing such responses as smoke screens. The problem is not chiefly economic: Millennials are, in fact, basically as well-positioned financially to start a family as any prior generation. And, if the Nordic countries are any proof, there’s little evidence that greater social-welfare infrastructure leads to increased birth rates. The root of the ambivalence must therefore be philosophical.
Berg and Wiseman spend most of their time diagnosing and responding to this philosophical woe. Declining birth rates, they argue, are merely a casualty of a larger “reconfiguration of values that touches on every part of our lives.” Where this transvaluation has been most operative is in what the authors call the “dialectic of motherhood.” This dialectic, they argue, has been scrambled by unresolved schisms in the feminist tradition following Simone de Beauvoir.
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir initiated a delinking of motherhood from womanhood: No longer would child-rearing be the sole path toward a woman’s transcendence. But these two categories, motherhood and womanhood, had relied on each other as a source of meaning for centuries—uncoupling them therefore created vacuums of meaning in both. Attempts to reconstruct meaning in these now-separate realms have been unsatisfactory, placing women in a limbo where their individual autonomy is secure, but what the best use of that autonomy is remains unsettled. This limbo has bred the ambivalence toward motherhood responsible for the fertility crisis. The authors do not mourn de Beauvoir’s rupture as such; they are happily working to replenish the space opened by it.
Berg and Wiseman deserve praise for unveiling the breakdown of the dialectic of motherhood and for attempting to salvage motherhood’s reputation. But their focus on de Beauvoir and the feminist tradition does not shed light on our emergency’s deepest roots. To do that, we must go further than Berg and Wiseman and look beyond the feminism question: If the dialectic of motherhood has collapsed, shouldn’t we also expect that there exists a “dialectic of fatherhood,” and that it too has imploded? And, consequently, that there is a keystone “dialectic of parenthood” between fathers and mothers that has been destroyed?
Certainly, the biological necessities imposed upon women by nature ensure that the dialectic of motherhood is unique and due special attention. Still, the likelihood that it can be repaired without significant reference to its counterparts, and vice versa, seems negligible. The authors seem vaguely aware of this: Many of their female interviewees complain that the question of children “fell squarely on them,” their male partners remaining totally deferential out of respect for individual autonomy. Others report a shortage of “real partners with whom they can be mutually forthright . . . and with whom they can hope to achieve clarity together.” That these conversations have become so strained speaks to a far more severe breakdown than the authors let on: The entire structure of man–woman relations has been devastated.
The need for greater excavation remains. Were Berg and Wiseman to see that excavation through, they may find that progressivism’s vernacular of individual autonomy does not sufficiently supply men and women with the language needed to converse on the deepest subjects. Still, the circumstances the authors highlight are partially irrevocable; responsive ideas or new ways of understanding old ideas must be developed.
The authors eventually shift their focus from ambivalence to antinatalism. These are incisive pages: They show antinatalism to be fundamentally antihuman—and they do so on the antinatalists’ own terms. Those terms, the reader will note, are distinctly post-Christian and therefore paradoxically indebted to Christianity. Antinatalists, for example, describe climate change as “punishment for our collective sins.” Our authors, meanwhile, admonish “faith in our individual and collective capacity for . . . sacrifice” and hope in the “wholeness” to be regained through that sacrifice, albeit without suggesting that our redemption is reliant on a divine force. But can the redemptive power of sacrifice be fully expressed without reference to a divine sacrifice? The religious question, it seems, is not so easily dismissed.
The defects of What Are Children For? are not unimportant. But Berg and Wiseman’s attempt to convince their audience of the goodness of children remains vital. Should the book coax even one ambivalent Millennial man or woman to take the leap into childbearing, then the value of that one new life infinitely justifies the authors’ efforts.
Luke Lyman is a New York–based writer and editor.
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