What Are Children For? A Q&A with Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg
By: Serena Sigillito, Rachel Wiseman & Anastasia Berg, originally published August 1, 2024, Public Discourse
Religious conservatives should be open to the idea that progressives and liberals might be able to take their own path and still find some common ground on the essential question of the goodness of human life.
Serena Sigillito: I recently read—and loved—your book. For those who haven’t read it yet, can you start by giving a quick overview?
Anastasia Berg: The most direct goal of the book is to help people who are faced with the decision of whether or not to have children to think more clearly about it. In our current reality, you have to do that in the face of a lot of different pressures and normative scripts that either make children somewhat of an afterthought, recommend postponing them past the point of physical viability, or even threaten the moral legitimacy of having children.
In order to gain some clarity, we address the concerns that people are experiencing from the first-person perspective. We treat the looming concerns of finances. We think about the romantic scripts that we draw on, the scripts of how we should be dating and what we should be trying to get from our relationships that help—or, more often, don’t help—us find the kind of relationship in the context of which we can have children. We also look at length at what it means specifically for women to have children, given the apparent incompatibility of having children with the way we often understand feminist goals, namely, as empowerment and equality to men. And finally, we look at the greatest moral challenge to having children today, which takes the form of the threat of climate change, but really is the deep philosophical, ethical concern about whether life is so miserable, or perhaps we are so fallen, that reproducing our species is no longer justified.
We do this by taking the reader through a journey that we take ourselves. So, we start with a personal essay by Rachel that describes the position of somebody who doesn’t just not know whether they want to have kids, but doesn’t even know how to start thinking about it. Then, we move to a third-person analytic register, where we perform cultural criticism and literary criticism; we look at social science findings; we report on hundreds of conversations and surveys that we’ve conducted with people who are faced with this decision, or have faced it in the past. Finally, we conclude with a personal essay by me, which I a little facetiously titled “Hello from the Other Side.” I reflect on having made the choice to have children, in light of everything that has happened in the book, and I consider how going through the thought process laid out in the book can affect the way you think about parenthood.
SS: That’s really fascinating—particularly the fact that you began your answer to that question in the context of relationships. One of the things that really stood out to me about Rachel’s introductory essay was the absence of that context. On the very first page of the book, Rachel, you write that you used to imagine that the idea of having children would just, at some point, suddenly feel like the natural next step, once you moved in with your boyfriend and consolidated your furniture and streaming accounts. But, as far as I could tell, I think that was the only mention of a boyfriend or husband—and that was a hypothetical boyfriend—in the entire introduction.
Unless I’ve missed something, you don’t talk again about romantic relationships or partners until page fifty-one. It felt like you were starting by looking inward, trying to answer the question of whether you want children in isolation from other people. Yet that’s precisely the framework that you critique in chapter one.
In that chapter, Rachel, you talk about the experience of taking this course that is supposed to help you discern whether you want to have children. Can you talk a little bit about that, and in particular, how the instructors told you to “bracket the externals”?
Rachel Wiseman: In the introduction, my perspective was not all that different from the people that we write about in chapter one or two, insofar as I was thinking of it as my decision alone for some time.
As part of researching and writing the book, I took a so-called motherhood ambivalence course. It was a correspondence course. There was a forum where women would write about their decision-making process. There was a curriculum, and then there were these calls that were really illuminating where women would come together and talk about their misgivings about motherhood, their fears, the things that were standing in the way of their decision, how they were feeling at any given point.
As part of the structure of the class, the idea was that you need to remove all of the external factors that are clouding your decision-making and get in touch with a true internal desire. So, whatever your partner wants, whatever your parents might think, your career, whether you can afford them, whether you’re too old to have them: just put all of those things aside and try to get in touch with your desire. Now, one thing that I experienced in the class and in interviewing some of the other participants after the fact was the impossibility of that challenge, given how salient those concerns end up being.
It is hard to just completely bracket off whether you have a partner and what your partner thinks about having children. How you feel about your career ends up being important, too. It’s not just about the money in a numerical sense. It stands for something about how you see yourself and your level of security in the world, your aspirations and ambitions.
The course was a really interesting lens and way into this problem that I experienced, and one that many other women and men experience in this milieu, where there isn’t necessarily some easily identifiable urge or desire you can just latch onto. And it’s important to try to demystify some of the narratives, influences, and pressures that assert themselves and cause confusion.
AB: That’s really a nice connection, Serena—noticing how Rachel’s introduction really embodies something that we end up criticizing. As you’re picking up, it demonstrates really nicely what we discovered, one of these things that was a genuine surprise to us: we knew that people are thinking of their relationship according to this thing called the “slow love” paradigm. People are taking longer to get exclusive, they take longer to commit, they take longer to move in together. They don’t meet each other’s parents. They don’t raise the question of children very early on. This was all fairly familiar territory.
But something that was shocking to me was the increasing desire to separate one’s romantic timeline from one’s family timeline. So, we talk about this super illuminating study of women who either went through with egg freezing or were considering egg freezing, and the researchers asked them, “Why are you doing it?” If you asked the general public “Why are most women freezing their eggs?” they would probably say, “Well, they want to extend their chance to pursue their career and they want to have freedom to make choices in their lives.”
The researchers were surprised to find that a much more common answer was, “I want to be able to pursue my romantic goals separately from the goal of starting a family”—to extreme lengths. Somebody would be dating and at the same time freezing their eggs, sometimes even inseminating the eggs, but thinking that these things could be held apart.
We hope to shake up some of these narratives that we’re taking for granted in our romantic lives. It’s both the idea that time can give us security and the idea that if we incorporate the thought of family into our dating lives, we’re somehow betraying love and romance. We want to rethink and criticize that. And finally, and maybe most importantly, we want to challenge this idea that women should be faced with this choice alone.
So, in liberal and progressive circles, we want to make sure that women are in the position to determine their own futures. They have autonomy over their bodies. They shouldn’t be pushed into choices they don’t want to make. But the pendulum has swung to create the following situation: For men, there’s almost a taboo on their participation. So, for the men we’ve talked to, when we say, “Do you want kids? Would you talk about it in a relationship?” They say, “No. I would be creepy, I would be oppressive. That would be controlling. I would be afraid to bring it up.”
So it’s not just that the women are thinking of it as their own decision. Men are feeling the pressure to leave them alone with the choice. We’re encouraged to make this choice in separation from our partners. It’s not something that we think we should be discussing very widely with other people. And it’s certainly not something that many people think should be the topic of lively feminist debates today.
SS: That’s so interesting. I’m coming at this as a Catholic feminist—a sex-realist feminist. So, to me, as I read and listen to so much of this, it feels like you’re touching on something really important, but then you’re not quite taking the observation or the line of thought all the way to its full conclusion.
You’re rightly critiquing this idea of the free-floating individual who has this preexisting sense of self inside, disconnected from their material circumstances, disconnected from their bodies, disconnected from the people upon whom they depend, the people who gave them life, or the people that they then give life to and who depend upon them. This web of dependence is shorn away. And to a certain extent, you’re critiquing that idea. Yet it ultimately feels like you don’t quite leave it behind. Even at the very end of the book, in the last line of the final chapter before your afterword, you conclude that none of this can really justify the choice to have children—that “only you can determine whether it is the right one for you.”
AB: In that course Rachel took, the provocation was as follows, “Take all your externals, put them in a jar,” literally. “Put the jar away, take the course, find out what you want.”
We say, you can’t do that. These things constitute the substance of your life. What we do in the book is try, in a way, to perform that function. We say, don’t put them away. Let’s think through them. Let’s not take their meaning for granted. Let’s see, at the end, how much of the burden of these anxieties is going to be lifted. I think of it as freeing somebody to make a better, more free, more authentic choice.
So, when we think through the way we’re conducting our relationships, the way we’re conducting family life, the call is not to retreat to a place of an individualistic monad, but to rethink how we have those relationships.
I’ll be completely frank. I have a practical goal of people feeling more comfortable talking to the people they are dating about whether or not they want to have kids. I want to see that happen in the world. When I hear somebody say, “Actually, I was able to have a conversation because I read the book,” or “I heard something that you guys said,” I think, “Excellent.” I want to help readers avoid retreating into their individual little cocoons.
The book is a call for us to recover the capacity to affirm human life, to affirm the value of human life in the present and in the future. But we think there is more than one way of doing that. Even within the confines of Catholic theology, there are different ways in which we can participate as human beings in whatever it is to be human. Having a family life is one of them. But there is room for other ways of participating in that project. So, in the same way that within a religious framework, there’s more than one way of showing your devotion and expressing your faith, there’s more than one way to do what we’re calling for in a secular context, affirming human life. I don’t think we’re in a position to determine what shape the reader’s life is going to take, but we hopefully don’t leave you with the possibility of simply retreating to your little shell for these processes of interminable self-examination. Hopefully, you are freed from many of the things that are impairing your ability to decide, and you’re able to much more freely talk about it with other people.
And after reading the book, we hope, readers can see that the intellectually respectable position with regard to children is not just being really brave about saying the truth about how hard they are. That is very important. Having children is hard. But we must also have the courage to affirm why it is that one would go for this kind of project to begin with.
SS: Can you tell me more about who your intended reader is?
I’m coming from a more socially conservative framework, as are many Public Discourse readers. For people from this background who are concerned about declining birth rates, it can be tempting to be dismissive of those selfish, self-centered millennials and Zoomers. I think it’s a really valuable book for readers like us, to help us take the concerns of these people seriously. But, judging by the framing around culture wars and abortion, I can also tell that we are probably not the primary audience you were writing for.
By the end of the book, you distill down the core of what those readers’ or young people’s concerns are, which come down to the problem of pain and the problem of evil. You then very quickly, it felt like, go through a philosophical defense or an answer to those problems. In that section, it seemed like you were reaching toward or trying to recover teleology, in a certain limited sense. I just kept thinking, “Guys, there’s 2,000 years of Aristotelian tradition you could draw on!”
AB: We did draw on 2,000 years of Aristotelian tradition! But Aristotle wasn’t Christian.
SS: No, no. I know he wasn’t. There was a lot of development from the Greeks onward. But I was curious. I couldn’t tell: were you purposely not using certain traditional terms for the sake of not alienating readers, even though you would agree with them? Or were you not using them because you disagree with them?
AB: You’re very right that a lot of Aristotle’s closest and most prominent readers over the years were Christians, and mostly Catholics, and they gave some of the most important readings of Aristotle that we continue to turn to today. That said, as far as the book is concerned, the arguments we are putting forward are philosophical arguments that do not rely on theological assumptions.
A conservative religious standpoint has resources to answer the challenge of the argument from evil and the challenge of the argument from suffering readily available. From a perspective that is not theistic, it’s harder to meet these challenges today. Some say it cannot do so. I think it can. In other words, I think it is possible to affirm the value of human life within a framework that does not rely on a revelatory faith tradition.
As we say in the book, when I face the decision whether or not to have children, I’m also faced with a really fundamental philosophical question, which is the question of the value of human life. I think that a non-theistic perspective has resources to help us answer that big philosophical question.
SS: Can you tell me more about Kieran Setiya, the philosopher you draw on, who talks about actions with ends that are self-destructive vs. those that are infinite? I was trying to think through how that maps onto a natural law framework, which would say that even without revelation, you can discern the inherent goodness or the purpose of a thing.
AB: The natural law tradition is one philosophical way of trying to affirm unconditional value, but it’s not the only framework. Kieran Setiya’s work can help us see how the desire to see an activity continue beyond our own lifetimes is internal to the very pursuit of a particular kind of activity. You can call it an infinite-end activity. It’s the kind of activity whereby, in pursuing this type of activity and being committed to this project, I think that others should be doing it too, now and in the future.
In other words, it’s internal to that activity that I think it would be good if it persisted into the future without any inherent point where it should give out. So, when I think of myself as somebody who’s committed to, let’s say, the promotion of justice among human beings, I don’t think that it’s the kind of thing I’ll ever be done with. There are a lot of specific things I could do to express that commitment. I can go vote, I can go protest. I can talk to a friend. And those things will eventually run their course: e.g., I voted, I’m done; I went to the protest, it’s finished. If I’m still standing there at night alone with a sign, I’m doing something wrong. But none of these actions exhausts what my commitment to justice among human beings is all about.
Maybe a more intuitive example is friendship. So, there are a lot of specific things I do. I try to get Rachel a gift, though she’s much better at that than I am. I call if she’s not well. I try and support her. There are very specific actions I complete, and then I’m done with them. That’s it. But what it means for me to be her friend—that’s not exhaustible. And in fact, even when I’m not actively doing anything that looks like being a friend, I’m always open to it. So, if she really needs me, I’ll drop what I’m doing and I’ll go to her.
The goodness of such activities is apparent to us. And because their goodness is apparent to us, we also think others should be committed to them, and that they should not give out. That is, I think, the ground of our implicit understanding and commitment to the goodness of the persistence of human life into the future.
RW: Our original vision of someone who might really need this argument tended to be secular, progressive people, but we don’t think that it exclusively applies to them. And we do think that this is something that conservative Christian readers might find some interest or value in.
There was a review of our book in Christianity Today that had this line that really struck me, where the reviewer said that we come to similar conclusions as ones that she holds, but through different paths. I think that is a strength of the book. You don’t have to necessarily share all of the same assumptions in order to find something of value in it.
AB: This goes to what you mentioned, Serena, about how we’re interested in rescuing this question from the culture wars. I think this is a place where a lot of people who identify very differently politically or religiously can come together.
It’s very tempting to think that a concern is just liberal, or just conservative, or just religious. But I actually think a lot of what we talk about—the seeming unaffordability of children, how we should be structuring our romantic lives, the idea that there are very high standards of readiness for having children—these things are experienced differently by these groups, but they’re not absent.
I also think it’s condescending to conservative and religious women to think that they’re not thinking at all about any feminist goals. They’re also asking themselves, “How do I reconcile my ambition, my curiosity, and my sense of self with motherhood?” I think for those kinds of readers, the book will have a lot to offer too.
SS: Yes. I loved the chapter on the dialectic of motherhood. You delved into so many different excellent thinkers and gave really concise, compelling portraits of these women—Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone and Adrienne Rich. I loved your descriptions of Rich. And I love that you included a discussion of black feminism—Audre Lorde, and Angela Davis, and bell hooks.
PD readers are probably familiar with the Moynihan Report and the idea of the breakdown of the black family as being a harbinger of the familial breakdown that rippled outward through society. But, in socially conservative circles, I don’t think other aspects are talked about as much—things like the lingering effects of slavery, and how that changed the relationships between black men and women, and how that altered black women’s relationship to motherhood, and how it trained them to see motherhood as a revolutionary force and a source of power . . . but how that also had negative effects on black men’s sense of their place in the family.
For readers who aren’t familiar with these ideas, could you tell a bit of that story?
RB: Sure. There was a famous report in 1965 called the Moynihan Report that looked at the social problems faced by black communities. The diagnosis was that there was an absence of strong male leadership, and it was based on this other book that was written in the late 1930s by a sociologist named E. Franklin Frazier, who thought that there was a “matriarchate,” that women were in control of domestic spaces and black social life, and that there needed to be stronger black men to take leadership roles. This idea trickled down to the Black Power movement as well.
Many black feminists balked at this idea, among them Angela Davis, who wrote a very forceful critique, saying that it was unconscionable to blame black women for the oppression that the black community was under. And that, in fact, it was because of the conditions of slavery that they were forced into this difficult position of paradoxical power. They were the ones who really kept the community going. So, one should look to black women with admiration and respect.
AB: Davis points out how, under slavery, black men and women were oppressed, but women were doubly oppressed because women were also restricted to the household. And so, within households, they then had disproportionate power compared to the men. They were performing roles of keeping together family life, preserving whatever tradition and culture was possible. It’s because of this paradoxical position of double oppression that they were able to both uplift the community and become much more central to the maintenance of the family—and the maintenance of the community itself.
So the black feminists said, the right way to think about it is that black women rose to a very tragic and unjust occasion. They were able to do what they could to preserve their own kin and communities.
RW: There’s an interesting contrast here with the white feminist tradition, which was often locked in a generational battle with their mothers and grandmothers and wanted to experience a kind of break. When they did appeal to some past version of motherhood, it was very distant, irretrievable, almost mythic, whereas in the black feminist tradition there really were more resources within family history to draw on. Even though Audre Lorde and bell hooks write a lot about their relationships with their mothers in a similar way to Adrienne Rich and other white feminists, the idea that motherhood could be a source of power, even in the face of difficulty, suffering, and oppression, doesn’t seem so remote as it does in the work of many white feminists.
SS: Can you explain what you mean by the phrase “double oppression”?
RW: Angela Davis emphasized that, for one thing, women didn’t have bodily autonomy under slavery. Many were abused and raped by their overseers and enslavers. And they weren’t just maintaining their enslavers’ homes or laboring in the fields. They were also maintaining their own homes and laboring to have and raise children.
AB: For these feminists, from their perspective, the division of labor between men and women in the past was already unjust. Sure, later bell hooks ends up warning feminists against disparaging motherhood precisely because it’s the source of meaning for so many working-class and middle-class women, black or white. But, at the time, the confinement to the home was not a free choice that a woman undertook. It’s not that she could have a career, but she decided to stay home with her kids.
So black women under slavery were slaves and women, and as such suffering from misogyny, from even further restrictions on their freedoms. While they were able to tap into the humanizing and ennobling possibilities of family life, they were also, at the same time, suffering along the lines that women suffered across the board.
SS: Before we wrap up, are there any other things that I did not ask you that you would like to talk about? Is there anything you’d like to share with a socially conservative audience, in particular?
AB: The one thing that seems promising to me as a pathway to consensus, ethically and politically, is the idea of embracing the possibility of children as a fundamental human good. I think the coding of having children as conservative and religious ultimately doesn’t serve either side. As we argued in the New York Times, progressives and liberals are so alienated from this conversation that they can allow the choice to be made for them, by their cultural milieu or circumstance.
But as with any culture war issue, there’s a tendency on both sides to err on the side of farce: progressives may be quick to flirt with anti-natalism while conservatives find themselves affirming unsustainable models of life in the so-called “trad wife.” In order to go beyond this impasse, we need two things. We need liberals and progressives to understand that tradwifery and Silicon Valley pronatalism do not exhaust, or even accurately represent, the conservative worldview. And we need conservatives to get a better sense of what’s really going on with progressives and liberals. It’s very easy to just dismiss them as selfish or histrionic.
From that perspective, I think the book should be really interesting to conservatives. Part of our ambition is to show that things that could be read as selfish actually have to do with a really profound understanding of what it means to be responsible, of what standards of success mean to us today, et cetera. And I hope the book can promote mutual legibility across these divides.
RW: I also think there’s a tendency on the Right toward fatalism about the issue of declining birth rates, or to say that there is no answer to this aside from a widespread religious revival.
Religious conservatives should be open to the idea that progressives and liberals might be able to take their own path and still find some common ground on the essential question of the goodness of human life. There are many things that we can disagree about when it comes to policy, but this can be a starting point. Conservatives and people of faith should be able to cheer on these other approaches that are attempting to find a way to affirm the value of families and children in modern life today.
SS: From my point of view, which is grounded in a belief in the sacramental nature of reality, I just see so many different ways to encounter truth. Whether you’re accepting divine revelation and getting to those life-affirming conclusions that way, or you’re just feeling it out, you’re picking up on the same thing. As a person of faith, if I really believe this is the structure of reality, then I don’t get the fatalism. People want to be happy, and living in accordance with reality is what ultimately makes people happy.
Certain things lead to human flourishing, and they always will. Yes, you can fumble around a lot, and sin is real, and people get hurt. But the fundamental structure of reality is just not changing. And people can still get there. There’s room for a lot of optimism, I think, for people to come to the same conclusions about what truth is, because they’re endowed with reason.
AB: From a religious perspective, you could just say, “They don’t know it, but what they’re on to is what we give a better name for.” I don’t know that that’s not true.
I think of the nice line Rachel quoted from Christianity Today: that we and the writer had “come to the same place by apparently different routes.” If you care about the conclusions, you want to see things change in the world to reflect those beliefs, then from a certain perspective, what does it matter how people got to it?
There’s a lot of possible cooperation. There’s a lot of value in realizing that a disagreement on some questions need not translate to a disagreement about others. That’s politics. We have to join forces where we can.
Here, we have common ground. Let’s seize it.
Serena Sigillito is Editor of Fairer Disputations. She recently completed a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship focusing on contemporary American women’s experiences of work and motherhood.
Rachel Wiseman is the managing editor of The Point. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Point, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and an editor of The Point. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Chronicle Review.