Kids or No Kids? Rethinking Parenthood in Uncertain Times (with Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman)

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Introduction – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes, the podcast where we explore the shifting terrain of relationships, gender, sexuality, race, and more. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guides in this episode are Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman.

ANASTASIA BERG: Thinking about children and thinking about family is coded conservative. And so for us, one of the tasks was to call out that this connection between the very question—should I have children? Should I start a family?—and other conservative points is not a necessary one.

RACHEL WISEMAN: And I'll just add that it wasn't always the case that family values were presented as a conservative issue. Many great progressive, leftist, liberal thinkers have raised the importance of family. And so it's important to carve out a space for progressives and liberals to have these conversations and not just cede them to the right.

BLAIR HODGES: Is anybody out there thinking about having kids right now? It's a little rough out there. Becoming a parent, though, used to be what most people seemed to want. It was the path to a meaningful life. But things have changed, and a lot more people report feeling really ambivalent about the question: kids or no kids.

There are things like climate change making the future seem bleak. Finding the right partner can be tough. Many men still aren't doing their fair share of child-rearing. Look at the cost of living, not to mention the terrible political moment that we're in. Why would anybody want to bring a kid into this?

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman don't want women to be the only ones wrestling with that decision. They say the choice to have kids isn't just a women's issue. It's a basic human one that we all need to think about. Their new book is called What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. They join us right now to offer progressive ways to think about the hardest questions about having kids today.

 

Making the Personal Decision – 02:20

 

BLAIR HODGES: Anastasia Berg, welcome to Relationscapes.

ANASTASIA BERG: Thanks for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: And Rachel Wiseman also joins us. Rachel, it's great to have you on the show.

RACHEL WISEMAN: So good to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. And Rachel, I'll start with you because you wrote the introduction, Anastasia wrote the conclusion of the book. Your introduction starts off with your own ambivalence about whether to become a mother. All along, you kind of thought you had reached this point of knowing whether you'd want to have kids.

But as you approached your 30s, you say whatever that thing was that was supposed to tell you, it wasn’t telling you. So talk about that context, when you started to really wonder. And why weren’t you wondering about this question earlier?

RACHEL WISEMAN: So the book starts with an introduction that I write where I reflect on being in my late 20s and early 30s, and feeling as though I was expecting at some point to have this urge come over me. The urge that would make the question of whether or not to have children somehow necessary: should I have kids?

I had a hard time figuring out how I should raise it, and how necessary it was for me to take this question really seriously. It wasn't that I was thinking about it in terms of rational pros and cons—can I afford it, do I really want them? I just didn't know where to begin.

And that felt pretty isolating. So at one point I asked my mom, how did you know that you wanted to be a mom? How did you know you wanted kids? And for her, she said, well, it was obvious. I always wanted kids. There was no real moment for me where it became this big, looming question, because it was never really a question at all.

Whereas for me, and many other people I think in our social milieu, it is this very live, real question in a way that it wasn’t before. And so in the book, we try to address that and also give space for people who might feel kind of alone and isolated in the decision, to figure out where they might want to begin.

BLAIR HODGES: And in the intro, you place your own personal story in a broader context. The basic facts are pretty clear, right? People are generally waiting longer to have kids, if they have them at all. People are having fewer kids. And these numbers are increasing—the time people are waiting is longer, the number of kids is lower.

So you're situating yourself, but you're also not really feeling like the question exists in that bigger context. It really does feel like a personal question. And in the book, you look at where that ambivalence comes from, to uncover its sources and dig into the deeper philosophical stakes about what children are even for. What does it mean to want to have kids at this time?

So the intro really lets us know where you're at. Rachel. Anastasia, how about you? I didn't get as much from you about that calculus. When you did that calculus, what did it look like for you? Maybe you grew up kind of like Rachel's mom, just knowing that you would always want to have kids.

ANASTASIA BERG: So that's not the case in the book. After the introduction, Rachel and I spent four chapters discussing the sources of ambivalence—so many Romantic concerns, feminist concerns, especially for women, and the ethical concerns that are brought home by climate change today. But I conclude with a little report from, quote-unquote, the other side, having had a child.

And what is it that I have personally to say to people who are faced with a decision? In my case, no, I did not always want to have kids. In fact, what was very salient for me was the fact that for novelists, poets, and philosophers who were women, it looked like a condition of their success and creativity and productivity that they shouldn’t have children.

This is partly because there’s a kind of kick out of listing all the women who didn’t have kids in order to make a justice point. We see far less frequently the list of women who did have children and succeeded just as much or more. So for me, it was very clear that this was a sacrifice I was going to have to make in order to, say, write a book about an important philosophical question like I just did.

So what changed? I want to credit philosophy for it. Although I wasn’t asking the question of children in a philosophical register, I was thinking a lot about the role of different values in human life, the differences in how we live today from how we lived in the past—what we lost, what we can recover, what we want to reinvent.

At some point I realized I wanted to take a direct part in this project of the perpetuation of human life. I call it "taking one for Team Humanity." I didn’t have kids because I thought they would just be fun. I didn’t do it just because I wanted to ethically grow or see the world from the perspective of a child’s eyes. I really thought it’s going to be hard, it’s going to make it harder to accomplish all these things that I don’t think I’m going to care about any less. And indeed, I don’t care about them any less now that I have children.

But this difficulty is something we collectively share. And I was willing to do my little part, like I do as a citizen or like I do as part of an academic community. I’m going to take my little part—me and my partner—in taking care of this one tiny droplet of the next generation.

 

Beware the Culture War – 07:48

 

BLAIR HODGES: You’ve hit on a lot of things I’m excited to talk about: The basic stories people tell about why people are having fewer kids and why people feel ambivalent about it include things like economic uncertainty, the rise of women’s empowerment, and concerns about climate change—all these things we’ll dig into.

But before we do, I also wanted to point out that this is a book about ambivalence, and I approached it with some of my own ambivalence. A sort of uncertainty, maybe even some fears, about the culture war that’s going on around these questions. These are very loaded questions—whether people should have kids, or why people should or shouldn’t want to.

So I wanted to ask you about that, if it was on your mind as you approached this. The things I’m thinking about are debates over abortion. People that oppose abortion are probably more likely to make pronatalist arguments. Or the racist things that can happen in conversations around birth. The Great Replacement Theory is an example—the idea that not enough white people are reproducing, that they’re being out-reproduced by other races, and that this could lead to the downfall of society, or whatever.

I wanted to know how you thought about those kinds of hot-button culture war issues as you approached this book.

ANASTASIA BERG: Well, the first and maybe most interesting point to make here is that the polarization and politicization of the question of children is, in fact, one of the reasons we think it’s so hard to think about them—especially in liberal and progressive circles. Because thinking about children and thinking about family is coded conservative.

So it’s something that’s supposed to happen without you directing too much attention to it. As we might talk about, that’s also true from other perspectives, but it’s very true from this ethical-political perspective that you raise. And so for us, one of the tasks was to call out that this connection—between just the very question, should I have children? Should I start a family?—and other conservative points is not a necessary one.

We want to free ourselves from this impossibility of having an open conversation about whether it’s fertility, timelines—something very much coded conservative—or the benefits of family, or the meaning of motherhood and fatherhood, from political pressures. This is why we published the New York Times op-ed about freeing, or saving, children from the culture wars.

And I’ll just add that I actually think there’s tremendous potential for liberals and progressives to find something in common with conservatives and religious conservatives through this question of children. Because if you look at the kinds of things that progressives and liberals care about—the reforms they want to see in the world—all those things presuppose a robust human future. I think we should free more people to want to, as I was saying before, take a direct part in that.

RACHEL WISEMAN: And I'll just add that it wasn’t always the case that family values was something that was presented as a conservative issue. Democrats and Republicans used to fight over which party could really claim that title. And many great progressive, leftist, liberal thinkers of the past have raised the importance of family as a kind of haven from all of these market forces that make life very difficult for people.

And so I think it's important to carve out a space for progressives and liberals to have these conversations and not just cede them to the right in the way that they have.

BLAIR HODGES: I appreciated in the beginning of the book seeing you openly acknowledge, like, yeah, there are these racist discussions that happen around these issues. That’s not what we’re doing. You made sure to take it into account and let people know where you were coming from, to try to back away from the ways that culture war uses these issues and to just be more thoughtful about it.

So for me, the ambivalence sort of lifted. I was like, okay, cool, I’m excited to see what else you do in the book.

 

Internal and External Considerations – 11:44

 

BLAIR HODGES: You start off by looking at the external considerations—the reasons that people are going to give about why they feel ambivalent, or maybe even don’t want to have kids.

Rachel, you talk about how you found this course by Ann Davidman, this online thing, Motherhood: Is It For Me? It’s something people can subscribe to for guided meditations and writing exercises, and there’s an online forum and phone calls. The point of it is to get a person to tune out all external considerations and just listen inside themselves to find out if they personally really want to have kids, if this is important to them.

And it kind of presupposes the idea that you can be this isolated person—this sort of platonic little thing inside you—that can tell you whether or not you want to have kids. And in the chapter on externals, you point out that that’s difficult to do, that it’s kind of problematic.

RACHEL WISEMAN: Yeah. One of the premises of the course is that there’s some kind of internal desire that you can discover if you only are able to separate out all of these other factors that might be clouding your decision-making in the moment—things like your partner’s preferences about kids, what your parents want for you, your career, or whether you’re biologically capable of having them.

And what my experience of the class was, and in talking to other people who also took it, we felt like, okay, it is kind of liberating to be able to silence those things for a minute. But at the same time, they’re the substance of your life. They are the things that you will always have to return an answer to.

So we felt it was important to be able to peel back those concerns about career and romance and family and climate, to figure out what really is going on under the surface there and why it’s so hard for people to figure out how to act and what to do in light of those concerns.

 

In This Economy? – 13:53

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. I feel like we can’t fully separate ourselves from those externals. I think we’re already thrown into a world where they make us who we are and where they contribute to our decision-making. And so you’re going to talk about some of the things people list in polls when it comes up—why people are delaying having kids or not having kids at all.

And there are some big ones. Let’s talk about those for a minute here. The externals that people identify that affect their decision on this. The first one we’ll talk about is economic precarity. This is a factor, you say, but you also suggest it might not be as big of a factor as people have come to believe.

ANASTASIA BERG: So the answer here is twofold. No doubt, especially in the American context, financial considerations—which means concerns with money and career—loom large. However, the situation is complicated once we start looking at international comparisons. In particular, when we look at countries that ostensibly have removed precisely those obstacles that people list. Countries like the Nordics and South Korea, where we have universal health care, childcare, generous maternity leave. We see that we do not have the intended or the sought-out effects on birth rates.

Now, in raising this, we do not mean to debunk the explanation and simply call it out as a case of bad faith. We treat this complication as an invitation to think deeper into what is going on when people are raising these concerns. And what we found is that they may not speak to actual concerns of the affordability of children.

What we have with millennials in particular is that, unlike their characterization as immature or refusing to grow up—lazy, hedonistic—in fact, there’s something too mature, too adult about them. Because what they have is a conception of the standards of readiness for family. These are standards you see across financial and professional life, but also romantically, and in terms of personal constitution. They’re so high and so vague, one never knows whether one has reached them.

And we think this is what the frequent talk about the concern and the anxiety over finances and careers really points to—the concern of whether I will ever be ready enough.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And so it's, as you point out, these programs in other countries—for example, paid childcare and things like this—there are strong cases to make for why we should do that. But maybe immediately affecting the birth rate might not be one of those. They're better for the social good in general. Yeah, but it might not affect the exact numbers.

ANASTASIA BERG: Exactly. And if I may just add to that point, in fact, today we have a situation, particularly among liberals and progressives, where we're pushing for certain kinds of policy. We'd like to see universal healthcare and then more specifically mandatory parental leave and childcare. However, while we're refusing to take a hard stance on the question of the value of children and family.

So it's not only that we think that these programs are good for another reason. We actually think that in order to really full-throatedly advocate for them, we need to begin by having the courage and possibility to affirm the value of children.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And that's going to get complicated when people start bringing up the state of the world itself, which we'll talk about later on when people are worried about things like climate change and that sort of thing. And we will get to that.

 

Is Selfishness the Problem? – 17:17

 

BLAIR HODGES: Another external that you mentioned here is general purpose-of-life stuff. And when people are polled, they talk about wanting a satisfying career, about having leisure time and being able to enjoy their lives and all of that. And some people think that accounts for the ambivalence and chalk it up to a rise in a selfish culture.

ANASTASIA BERG: So a couple things we didn't list in that list, Blair, is that people also talk about wanting to invest in their friendships. They talk about wanting to, quote, 'make the world a better place.' So the quick assumption that all we have here is just more selfishness, I think is something we should be a little careful about.

And by the way, that of course is itself a conservative talking point. What we found is that more profoundly, the big, most fundamental change is not in people becoming necessarily more selfish, nor is it in children simply becoming more costly. But it's that the very role of children in a human life has drastically changed.

So in the past, children were understood to be a very part of the framework of human life. It was something that you did no matter what the cost would be or whether or not it would give you any benefit. Today, however, it's an open question that people feel the pressure to justify. So as opposed to saying, oh, the opportunity cost of children has risen, really, the change is so much more radical.

It's that now we see them through the lens of an opportunity cost. And when we look at how children are perceived, it's not just that they're one choice among others, but that we see them often marking the end of life as you knew it. They're understood to be, especially for women, completely potentially transformative of one's identity.

And partly because people are also having them so late, they're thinking, my kids are going to leave my house when I'm mid-50s or in my 60s. I'll never get to enjoy the things that I have enjoyed and understand myself through. So instead of thinking of the self becoming more dear, it's that children are understood as much more of a threat to that self, as opposed to continuous with a life that we are going to be living in our future.

 

Finding the Right Partners – 19:27

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And then another external is the issue of finding a partner. A lot of people, when they think about having kids, want to do that in relationship with a partner. They don't—some people are cool doing it alone, but a lot of people aren't. And relationships and how they're formed and how they progress has also changed over time.

And now you say parenthood's kind of seen more as a capstone rather than a stepping stone or part of that process. So people want to find a partner, then go through a courtship and dating, get to know each other, and then maybe later on get married and figure out what marriage is like, and then later on maybe have kids.

And so that part of the decision is getting more and more delayed, again, because some people just want a relationship that's working and stable. And again, they really want to be sure in something. And so that's contributing to children being postponed or even just completely sort of pushed off to the side.

RACHEL WISEMAN: Right. There's this new kind of dating paradigm that's taken priority today called slow love. In contrast to the stereotype about millennial hookup culture, millennials are actually taking much longer to commit. They're testing the waters for longer, sometimes dating online for a long time before they even meet.

What's really remarkable is that in the past it was understood that you would date with the view of finding a partner to start a family with. Now it's more common for people to feel they first have to find the perfect, most compatible partner—and only then can they begin broaching the topic of whether or not they want children. So there's a real separation of the romantic timeline from the family timeline.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Rachel Wiseman, managing editor of The Point and a co-author of the book we're talking about today, What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. We're also joined by Anastasia Berg, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine.

 

Competing Visions of Feminism – 21:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: So you got together to write this book, asked each other personal questions about motherhood, and developed a friendship around it. You also turned to history, sociology, literature, film, and interviews with contemporary women and men about their feelings. Your book looks at the history of feminism in particular to help us understand where we're at today.

You write that there are feminisms—there’s no single feminism. And it's really clear when it comes to motherhood, because having children has controlled so much of a woman's life. Feminism has wrestled with whether motherhood should be abolished altogether, or reconceived in ways that empower women more. Give us some examples of these different schools of feminism—from the camp that sees motherhood as oppressive and harmful, to those who want to re-envision and even embrace it as the best thing women can do, and then the feminisms that fall somewhere in between.

RACHEL WISEMAN: Interestingly, you can see both poles of that debate in one of the seminal texts of feminism, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. She wanted to liberate women from the confines of their physiological destiny, from the home, and give them the freedom to enter public life. At the same time, she recognized how central children and raising another human being are to the continuation of human life and ethical life, and what a serious ethical task that is.

For the feminists who followed her, there was a more pro-motherhood camp that felt motherhood could be a source of great power and meaning for women. It just needed the conditions changed—and then its values could even be universalized, with men adopting them as well.

On the other side were feminists who felt motherhood was in some ways a prison, the source of most of women's oppression. Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex, argued that the sexual division itself was what kept women down, and that only with the invention of mechanical wombs and the end of sex division would women be truly free.

These debates went on for a long time about the importance of motherhood to a human life. But by the 1980s, they kind of exhausted themselves. Both sides eventually agreed on the value of private, individual choice: if you want kids, have them; if you don’t, don’t—but everyone else should keep quiet. Feminism moved on to other issues, but that left a vacuum in the public conversation. Many women no longer had the conceptual resources to think through whether they should have kids, why they might want them, or what it would mean for them.

ANASTASIA BERG: And perhaps I'll just add, because you also asked about what's happening in between. We think some of the most interesting positions in this debate aren’t at the poles, but from people like bell hooks, who said we should overcome the situation where the question of children is framed as a women’s issue.

Part of the essential problem is that we're asking, "Are kids good for women or not good for women?" Instead, we should recognize that the responsibility of having children should be truly equally shared. If that’s the case, then we should start thinking about parenthood—not just about motherhood.

BLAIR HODGES: And you say it makes sense that someone like bell hooks, a really incredible philosopher and theorist and just a great writer, pointed this out, because for Black women, the debates in the ’60s about women entering the workforce kind of seemed beside the point. That was more of a white woman’s concern: “We want to be in the workforce.” Meanwhile, a lot of Black women were like, “We’ve been here all along. What are you talking about?

ANASTASIA BERG: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: "What kind of empowerment are you looking for?"

So talk about how race became a really important component in challenging white feminism and the limitations of what white feminism was trying to do.

ANASTASIA BERG: Well, you said most of it, Blair. Because of the class distinctions between races in America, Black feminists were much more attuned to the situation of the working-class woman. bell hooks herself says what’s true of Black working-class women is in fact true of white working-class women too: they’ve always been working.

So the obsession with liberating women into the workforce as the exclusive goal misses not just the fact that they’ve always been there, but also the fact that, for those women, having children and family was in fact one of the refuges from the dehumanizing work they were subjected to. That was a realm of free human affect and of humanizing labor, as bell hooks puts it.

From that perspective, she is able to point out that this also holds true for a lot of middle-class women who go into the workforce. Their quest for meaning and value in life is often not met by their desk jobs.

She calls on us to reevaluate precisely this polarity. She calls out the complete anti-motherhood feminists, saying they are ethically missing an important part of what it meant to be women at the time. But pragmatically, she also says they’re losing the vote of these women.

She also critiques pro-motherhood feminists, saying it’s well-intentioned but sentimentalist, essentializing, and often class-blind, coming from middle- and upper-middle-class white women who enjoyed motherhood as very empowering and beautiful. She’s calling on us to rethink it.

She draws explicitly on Adrienne Rich and says we need to rethink how we’re socializing the youngest kids vis-à-vis parenthood. We shouldn’t call a little boy caring for his doll “motherly.” We should laud him as a good parent. From the earliest age, modeling equal parenting and encouraging it is how we can truly transform gender differentiation insofar as it’s harming us.

So to go back to Firestone, who wanted to explode that difference, bell hooks says no—we’re going to transform it by inculcating the sense that family, nurture of children, care of children, and education can bring meaning to the lives of all people, not just women.

 

Is There Too Much Pressure to Have Kids, or Not to Have Kids? – 28:35

 

BLAIR HODGES: I love how you bring bell hooks into the conversation. Another thing I want to amplify is this rise of mysticism around motherhood—this idealized state. Part of the feminist movement emphasized how amazing women are, what our bodies can do, how amazing birth is.

And breastfeeding and natural birth and all of these things can be positive in some people’s lives. But bell hooks points out that this romanticizes motherhood and can also be used to argue that it is inherently a woman’s job. Men are over here providing, and women are over there nurturing and doing the baby work.

bell hooks says we should also pay attention to that romanticizing and emphasize parenthood rather than just motherhood or fatherhood. She wants to end the contest between women—where women claim, “Being a mother is the most important thing a woman can do,” or, “Being a mother is the most rewarding thing in my life.” bell hooks asks, “Why can’t we just say, ‘Being a mother is important to me,’ or ‘Being a mother has been rewarding to me’?” She wants to remove the contest element, so people aren’t excluded. Some people can't have kids, or some people, maybe they don't want them. She’s trying to create a more encompassing view of motherhood that includes all of humanity.

The irony in all of that is, today it wouldn't be surprising to see an op-ed that says, "I want to have kids, and I love having kids, but society hates that," or "I feel persecuted," or "I feel really judged for wanting to do that."

Then you can also see an op-ed of a woman saying, "I feel so much pressure to have kids. Culture is making me do it, and I don't want to." And we could see both of those perspectives being truly held by two different women. That's the context we're in today, of the world making women have kids, or the world not wanting us to have kids.

ANASTASIA BERG: Now, the first thing to say is, of course, this is a culturally unresolved issue. We have, in fact, people both concerned about declining birth rates, mostly conservatives, making a big fuss about it. And we also have people worried about climate, women's rights, et cetera, who are weary of motherhood and channeling that sentiment.

What's interesting, however, is that we found in many interviews with women and men that, because this choice today is so fraught, people feel the real need to justify it. We think a lot of times, given their internal conflict, whichever way they're leaning, they're really acutely aware of pressures from the other direction.

So women who are very ambivalent or leaning no are seeing the world as full of signs that they have to have children. Although a lot of times, when you ask them, “Okay, so you experience external pressure, what form does it take?” they really have nothing more to point to than, “My mother-in-law asked me about it.”

On the other hand, women who are, of course, free to have kids are looking at the culture. They're looking at that monthly update about climate change in the New York Times. If they're in an academic or culturally avant-garde milieu, they might also be directly exposed to more feminist pressures, like the idea that they can’t find room for family in the life of an intellectually ambitious, artistically inclined woman.

Those are the things that are salient to them. I would say part of the ambition of the book is to create more possibility for hashing out exactly these questions. Like Rachel was saying, this isn’t considered a mainstay of feminist debates today. Other things are on the table. We want to bring it back on the table so that women and men who are conflicted have somewhere to turn and think with.

RACHEL WISEMAN: Yeah, and I'll just add that I think the identity dimension of the motherhood question complicates things even further, because people see it as a direct threat or indictment of who they are, whether or not they made this decision: “I'm going to be a mom,” “I'm not going to be a mom,” “I'm going to be child-free.”

Those identity challenges can feel so intense that any kind of different approach, or an article in an op-ed, can be seen as actually calling out the legitimacy of their own choices. We think it’s important for feminists to be able to create room in the public conversation where we can talk about these different experiences without that kind of defensiveness.

In the past, feminists were really able to think about the difficulties women are experiencing psychologically and to try to address them and come up with solutions. If we’re not willing to see those honestly and have those conversations, then there won’t necessarily be the resources to help women overcome them.

 

What About Men? – 33:49

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. What you’re pointing out in the book is that feminism isn’t a checklist of predetermined goals for women; it’s an evolving movement. It needs to respond to challenges as they emerge in ways that address women with multiple options. And importantly, that’s not just about women. Say more about that. Okay, so—men. What about men? [laughs]

ANASTASIA BERG: In progressive and liberal circles, the understanding that women should have control over their bodies, that they should be able to shape the course of their lives, has given way to what we think is an unfortunate consequence, where the very burden of the decision—this very fraught decision, as we’ve been talking about—has been completely lifted off the shoulders of men.

Precisely those men who understand themselves as “allies,” i.e., supportive of women and their empowerment, take a big back step from the questioning of parenting. Men we’ve talked to and asked about entering conversations about parenting have told us that they would absolutely prefer not to do so because they would be perceived as creepy, controlling, and oppressive.

ANASTASIA BERG: Now, again, we have a good intention here, but what happens in practice is that women within relationships are left with this choice on their own. We joke that the answer “whatever you want, honey” is one you don’t want to hear in response to the question, “What are we gonna have for dinner?” or “What are we gonna watch tonight?” That’s certainly not an answer you want to hear to the question, “Do you want to have kids with me?”

So what we need is to strike a very delicate balance where we both encourage men to think about this question early, to interrogate their own desire as to what shape they really want their life to take, and enter into those conversations, freeing women to partake in them without, of course, those acts of thinking and speech putting undue pressure on women.

We think this is something that’s certainly possible and that we need to see a lot more of today. And just to make it clear, we have an understanding that men should be doing as much around the house. However, in thinking that the responsibility for the question of having children doesn’t belong to men, we’re, in a way, stacking the deck against the equal participation of men and women in the household. Because when you’re not making the decision, you’re not taking responsibility for it later.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. Hey, you’re the one that wanted to have kids, so I’m here. To be an accessory to that project rather than a full co-partner is kind of the mindset that sets us up for problems.

ANASTASIA BERG: Exactly.

RACHEL WISEMAN: The history of feminism teaches us that feminist commitments point beyond themselves. It’s not the case that women can solve all of these problems just within the framework of individual choice, or just within a women’s discourse. Most of the feminist concerns at their core are human ones.

And so that requires the participation of all people—men, women, all genders.

BLAIR HODGES: That’s Rachel Wiseman, she and Anastasia Berg, authors of the book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. 

 

Mom Novels: Ambivalence in Popular Literature – 37:05

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, so after taking readers through theoretical feminist thought, kind of a history of feminism in the 20th century, you also look at some popular books by women who are wrestling with the question of whether to have kids.

I think this is really great, because people are probably more likely to read a memoir or something than to dig into deep philosophical texts. As you did a literature review and looked at some of these memoirs, what kind of patterns did you notice in these books about motherhood?

RACHEL WISEMAN: Yeah, so in these motherhood ambivalence novels, there are a few tropes that get repeated. One is a very intense focus on pregnancy and the first year of postpartum parenthood. Another is a very detailed account of the physical experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. But the novels present this picture of motherhood that is generally negative.

You get a lot of emphasis on the things that are challenging biologically and psychologically, and not much of a fuller sense of the pleasures and goodness of being a parent, partly because of that myopic focus on those very intense, physically demanding months and years.

There’s also a tendency to view the child as a kind of alien figure. They’re often presented as either a bomb that blows up your life, or a literal extraterrestrial, or an animal, like a cougar, that has somehow appeared in your life, and not as something continuous with a full human existence. It’s not really redeemed on its own terms.

So that’s one branch of the motherhood ambivalence genre. But there are others too, like Elena Ferrante in The Lost Daughter or in her Neapolitan Quartet, and Torrey Peters, who we think do succeed in presenting motherhood—not in a particularly rosy way—but dramatizing what’s really at stake in choosing to become a mother or a parent.

BLAIR HODGES: It seems like there must have been a shift there, because as people aired the negativity or processed the difficult parts about it, maybe that was kind of new. Before, women were expected to say how wonderful motherhood was, how incredible it was. So that shift in genre could be a reaction to earlier expectations, or even present expectations, that every woman needs to love it.

It would be bad for women to say how hard it is because they’re supposed to be natural at it. Maybe these books are a reflection of, “Okay, I’m going to actually tell you the truth. Here’s what it is.”

ANASTASIA BERG: It’s very true, Blair, that the novels perform something new, which is they make a worthy literary subject out of the experience of motherhood, where the whole focus of the memoir or novel is the experience of motherhood.

But there’s a tendency to exaggerate how new that actually is. In literature and film, there has always been acknowledgement that not all women are natural mothers and not all experiences of motherhood are rosy.

Rachel and I have tried to think hard about what drives this investment in the novelty of that discovery. Historically, it’s not that novel; this isn’t a big revelation. What we found is that there is a constant need and desire to express why motherhood is so difficult, why so challenging.

Some of it is specific to women, and some of it is the difficulty of integrating children and family life into a human life. Some of it is the seemingly insurmountable ethical challenges of having children, especially today in light of climate change. Fundamentally, it’s the awesome task of taking responsibility for another human life.

All of these fears and anxieties get invested and channeled through the idea that this is a groundbreaking literary discovery, when the truth is, I’m not sure it is.

 

Detransition, Baby: A Pro-natal Moment – 41:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's interesting. You still point out, though, that a lot of them are very individual-focused. So a lot of them are in the head of the mother, right? It’s the mom and the baby. There's not a lot of community. There's not a lot of moments where they're talking about how great it is to have a kid or the benefits of having a kid.

But you do point out an exception to this in Torrey Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby. And this is a really fascinating example of thinking about motherhood in a new novel. So talk about Detransition, Baby and how that fits into the story you're telling.

RACHEL WISEMAN: Yeah, so Detransition, Baby takes a very different stylistic approach from the more traditional motherhood ambivalence novels. It is in some ways a more conventional novel because, instead of being just a very hyper-subjective experience of one disembodied character undergoing the transition from not being a mother to being a mother, it’s really an investigation of the question, "Should I? Should we become mothers?"

The way it does that is by staging this confrontation between three characters. There's Ames, who used to be trans, living as a trans woman, and then detransitioned, living as a man but still experiencing significant gender dysphoria. He enters a relationship with his boss, a cis hetero woman, and they accidentally get pregnant. They have to decide, are we going to keep this child?

The woman carrying the child is ambivalent about having a baby. Ames may want to become a parent, but the idea of being a father is alienating and triggers his gender dysphoria in another way. He says he can do this if he brings in a past flame, a trans woman who has always loved children and felt that motherhood was the one kind of marker of female identity not available to her.

By going through these three different accounts of what it would mean to take on motherhood or parenthood, you see what’s at stake for each character and also what might be redeemable about the experience.

BLAIR HODGES: There’s a passage you include in the book that I wanted to read. You say of all the motherhood ambivalence narratives that you discuss, none have a passage as straightforward about a desire to be a mother. I’ll read that here. This is Reese, who is asked, “Why do you specifically want to have a baby?” Her response:

There are so many reasons, but most of them are so simple, so embodied, that they feel inadequate to the question. She likes to hold children, to smell a baby's hair, to soothe the crying infant and feel his little frame let go of rigid fear, to settle in her arms. The weight goes slack and calm, so that for a moment she both gives and receives a rare peace, to rock a baby and communicate with your body, you’re safe. When she worked at the daycare, she liked the thoughtless way a child would reach to take her hand. She liked watching kids puzzle out something new, their wonder, their awe and excitement, which was when she let it be contagious. She liked their sudden acts of altruism. She recalled this one kid at the daycare, maybe four years old, who built a tower out of blocks, then tugged on her sleeve with the offer, “Do you want to kick it down?” He understood that the knockdown was the best part of building, and he wanted to give it to her. Who else could give you something so pure but a child?

Anastasia, when you’re hearing that passage, what’s going through your mind?

ANASTASIA BERG: What struck us was the willingness and courage to speak in such unadorned ways about the satisfaction, attraction, and pleasures of being a parent. After reading the motherhood ambivalence novels, where there’s always a desire to capture why anyone would choose this experience, it’s never in terms of the mundane, ordinary aspects of parenting.

It’s always done through some form of sublimation. This was refreshing—someone willing to speak about the experience in a straightforward way. And partly that’s possible because of the polyphony of voices Peters uses. It’s not a single consciousness ruminating repeatedly. The trans woman is invited to express her desire in these ways.

In these straightforward, simple ways, you can almost say, if I dare, that against the backdrop of this portrayal, there’s something anxious about the ambivalence literature’s depiction of motherhood. They won’t dare to just say, “There is something lovely about this moment,” and this is a connection we haven’t drawn before.

For example, in Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, she talks about the simple moment of peeling an orange for her children. That becomes a moment she replays, which symbolizes the love she has for her daughters and her capacity to integrate her love for them into her love of herself. It allows her to assume her role as a mother.

It’s a daily occurrence she can find meaning and value in, as opposed to some attempt to talk about parenting as a portal to tremendous ethical growth or a transformative identity.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And she’s just enjoying peeling an orange. Rachel, when you hear a passage like that—knowing you don’t have children now—does that pull at your heart? How do you feel? Do you think books could influence the kinds of decisions you make?

RACHEL WISEMAN: Yeah, well, I think literature is an incredibly potent arena for exploring meaning. I don't think it can be a guide. I don't think it can give you specific answers as to whether or not you want X or Y, but it can dramatize through characters and their experiences what really is at the heart of some of these big questions about what it means to live.

It can do so in a way that theory or philosophy maybe can't. That said, when I read Ferrante or Torrey Peters, what I get out of it is a sort of liberating sense of parenthood as a meaningful and constituent part of a human life. And that's not to say that it's easy. That's not to say that one has to take it on. Notably, in Detransition, Baby—sorry if this is a spoiler—it ends in an abortion. So it's not necessarily something you have to take on as your own, but it presents parenthood as something that could be a worthy project.

ANASTASIA BERG: And if I may, I would also add that what's interesting about Ferrante and Detransition, Baby is that you have this staging of a conversation about parenthood between people who are thinking of doing it together or not. That intersubjective experience becomes very important for the decision-making, the progression of the plot, etc., in a way that's largely absent from the prevalent motherhood ambivalence literary genre, where there are very few conversations with other people.

And whatever conversations exist feel like little markers, not life-constituting moments. They don't propel the drama. There is no drama. That mirrors something important in our book: the need for open and free conversation about the role of parenthood, especially in the lives of progressives and liberals, which we feel we just don't have enough of. That's another thing we really liked about these particular novels.

BLAIR HODGES: I loved reading about the novels. I hadn't read any of them, but it really made me want to read Detransition, Baby, which was already on my list. So I think I'm going to bump that up. And yeah, that was a big spoiler, Rachel, but I'll forgive you. [laughs]

RACHEL WISEMAN: Sorry!

 

Bringing Kids Into a Suffering World – 51:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: A lot of these books are talking about whether it's right for an individual. Right? Is this right for me, for my life? The next part of your book broadens that question to whether having kids in this world could be right in general. And Anastasia, you mentioned climate change. This is often cited as a reason people might not want to have kids.

Right now, things are looking ecologically dangerous, or people use climate change to explain declining birth rates. But you point out in the book that this isn't the first time in history that parents have worried about large-scale catastrophes and whether they should have kids. You cite an example from 100 years ago with Virginia Woolf. She has a character in a novel who says one cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering. So you could read that 100 years ago, you could read that today.

But you even trace it back to ancient history: the question of whether it's morally right to bring children into existence at all. And you identify this anti-natalist thinking—thinking against having babies—and you identify two major impulses behind it: the problem of evil and the problem of suffering. So let's look at both of those in turn, beginning with the problem of evil. What is that? And what does it have to do with whether we should have kids or not?

ANASTASIA BERG: The problem of evil is the following challenge: Could it be that human life is so fallen—that’s the theological register—or simply so bad and evil, so cruel, so selfish in a secular register, that it would be irresponsible to bring more human life into the world, whether because of the damage we cause one another or the damage we cause to the planet?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like, would I want to bring my kid into this? This idea that things are so bad and people do such bad things that I don't want to take part in that or put someone into that. How do you answer that problem of evil? How did you explore it, contextualize it, and work through it with people who are worrying about it?

ANASTASIA BERG: Right. I will point out, in what you said, you actually also hear echoes of the problem of suffering, and it's worthwhile putting both on the table because a lot of times when we talk about climate change, we can slide from one to the other.

The problem of suffering is perhaps a bit more familiar: how can we bring children into a world like this, and into the world as we predict it to become? Once we've diagnosed the arguments, we are able to answer them. There are two different answers to the argument from evil and the argument from suffering.

I'll start with the argument from evil. The argument from evil says we're irredeemable right now. There's no denying that we are not perfect, to say the least. That we make mistakes, that we hurt one another, that we make errors individually.

BLAIR HODGES: And collectively, that we give spoilers in podcasts.

ANASTASIA BERG: That's right. What we invite our readers to ask is whether or not they can recognize in their own lives that the pursuit of goals and projects, and attempts to realize values, are in fact, in their eyes, of unconditional worth.

Is it true? That's not something I can answer for someone else. But is it true that your life is all shadow? You pick up a climate change novel off the shelf, and you get a picture of us as decrepit, selfish, and completely ineffectual. The question is: is that really how you see yourself?

I think even the authors of these novels don't see themselves that way because they write the books for us. They think we can see past that perspective because they think we'll like the book. Once we ask ourselves that question, we realize that we're not all selfish.

We're not just chasing real estate; we're trying to create homes. We're not just using one another; we're developing friendships. We're not just caring for number one; we care for political and ethical causes. From that perspective, I think the argument from evil doesn't take off the ground.

Yes, we're not perfect. Yes, our pursuit of the good is partial and attenuated. But in recognizing goodness in our own lives, we see that it is in fact possible for us to do good, and that means to do better.

Now, once we put the argument from evil to one side, we are left with the argument from suffering. Here, we want to draw out a consequence of what looks like pretty sound logic: people saying, "I don't want to subject someone else to a miserable fate. It seems like I'm not morally justified in doing so. These people I'm bringing into the world didn't choose it, after all."

At that point, we want to point out that this line of thinking is undermined by a certain assumption: that we're morally responsible for the suffering our child will have, over and above every other cause of that suffering or misfortune.

In addition to all the people who are mean to a person, all the systems that betray us politically, and our collective negligence vis-à-vis climate change, the parent is assumed to be individually responsible for all that tragedy, misfortune, and failure. That assumption is flawed.

In taking responsibility and becoming a parent, we're not responsible for every aspect of our child's well-being. What we're responsible for is preparing that child for any kind of fate they may encounter. We fail when we fail to prepare our child to face the inevitable pains, failures, loss, and grief that are part of life as finite beings.

Another thing to point out is that if we are too attracted to the idea that climate change gives us a reason not to have children, we start to see that some people are in far better positions to spare their children certain harms. In a predictable world, your child may be less likely to suffer the harms of climate change and other natural or man-made threats.

If you follow that logic, it quickly seems that the more well-to-do you are, the more morally justified you are in having children. That is what we call a perverse conclusion. It's perverse to give more moral permissibility to those who are well-to-do in having children.

As if someone having children under conditions of great adversity is doing something less responsible. In fact, our common intuition is that they are probably much more courageous because they are taking on the responsibility of preparing their child for what's to come under far more precarious conditions, at far greater cost to themselves.

 

Burying Our Heads in the Sand – 58:55

 

BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned that there's a philosopher, Jonathan Lear, who said that there's cultural pressure right now to feel anxiety about the future and that there's a sort of cool detachment that despair can fuel. Like there's this genre of apocalyptic literature, and I've enjoyed some of it myself. Station 11 is terrific. I loved the TV series that they did from it.

So I enjoy this as well. But you're also worried that some of these cultural products can prompt resignation or really rob us of hope. But the response to that would be, well, what are you really going to hope for anyway? Then, like, people say, things look bad enough that they think you're kind of off your rocker.

If we should be striving toward hope in the face of possible suffering, how would you respond to that? That the idea that, why are you so hopeful? Actually maybe you're just burying your head in the sand here.

ANASTASIA BERG: I don't think that having genuine hope requires burying one's head in the sand. I think having hope does require something that's not always obvious in today's discourse. Sometimes you see people talk about hope, and they say something like, "Yeah, we're terrible. The world is a horrible, horrible place. However, who knows what the future will bring, so we can have hope."

That kind of hope doesn't really make sense to me. And if we are in fact the creatures that are described by this kind of portrayal, then I don't know that we deserve the kind of efforts that would be required to bring about a better future. And it doesn't sound like we're capable of it.

So I think hope has to be grounded, like I was saying before, in the capacity to see goodness in our future. I often say that an evaluation of the possibility of a human future really is an evaluation of the present. So when we're talking about anti-natalism, a lot of times that really is an expression of a judgment about today's reality.

None of it requires burying your head in the sand. However, it's in fact the capacity to recognize that we both deserve and are capable of the kind of efforts that we're talking about to bring about a better future. That, I think, is necessary in order to keep your head out of the sand.

Because the truth is—and I'm sorry in advance, Blair, I know you like the books and some of them are, you know, a great ride—but they themselves could be a kind of way of burying your head in the sand. There's something, and that's what I think we draw on Jonathan Lear's work.

There could be something self-indulgent in consuming these kinds of self-flagellating accounts over and over again. Because, in a way, we are invited to place ourselves out of the radius of humanity, right? We are the ones—we're the judgers of these kind of lowly, disgusting, decrepit beings. Instead of realizing that, in fact, the actual survivors of any kind of apocalypse, they're going to be people like us; they're going to be flawed.

One of the things we want to encourage in the book is to recover the sense of true ambivalence, which is, you know, the recognition of the ability to recognize both the problems and faults in our own being as well as the tremendous potential and goodness.

 

Living for the Present or Future? – 01:02:23

 

BLAIR HODGES: I appreciated toward the end of the book where you're talking about, instead of just asking, "Why have kids?" you kind of expanded out to, "What are we doing anything for? Why do anything?" And when you connect it to that, sometimes some people live toward the future, and sometimes people say we need to live toward the present.

There's this kind of rise of a Buddhist mentality of, "Just live in this moment and this moment is what matters and stop thinking about the future." Where do you come down on that question in terms of where we set our horizons? Should people, as they're thinking about kids, be thinking about the horizon, or like the future of human civilization and what it would take to either prevent it from falling off a cliff or to keep it flourishing, versus I like peeling this orange for my kid in this moment. This matters to me. Where do you come down on that—setting your horizons, future or present?

RACHEL WISEMAN: Well, I think we don't think that they're so separate. In trying to affirm the value of a human future, we are always affirming the value of the lives that we're living today. And so it's not just a matter of having children for some far-off future progeny that you will never meet, although that may be important, but to see the lives that we're living as worth reproducing, worth passing on, worth sacrificing for. These things are not necessarily so incompatible or so foreign as we might think.

ANASTASIA BERG: And also following the philosopher Sam Scheffler, we point out that in many of the investments that may seem at first glance to be very presentist, in fact, we have a deep investment in a future. And when I say a future, I mean the kind of future where people will outlive us.

So, you know, I'm an academic in my day job. I ostensibly am part of a big project expanding human knowledge. If you told me there is no human future, we might really ask a question about the full sense-making of this particular activity. I assume that there will be a future, and I affirm the value of the future in my actions when people are fighting for political reform.

One of the things that comes up often in conflict in today's discourse with having children is that it presupposes a robust human future to make sense of my commitment today. And that's true of so many of our activities. If we look through the things that we're invested in that may look like a very simple present activity, we see that, in fact, we are embracing in that activity the possibility of a robust human future.

And so, as Rachel was saying, we want to point out that there's a false choice between presentism and the future. We do, however, think that the right corrective, at least for the audience we're aiming the book at, is to invite them to think about their own personal futures earlier in life, where they can really make those thoughts count for the decisions that they're going to end up making.

And also really realize what I just described, which is how many of the goals that they are happy to affirm without reservation—political goals, reversing climate change, intellectual goals, artistic goals—really presuppose the kind of robust human future that anti-natalism simply isn't compatible with.

 

A Fulfilling and Rich Adult Life – 01:05:50

 

BLAIR HODGES: And then on a personal level, Anastasia, you mentioned this earlier, that the conclusion to the book is written from the other side of the question of having kids, because you've had kids, Rachel hasn't. Let's go there. A lot of people say that they think motherhood is going to completely change who they are, that it's just completely life-changing—you'll be a completely different person.

And you say that motherhood didn't really fundamentally change your entire world, and also that you were kind of resisting that change. Talk about the conclusion then, as you were thinking through from the other side of now having become a mother.

ANASTASIA BERG: Right. So one of the things I want to introduce is the idea that we can talk about the radical sort of change to your life—my life looks different—without having to couch that change in terms of an identity change. Oftentimes we try to understand the change that happens to a parent, but specifically to a mother, in terms of a radical identity transformation, which comes at the expense of our other identities.

Now, on the one hand, this is kind of like what we're talking about with the novels. On the one hand, this is really an attempt to give pride of place to the experience of motherhood and recognize its challenges in many ways, maybe in a novel way. But on the other hand, it can make the decision and the deliberation around motherhood that much harder to make because you're now not just facing the challenge of parenthood.

You're told that you might not recognize yourself on the other side. That can make it very daunting. And then, when you've had your child but you don't recognize yourself in that narrative—quite a monolithic one—sometimes you might feel like you're doing it wrong. Like, am I not the right kind of mother because I, in fact, still care about the things I care about and still try to pursue my other goals?

What I want to introduce is the fact that while children could be hard, challenging, a big force in your life, it can be continuous with the things that you have built up to the point of having children, including your own self.

And in fact, there’s also a horizon for an adult past the point of having very small children. Rachel was telling us how in the motherhood ambivalence novels, we see the portrayal of parenting as strictly concentrated in the first year of life. That's true of a lot of portrayals and representations of parenting today.

As if parenting is just parenting an infant. But parenting isn't just parenting an infant. It's also developing a robust relationship with another human being for whom you've taken on those responsibilities. It's having a relationship with adults. One of the most moving interviews we've had was with people who described to us how fantastic it has been for them to have adult children.

They say, you know, that's really my contact with the younger generation—goes through those experiences. And we want to show that continuity of having children with a fulfilling, rich adult life. And I want to say that it is possible. It doesn't necessarily make it easier because, like you said, in fact, not giving in totally to this so-called new identity is hard in itself because I could really feel where there was a call to sacrifice or where there was a challenge to integrate.

I refuse to give up. I want to try and continue living that fulfilling life. And that could be its own kind of challenge.

BLAIR HODGES: One of the biggest challenges you mentioned is the boredom of it. You didn't expect the tedium of it, where you're talking about how you really love the life of the mind. But then you say, "Oh, but here I am just up in the middle of the night with a kid that won't go to sleep. They're just crying and crying," and you're just like, ugh! Some of the tedium has been one of the biggest challenges for you?

ANASTASIA BERG: You know, I think tedium is one—one way of describing, and I think that's very true for many people. And sometimes it's boring for me because it doesn't fully engage you. I think I had some kind of fantasy based on my limited interaction with small children that seeing the world through a child's eyes could be very rewarding, seeing them grow and develop. Like, I'm very interested in human development. So I thought that would be very interesting. And that was all true.

What I didn't quite realize is just how much time you're spending not doing any of those things. You're not playing, and you're not observing a child develop. You really are—way I think about it is you're kind of like a sponge for displeasure.

So I don't mind the quote-unquote "boringness" or tedium as much as I mind the kind of helplessness in helping another being where the only thing you could do is absorb. The only thing you're supposed to do is hold and walk and try and comfort, but a pretty resistant-to-comfort kind of being. Yes, that is very hard, and that's very difficult. And there, you know, if somebody's reading the book with the hope that we can cure that, I don't have a cure for that. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: What's the most rewarding thing on the other side of that?

Oh, Rachel, did you have something?

RACHEL WISEMAN: I was just gonna say that one of the things that's funny about the conclusion is that it does not turn a blind eye to some of the hardships of raising a small child, a toddler, but there is something about it that I think is kind of consoling or liberating for someone who hasn't made the decision yet. You can recognize those things, you can acknowledge them without having it necessarily be an indictment of the experience.

Somehow it can be a way, and it also doesn't have to be some kind of personal sacrifice or something that's idolized, but that it's part of an experience that will be part of a life, and that it's something you will move through. And that, to me, for someone who does not yet have a child, was actually kind of refreshing to hear.

ANASTASIA BERG: To what's actually rewarding about it, if I may, I'm gonna do a lofty part of the answer and then a very quotidian one. Yeah. So I think the lofty part of the answer is that I do think that ultimately, in having children, it's like you take one for team humanity. And I think there are a lot of ways of participating in this project of sustaining our existence, and they include political reform and intellectual pursuit and artistic pursuit—not biological parenting.

So you can also be a great godparent and great uncle, and you could do that. But one of the ways is to take a responsibility for just a tiny, tiny sliver of this existence: raising a child. And I do genuinely think that part of what redeems so much of what you refer to in the book, when I say, "it doesn't even have to be me, but it does have to be me," and those kind of moments of frustration, is actually that I'm not doing something that is explained fully by a list of pros and cons, and that there's something here of tremendous kind of meaning and value.

And then, on the interpersonal level, I have to really say that even I, who wrote this book and pointed out and criticized the fact that parenting is represented as the parenting of infants, even knowing that, theoretically, did not fully prepare me for how much, in practice, seeing your child grow makes a difference to your experience. And just how dynamic the experience of parenting is going to be when you're a parent to a very small, your first small child. People say, "Don't worry, anything that happens, it changes. Anything that happens, it changes. And that is so true.

And so just realizing how dynamic that experience is, and then finding out that very quickly you are actually having little conversations with a human being who is discovering the world—I think that is probably the most rewarding thing for me.

BLAIR HODGES: I want to close with this quote from the book that says, "If the basic feminist goal is to liberate and empower women, then simply insisting on a woman's right to choose won't do." In other words, it's not enough. So it sounds like a woman's right to choose is important to you as authors, but you want something more than that. Tell me what that is.

RACHEL WISEMAN: Yeah, we want to make space for having open, honest conversations about the value of children and parenthood in a human life. So obviously, individual, biological, bodily autonomy is an important value and one that we uphold. But that's not going to help you, necessarily, on a personal basis, decide whether or not you want to have children.

So that is the space that we are trying to fill with this book and this argument—by opening up a conversation between the two of us and with our readers about what it would mean personally, politically, socially, intellectually to have and raise children.

BLAIR HODGES: And that's exactly what this book does. Again, it's called What Are Children? On Ambivalence and Choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. Anastasia Berg's an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and Rachel Wiseman is managing editor of The Point, which is a magazine of philosophical writing on politics, contemporary life, and culture.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:15:08

 

BLAIR HODGES: Now it's time for Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. This is where you get to reflect on the book itself. Something you regret about it now that it's out, that you might change about the book, or what the hardest part about writing it was. Any challenges you faced, or a surprising revelation that came about because you did this project. You don't have to speak to all three—you can choose. It's up to you.

ANASTASIA BERG: I'll say, I mean, the greatest challenge for us was certainly, I think, the fact that we chose to write it together. That wasn't just a matter of us happening to want to write together. It felt right, given the themes of the book and the ambition we had for the book, that it should be a live conversation between the two of us.

But that is very difficult. Rachel and I have different styles of thinking and different styles of writing. I believe the book is so much better because of that. But for us, I think that was the greatest challenge in trying to figure everything out, but also probably what made the experience just so rewarding—and hopefully the book as good as it is.

BLAIR HODGES: Were there things that either of you were like, I really don't want that in there, and the other person made a case for it? Like, were there big, big disagreements over stuff, or was it mostly like in presentation or…?

RACHEL WISEMAN: I don't think there were any. There weren't any big things where we had to make cases for, should this go in? should this not go in? We were working on kind of a sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph basis for the vast majority of the book.

ANASTASIA BERG: This is absolutely not true! [laughter] I had to fight Rachel very hard to keep many of the things in her personal essay that is the introduction to this book—that is the truth. I thought they were amazing and incredible and really important for showing the readers that we really understand where they're coming from and know in our own experiences how hard and challenging and fraught thinking about having children in one's life could be.

And that requires taking a risk. So I had to fight Rachel to make sure that we show we can take the risks that we ask our readers to take as well. Sorry, Rachel. I had to confess that one.

RACHEL WISEMAN: That's fair. That's fair. I mean, I do think that speaks to something that I was gonna say was the biggest, for me, a big challenge in writing the book, which is that we know that this is at once an incredibly personal issue—something that touches on lots of really live wires. It's something that is quite polarizing.

At the same time, we wanted to make space, make room for that conversation, and to find a way to do so sensitively and analytically. And kind of figuring out how to thread that needle was a big conceptual challenge at the beginning of writing the book.

BLAIR HODGES: And it sounds like you felt vulnerable then, Rachel, about the beginning, because it does get very personal about your own sort of searching and thinking about the question. Do you feel good about it now? I mean, it's in the book now. How are you feeling about the fact that the book starts off with that?

RACHEL WISEMAN: I mean, I feel good about it. It's interesting rereading it now because I wrote it, you know, four or five years ago—four years ago. And I'm at a very different point in my life now, and I've kind of gone through different phases of thinking through the question, attempting to get pregnant.

And so for me, I read it now, and I was worried when I took a little bit of a break from it that it would feel like I no longer recognize the person who was writing. And I did—I recognized it as me, but a kind of earlier version of me.

BLAIR HODGES: That's an important point in itself because I feel like that's the journey a lot of people experience—and also people who deal with infertility, or who maybe have made up their mind and then have to go through the process of grieving something that they've figured out they did want. Or, you know, there are so many different paths that different people can take.

And I feel like your book really tries to make room for a lot of those different paths in a way that also thinks positively about the possibility, of having children as a good thing. And like you said, I think that's a more uncommon focus, especially in more progressive and liberal spaces. So having a book like this is really valuable so people can really think about that part of the conversation, because I do think it's kind of under the radar.

RACHEL WISEMAN: Thank you.

ANASTASIA BERG: Thank you so much, Blair.

BLAIR HODGES: Again, the book is called What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. Anastasia, thanks for spending the time with us talking about the book.

ANASTASIA BERG: Thank you so much for having us.

BLAIR HODGES: And Rachel, again, thank you for putting yourself out there. It's a great book.

RACHEL WISEMAN: I'm so glad we got to do this. Thank you, Blair.

 

Outro – 01:19:56

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes. And if you're enjoying the podcast, I'd love it if you go rate and review it. You can do that in Apple Podcasts—just look up the show, scroll down, there's a rate and review section. Click that. I love seeing new reviews come in, like this one from gpouliot. Uh I don’t know how to pronounce that. [laughs]

They say: “Many podcasts succeed by offering the same thing over and over. Blair brings in guests from a broad spectrum of viewpoints and topics that keeps the variety interesting with agility and grace.” Thanks for that review, gpouliot—that’s exactly what I'm trying to do. I hope other people go rate and review the show so I mispronounce their name on the show as well. You can also rate the show on Spotify, by the way, if that's where you're listening—and that's easier to do; you just hit the stars.

Mates of State provides our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, a journalist in Salt Lake City, and I'll see you next time.