Yousuf Karsh, “Princess Juliana,” 1943 (Courtesy of the estate of Yousuf Karsh)

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“Kids will ruin your life,” a friend once told me, cheerfully. “They’re little life-ruiners.” He and his wife had four children and were expecting a fifth. At the time, I was struggling to balance young children and graduate school, wondering what if these kids mean I can’t finish my PhD, or my husband can’t finish his? Perhaps the life I had planned was ruined. But hearing someone say it so openly and with such mirth made me realize that this would be no tragedy. Plans are often ruined, and for all kinds of reasons. A child is the best kind of reason.

A recent spate of books has come out addressing just the attitude my friend was taking up in half-ironic jest. In the developed West and elsewhere, children are increasingly seen as a burden to be avoided. Globally, fertility rates are declining. Very few countries outside of Africa and the Middle East have above-replacement fertility rates. (Replacement is approximately 2.1 births per woman, the rate at which a population would sustain itself at its current size.) If such trends persist, every continent in the world will have below-replacement fertility rates by the end of the century. Some warn of dire consequences: labor shortages could lead to scarcities in food, medical care, and other essential services, potentially precipitating a significant decline in quality of life as the workforce is unable to sustain an aging population.

Others see a silver lining. With world population set to begin trending downward in about fifty years, a shrinking population could reduce the strain we’ve put on the environment. Aaron Bady argues that this “baby bust” is not a problem at all, and he chalks up all the panic and hand-wringing to far-right varieties of white nationalism and xenophobia, since immigrants can and do make up the difference in the United States, Canada, and Europe. But Bady is inattentive to the worldwide trends. While immigration can bolster populations in the short-term, that boon is on track to dry up soon. Still, Bady does raise a valuable question. Should we attempt to reverse the baby bust, or just accept it and adapt?

 

Reading the baby-bust literature, one is struck by the way that what was once a default assumption has now become a question. In the introduction to What Are Children For?, Rachel Wiseman recalls asking her mother how she decided she wanted a family. “It was never even a question,” her mother replies. Today, it is very much a question; rather than asking “why not have another?” people are asking “why have any children at all?”

The decision whether to have children is frequently conceived in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. And the costs and risks are high while the benefits—instrumentally construed at least—are few. If becoming a parent comes at the cost of financial, professional, or romantic precarity, maybe it’s not worth it. At the very least, many are reasoning, there is a list of things to be done prior to having a child in order to reduce the risks involved or to build up the resources to adapt if necessary. In the face of all this contingency, the chances rise that potential parents stop at one child, put it off until it’s too late, or simply decide against it altogether. Couples have become, in effect, too afraid to have children.

The value of having a child is not primarily some enrichment of the parents’ lives. Rather, the gift is the child, to the child.

What Are Children For?, co-authored by Wiseman and Anastasia Berg, focuses on those grappling with this decision. In their interviews, the authors found that those hesitant to have children were held back most often by financial insecurity, professional aspirations, or difficulties finding a suitable partner. Berg and Wiseman point out that these sometimes-conflicting aspirations lead people to attempt an “ordered stacking of their pursuits” in which children are the last step, “a ‘cherry on top’ of an already fulfilled life.” If these conditions aren’t met in the right way in time, then the children just aren’t meant to be.

Berg and Wiseman attempt to chip away at what is perhaps the primary argument against kids: financial instability. For one thing, they point out, those of childbearing age (millennials, primarily) are doing fine financially as a group. While their debt-to-income ratio is still higher than that of boomers and Gen Xers at the equivalent stage of life and their rates of homeownership remain lower, millennials’ wealth per capita is roughly equal to that of previous generations, and they earn more, on average, than any other generation on record.

One plausible explanation for the low rates of fertility despite financial gains is that there is more at stake when a person or couple is established, financially and professionally. Prioritizing a child and taking a step back from work might jeopardize everything one’s worked for and even disappoint loved ones or coworkers. Making success a temporal precondition for children may end up making it in effect a priority over children, even if the opposite was originally intended. Once a person is established, a baby becomes a threat to that hard-earned comfort, security, and success. As one thirty-four-year-old diplomat told the authors, “Having children would destroy my career and the fulfilling life I’ve built for myself.”

The purpose of Berg and Wiseman’s book is ultimately not to convince people to have kids but to help them clarify the reasons and social forces behind their ambivalence so that they can make a final determination with confidence. And yet, the book’s final pages subtly point to a different framework for decision-making, one that escapes a pro-con calculus. In response to anti-natalist concerns that human suffering renders life not worth living, Berg and Wiseman argue that if one sees any kind of activity at all as valuable, one must see human life—the foundation that makes valuable activity possible—as itself valuable. To bring a child into the world, they write, is to take a practical affirmative stance on the question, “Is human life, despite all the suffering and uncertainty it entails, worth living?” There are many other ways of affirming life, they are careful to admit; having children is “the most basic way,” but “only you can determine whether it is the right one for you.”

No one wants to tell someone reluctant to have children that, for whatever reason, they ought to reconsider. It is, as Berg and Wiseman note, their choice. But perhaps we can still come to a stronger conclusion than they do. The value of a human life, the one that a couple could bring into existence, is not just something on the pro side of the ledger to weigh against the couple’s finances, careers, and leisure time. The person brought into being has intrinsic, not merely instrumental, value. Berg indicates something like this in her conclusion where she writes about her own experience as a mother: “People say that having a child is a gift, but if that’s true, it’s not because it’s like getting a gift. If having a child is a gift, it’s because it’s like giving one.” The value of having a child is not primarily some enrichment of the parents’ lives. Rather, the gift is the child, to the child: parents give their children the gift of themselves. They commit to loving them for who they are, whoever they are. The “whoever” part is important, since it, at the same time, suggests a commitment to the idea that everyone is valuable and worthy of love.

Consider works of art: something else we take to have intrinsic value. Beethoven didn’t need to compose the Ninth Symphony. He had a lot going on at the time, including bouts of illness and legal battles, and he had already composed eight, after all. Significantly, if he hadn’t composed a ninth, we wouldn’t particularly feel its loss. It’s a gratuitous kind of good, value added to the world. The symphony is not merely valuable in virtue of satisfying a preexisting need or desire. While the artist may produce art partially to meet certain needs or market demands—one must earn a living—the value of the artwork, unlike the value of a superhero sequel or a dishwasher, extends far beyond meeting those needs or market demands. Rather, Beethoven’s Ninth, like all great works of art, brings its own idiosyncratic goodness and value to the world.

A couple capable of having a child has a creative power, greater, in its way, than that of a great artist.

I venture that children have a similar kind of value, which can’t be calculated or understood separately from their existence. A couple capable of having a child has a creative power, greater, in its way, than that of a great artist. However great the creative power exercised by Michelangelo in sculpting David, it pales in comparison to the creative power exercised by Michelangelo’s parents in making him. Creating something as magnificent and incomparable as a human being is a wonderful thing. It is just for this reason that longing for a child and being unable to have one is a unique kind of grief, incomparable to life’s other myriad disappointments.

What would it mean, in the process of making the decision, to do justice to the immense intrinsic value of bringing a person into existence? At the very least, I think, the major question would not be “why?” with the resulting calculus of factors for and against, but rather, “why not?” That is, in doing justice to the child’s potential value, the default would be to go ahead and have one, unless there are serious reasons that stand in the way.

If someone with the gifts of Beethoven were ambivalent about composing music and put it off indefinitely for serious financial reasons or personal obligations, we could understand. Creating art, like having a child, requires sacrifice and only the person making the sacrifice, who knows intimately what else is at stake, can commit to undertaking it. Still, we can hope that potential Beethovens make the decision with a full understanding of their gifts and the value of their potential creation. Of course, having a child is different from composing a symphony—the sacrifice is greater, the stakes are higher, the commitment is lifelong—so it’s easier to imagine serious reasons standing in the way. Nevertheless, the decision to forgo having a child should take into account the immense gratuitous and intrinsic value of that child.

 

Of course, the decision to have children is not made in a vacuum. There are social forces at work—laws and social infrastructure that value property and economic growth over parenting, and a culture that follows suit. Timothy Carney, in his book Family Unfriendly, claims that “workism”—a prioritization of professional success—is inimical to family life. He argues that child-care subsidies and the like are less efforts to subsidize the family than to subsidize work itself—to get otherwise unproductive parents back into the workforce so they can help boost GDP.

According to Carney, workism is manifest not just in would-be parents’ prioritization of their careers; it also colors parents’ ambitions for their children and places burdensome expectations on families to ensure no child’s “potential” goes unrealized. In such a culture, the commitment to have and care for a child transforms into an instrumental commitment to make the child successful, along with all the money and time that might require. Workism works against children in two ways, then. First, it turns having them into a potential impediment to parents’ hard-won careers. Then, if that reservation is overcome, the would-be parents must consider the work it will take to build their children’s own future careers. After so much “investment” in children, those children will likely, in turn, feel the pressure to generate a “return” in the form of their own professional success, with family again taking a back seat.

Carney’s analysis of the way an economic mindset has come to dictate family policy and culture echoes Centesimus annus. There, Pope John Paul II defines consumerism as a form of capitalism free from ethical and religious constraints, in which economic life is “absolutized.” The consumerist mindset can undermine the proper conditions for marriage and reproduction, John Paul II argues. The conception of life as “a series of sensations to be experienced...leads people to consider children as one of many ‘things’ an individual can have or not have, according to taste, and which competes with other possibilities.” By this logic, a child becomes, in effect, a consumer good, and the decision to have one is dictated by individual desires—the anticipated benefits compared to competing possibilities.

The fear of the immigrant has, at its heart, the same structure as this fear of the child.

Importantly, even pronatalist organizations and activists can treat children as means to an end. Consider the sleek, tech-influenced pronatalism advanced by Malcolm and Simone Collins. The major concern of their organization, Pronatalist.org, is preventing population collapse. It promotes pronatalist policies, including improved education and child-care options, fertility treatments, and the reproductive technology the Collinses have used for their own children: “polygenic risk screening” of embryos, including selection of those embryos scoring highest in IQ and health. They consider their work part of the Silicon Valley–centered effective-altruism movement, which seeks to direct charitable efforts toward the most efficient means of improving future outcomes.

The Collinses insist that parental selection of ideal embryos does not qualify as eugenics. Regardless, such practices point toward a future of designer babies, curated for the best health, the most winning personalities, the most productive future careers. The unfit would be culled before they could even implant in the womb. These designer children would be subordinated to ends beyond themselves, tailored to their parents’ consumerist desires.

Similar concerns apply to influencer families: parents who put their children on display on TikTok and YouTube to make money. Both eugenicists and influencers are instrumentalizing the human person, putting children in the service of economic demands. When children are made to order and discarded if deemed wanting, when they are monetized on social-media feeds, when they are brought into existence only to solve a social malady, there is no commitment to love the child whoever they are. Gone is the recognition implicit in having a child that all people are worthy of love.

Pope Francis connects the cultural attitudes that encourage childbirth with those behind the welcoming and integration of immigrants. “A happy community naturally develops the desires to generate and to integrate, to welcome, while an unhappy society is reduced to a sum of individuals trying to defend what they have at all costs.” Francis links the low birthrates in Italy not just to unhappiness, but to fear and despair. The world is uncertain; people just starting out in life feel their circumstances to be precarious, and not without reason. As a result, they are fearful and defensive, clinging to what they have.

The fear of the immigrant has, at its heart, the same structure as this fear of the child: We’re barely getting by as it is. We’re maxed out—we can’t fit anyone else. They will ruin everything. The remedy is not a facile optimism that papers over the very real difficulties that welcoming others might involve. Rather, as Francis states, it is hope: “Hope is fed by each person’s commitment to the good; it grows when we feel we are participating and involved in giving meaning to our own lives and the lives of others.” Hope is a commitment to the good, even in the face of justifiable pessimism.

We live, instead, in a culture of fear, exacerbated by a politics of fear. Party platforms are constructed out of fear: of the unborn child, of the immigrant, and of political opponents bent on destroying the very fabric of our society. Through extreme and misleading anecdotes, we paint other human beings as intolerable dangers: parasites, criminals, fascists, groomers, often distorting reality to do so. The remedy to this fear is a courageous commitment to open oneself up to the other out of love, despite substantial risks and costs.

 

In her book Hannah’s Children, Catherine Pakaluk writes about a group that’s made that commitment repeatedly: women with five or more children. These women experience the oft-cited reasons not to have children: financial insecurity, career costs, feelings of precarity and overload. Some have children with disabilities or special needs. Others have had stillborn babies, and one lost a child to leukemia. These challenges and tragedies did not make these women withdraw from family. On the contrary, these experiences made their children all the more precious to them.

As a group, the women are quite confident in their lifestyle. They insist on the value of childbearing and rearing and are eloquent in its defense. They lay out the benefits of larger families, including the unique sibling relationships, the feeling of community within the home, a relative lack of loneliness, and the ways children gain independence and confidence as part of a well-functioning whole. They speak of decentering themselves as a way of living a more fulfilled life. Several speak of how each of their children’s individuality helped them better appreciate all people. “[Y]ou see so many different personalities amongst your children and you realize how innate that is,” one mother of six explained to Pakaluk.

When I was the parent of just one or two, I could delude myself that my kids’ faults were due to defects in my parenting and their merits were the result of my hard work. But several kids later, I realize I cannot take credit for my middle child’s exceptional compassion and weird sense of humor, or my eldest son’s love of reading, or my toddler’s insatiable thirst for adventure. The realization that children are not mere reflections of you but uniquely themselves, with irreducibly particular personalities and inner worlds that expand unpredictably as they grow, can lead some parents to want more. When friends of mine had their fourth on the way, they explained: “You meet them, and pretty soon their little personalities start to show. You just don’t know what you are going to get. It’s the best thing ever, why would you stop?”

A child, more than any major life event, breaks through the illusion of control.

Yet, in her book, Pakaluk adopts a model of decision-making strikingly similar to the pro-versus-con analysis that seems to lead so many would-be parents away from having children. “Women make choices about having children based on ‘costs and benefits,’” she writes. “The choice to have a child is a value determination about the relative size of those gains and losses.” But the idea of weighing the value of expected outcomes is belied by the way these women speak about their families. As Pakaluk points out, these women describe their approaches to having children not in terms of calculated desires or expected outcomes, but rather in terms of openness. They know neither the good that will come nor the costs they will incur; having children is, for them, a step into something unknown and unknowable.

A child, more than any major life event, breaks through the illusion of control. We bind ourselves to a person of unknown fate and unknown character. One of Pakaluk’s interviewees, Esther, who has nine children, makes this leap of faith explicit. “It doesn’t make sense,” she says, endorsing a kind of “super-rational” thinking that leaves one open to the “possibilities of expansion in your life.” This radical openness is countercultural. We are trained to intentionally curate every aspect of our lives and to make a plan for every contingency—anything less has come to seem irresponsible. We react to any misfortune by wondering what we could have done to stop it. In an age of control and fear, having a child under less-than-perfect circumstances seems risky and irresponsible. Better to put things off until we’re better prepared. But responsible planning can easily slip into paralyzing fear. Pakaluk’s subjects seem able to let go of both fear and control to welcome each new child with love. While the risks and fears are real, even the realizations of those fears—illness, severe disability and dependence, death—don’t negate the value of the person. Perfect love drives out fear.

 

As a Catholic mother of six, I am often asked if I have six children because I am Catholic. It’s a delicate question. The Catholic Church does not exhort the laity to have large families. But it does consistently place a high value on human life, especially at the margins: the immigrant, the refugee, the child in the womb, the sick, the elderly—all people possess immense significance and value. Accordingly, my husband and I believe that creating and loving a person is the most extraordinary and meaningful thing we can do. Of course, this is not the case for everyone. Some are called to a religious vocation, others to forgo family life for some other radical life of service. But as married people who are called to have and raise children, it always seemed that we needed a reason to stop, not a reason to keep going. The potential person was herself enough of a reason. Of course, Catholics aren’t the only ones who appreciate the value of human life, but the consistency of the Catholic Church on this subject is one of its great treasures.

Welcoming a child is a deeply personal decision, an immense undertaking that only the parents themselves can commit to. But the growing reluctance to make that commitment is concerning. The issue is not that small families are in themselves problematic—if all families were the size of my own, entirely different challenges would loom on the horizon. Nor should we be concerned primarily about demographics: we can be hopeful that governments will effectively adapt to coming demographic shifts, and advance policies that address the accompanying challenges. The real issue lies in the cultural problems that underlie declining birth rates: antihumanism, consumerism, and a pervasive culture of fear.

Berg and Wiseman maintain a value-neutral tone, presumably out of an admirable respect for the reader’s autonomy. However, this well-intentioned neutrality prevents the book from effectively addressing the cultural antihumanism and consumerism behind parental ambivalence and the baby bust. Such antihumanism is prevalent in child-free and anti-natalist communities, as well as in contemporary pro-choice discourse, which invariably marginalizes the humanity of the unborn child. Similarly, certain strands of environmentalism treat human beings as a plague or paint the future as utterly hopeless. A parallel antihumanism is prevalent in anti-immigrant discourse, which often dehumanizes immigrants, treating them as problems rather than people, and reaches its most alarming form in white nationalism and the “Great Replacement theory.”

These antihumanisms rely on fear in a bid to protect our threatened interests and reassert control in the face of precarity. They insist that we prioritize our own needs, making us unwilling to entertain the needs and demands of others. Such defensiveness perpetuates the cultural perception of children as burdens, obstacles to personal satisfaction and well-being.

Combatting antihumanism requires the articulation of a robust and consistent humanism.

Combatting antihumanism requires the articulation of a robust and consistent humanism. The choice to become a parent, or to have another child, is a choice to bring about something—someone—profoundly valuable, to welcome and love a person. Pope Francis reminds us that hope grows when we commit to the good and participate meaningfully in the lives of others. If we refuse to be cowed or manipulated by fear, and instead open ourselves up to other people with love and vulnerability, we will move closer to the community Pope Francis envisions: one that seeks “to generate and to integrate, to welcome.” While one major way to act out this hope and commitment is having and loving a child, the goal must be broader than simply giving people reasons to have children. Rather, we should promote a culture that recognizes human life (and, by extension, children) as good.

When my husband and I started having kids, we made no final calculation that this was the right time. I remember no long discussion at the kitchen table, scribbling out a future budget. We knew there were risks, but we were both confident (and maybe a bit naïve) that we’d make it all work, somehow. Perhaps the best way to characterize our thinking at that time was that we were ready for a new adventure. As our family grows, each child brings something new, and the adventure shifts. More than once, a child has come at an inconvenient time. But each time our plans were “ruined,” I grew less attached to those plans and more attached to the chaos and beauty of our expanding life.

Of course, there’s never a perfect time to have a baby. A baby is always inconvenient, too expensive, too demanding. We are always working toward financial or professional goals; we are always getting attached to habits and plans. Children disrupt everything, even if all goes smoothly. But perhaps for just that reason, they remind us that life is not a project in maximizing enjoyment and avoiding hardship. It is not an experience to be curated, but a pursuit of the good, requiring vulnerability, courage, and love.

Naomi Fisher is an assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on Kant and post-Kantian philosophy.

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