All the British papers this weekend were focused on the "fertility crisis." The Observer warns:
Britain is suffering a baby ‘shortage’ with potentially disastrous consequences as work pressures force young women to shelve plans for a family, according to dramatic new research urging an £11bn campaign to boost parenthood.
Women have not turned against becoming mothers and, if they could have the number of children they actually wanted, more than 90,000 extra babies a year would be born, according to calculations by the respected think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.
But the report says the professional and financial penalties of childbearing – a mid-skilled 24-year-old who gives birth will earn £564,000 less over her lifetime than a childless counterpart, as motherhood narrows her career options – mean many are delaying pregnancy until it may be too late to conceive.
The ‘baby gap’ emerging between maternal desire and reality now threatens a demographic crisis as too few children are born to support future elderly dependants, the study warns.
On the one hand, we’ve been hearing this sort of thing in the USA for a while now, though our demographics are certainly different from those in the UK and in continental Europe. On the other hand, let me make it clear that I liked the tone of the report in the (gently leftish) Observer. So much of the debate about marriage and motherhood in this country seems to involve social conservatives bemoaning what they see as the "selfishness" of younger women today. In the American argument, feminism is often blamed as a chief culprit for declining birth rates; women seduced by false notions of independence and autonomy peddled by those of us in the feminist establishment are robbing themselves and all of society of the product of their wombs.
But the argument in Britain, at least in the responsible press, is couched in different terms. The opening line of the article quoted above blames not feminism or individual women, but "work pressures" and the "professional and financial penalties of childbearing" as the source of the problem of declining fertility. Even more importantly, the study that the Observer and other British papers relied on bases its claim on the desires of real women. According to this British study, women would want to have more children — and perhaps have them earlier — if the financial and professional costs to childbearing weren’t so high and so disproportionately born by women.
One of the goals of feminism, of course, is to make motherhood a choice. Freud — and many social conservatives in the culture wars — claim that biology is destiny; to these folks, it is only through motherhood that a woman realizes her fullest potential as a human being. According to this perspective, an unused uterus is a tragic missed opportunity that a childless woman will invariably deeply regret as she moves past her reproductive years. Feminism rejects that claim, even as it honors those women who do choose to be mothers. Yes, I’m well aware that from time to time, some isolated voices in the feminist community have expressed hostility towards all reproductive behavior, but they are in the minority. Feminism objects to legal, cultural, or social compulsion towards motherhood, not towards motherhood that is freely and eagerly chosen.
So on the one hand, part of vital feminist work has to be ensuring that women understand that they do have choices. It is important to make clear that happiness is possible outside of a relationship with a man, or outside of bearing children. Heck, this is even a biblical position! Paul encouraged young women not to marry or have children, recognizing that what matters above all else is a relationship with Christ, not with spouse or children.
At the same time, we’ve got to be equally concerned with making motherhood a more viable option for those women who would like to have children while also having professional lives outside the home. While some women who express a longing for children may be doing so to comply with family or social expectations, others are no doubt expressing a powerful internal desire. It’s a desire we’ve got to listen to, and as the British report suggests, a desire we need to respond to in concrete ways. From the Observer article:
Jenny Watson, head of the Equal Opportunities Commission, said the ‘baby gap’ partly reflected women changing their minds or not meeting the right man. But she added: ‘It should tell us that we don’t have a very family-friendly culture, and it should concern us.’
Britain has ‘too many women remaining involuntarily childless’, the report concludes, while high fertility and early childbirth is ‘systematically associated with severely reduced prospects’.
So encouraging early marriage and large families (the conservative suggestion) isn’t, in and of itself, an adequate response. The conservative argument is that what the report calls "reduced prospects" are really just the trappings of success in a materialistic society. Women should come to terms early with the notion that they will have to make hard choices, and "reduced prospects" are the inevitable price that must be paid for the far more sublime and enduring delights of bearing and raising children. Feminists respond by rejecting what they see as a false dichotomy; only in a society where there are no communal and governmental responsibilities for helping families raise children will women be forced to choose between motherhood and independence.
I’m haunted by the phrase "involuntarily childless." I think of my own students, to whom I often pose the question: "when is the right age to have children, and how will that fit into your future career plans?" Many of them don’t take the risk of infertility seriously (it’s amazing that many do assume that getting pregnant at 38 is going to be every bit as easy as getting pregnant at 18); others don’t yet grasp how brutal the demands of simultaneously pursuing motherhood and career can be. Of course, we who teach have an obligation to be honest with our young women about biological realities. But we also have an obligation to get them to question a system that forces the sort of unhappy choices that so many women seem to be making according to this British study.
The study suggests a variety of responses:
The Institutes for Public Policy Research urges government intervention to raise the birth rate by making working parenthood more appealing to both mothers and fathers.
It advocates free nursery places for two-year-olds, paternity leave paid at 90 per cent of a man’s salary, and three months of paid parental leave to be taken at any point before the child is five, with one month reserved for fathers. That would cost up to £11bn a year by 2020 – about £183 for every British man, woman and child.
As a pro-feminist man, I’m especially heartened by the call for greater paternity leave. If government policy is to be effective in creating a culture in which women can "have it all", it’s clear that fathers will have to be a critical part of the solution. The rewards for men — particularly in terms of a closer and more intimate relationship with their very young children — are obvious, and, to my mind, exciting. I’d love the idea of taking a semester off — at 90% pay — to stay at home with a future child while my wife worked full-time. I haven’t had children of my own, but I know how I feel about the little ones who belong to my family and friends. I’ve never accepted — not for a damned second — that my biology makes me less inclined to nurture and love, and I’d love to see more policy that honors that potential within me and within other fathers. With greater commitment from the state and from fathers, we can help to move past the dilemma so evocatively described in the IPPR study.
