When one of my sons was four years old, he made a decision. He told me, “I’m never going to work as much as Daddy! He works too hard.”
My son did eventually become a lawyer like his father, but he avoided big firm law, choosing a job with lower pay but much better hours as well as the opportunity to serve the public. He’s quite willing to work hard, but he doesn’t want to be available to the office and to clients 24/7/365.
I thought of him when I read that the US birth rate has dropped to its lowest level in 30 years and may be heading down farther.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The pressure on mothers to parent “naturally” was supposed to force them back into the home; instead they’re rejecting mothering.[/pullquote]
I wonder if we have made motherhood look too hard.
According to NPR:
The birthrate fell for nearly every group of women of reproductive age in the U.S. in 2017, reflecting a sharp drop that saw the fewest newborns since 1987, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There were 3,853,472 births in the U.S. in 2017 — “down 2 percent from 2016 and the lowest number in 30 years,” the CDC said.
That reflects a drop in nearly every age group:
Broken out by age, the 2017 birthrate fell for teenagers by 7 percent, to 18.8 births per 1,000, a record low. That figure is for women from 15 to 19 years old. For that same group, the birthrate has fallen by 55 percent since 2007 and by 70 percent since the most recent peak in 1991, the CDC said.
Women in their 40s were the only group to see a higher birthrate last year. Between the ages of 40 and 44, there were 11.6 births per 1,000 women, up 2 percent from 2016, according to the CDC’s provisional data.
Birthrates fell by 4 percent both for women from 20 to 24 years old and for women of ages 25 to 29.
For women in their 30s — a group that had recently seen years of rising birthrates — the rate fell slightly in 2017. The drop included a 2 percent fall among women in their early 30s, a group that still maintained the highest birthrate of any age group, at 100.3 births per 1,000 women.
Why is this happening?
Some claim it reflects long term demographic shifts common to all industrialized countries.
Others claim that it is the fault of the patriarchy: the lack of maternity leave forces women to choose between being good mothers or good workers, sure that they can’t be both.
Still others insist that it represents a rebuke to the patriarchy. Women no longer buckle under the societal pressure to have children and are childless by choice.
I fear we may have “broken” motherhood.
I’ve written repeatedly about my belief that the political and legal emancipation of (some) women in the 20th Century was a watershed moment in history. For the first time women were able to assert the exact same rights as men. They went from being property to property owners. They went from being economic chattel to economic engines. They were finally able to express themselves in the political, technological and artistic realms.
And that made some people very, very unhappy.
No major social change occurs without backlash and we are currently living through the backlash. On the Right there has been a rise of religious fundamentalism that insists that God wants women to be subjected to men, immured in the home and occupied only in the raising of children, often many, many children. On the Left there has been a rise of secular “religion,” the worship of Nature. Women (though not men) are pressured to raise their children the way Nature intended. And Nature supposedly intended them to give birth with excruciating pain (epidurals are “bad”); breastfeed each child exclusively for years (formula is “bad”); and literally “wear” babies on their bodies (a mother who considers her own needs is very “bad”).
Being a mother was always hard, but now the pressure on new mothers is extraordinary. How extraordinary? Consider a tweet posted several days ago by Carole Dobrich.
Dobrich is a lactation professional:
Carole is the Senior Lactation Consultant and co-director at the Herzl Family Practice Centre – Goldfarb Breastfeeding Clinic where she works with a team of IBCLCs and family physicians trained in lactation… Carole is the past president of the association québécoise des consultantes en lactation diplômées de l’IBLCE (2004 – 2008) and is the current president of INFACT Quebec and is actively involved in breastfeeding advocacy work in Quebec, Canada and internationally.
She chose to share a slide from a recent conference:
The slide claims:
Children will never achieve their full genetic potential by starting post partum life with ingesting a pediatric fast-food prepared from the milk of an alien species.
That’s just gratuitous cruelty masquerading as breastfeeding promotion. It’s using guilt to force women back into a very constricted and constricting definition of motherhood.
As psychologist Susan Franzblau has written:
The idea that women are evolutionarily prepared to mother … is consistent with a long historical tradition of using essentialist discourse to predetermine and control women’s reproductive tasks and children’s rearing needs. Evolutionary and biological theories have been embedded in a history of misogynist discourse… Women’s “natural” function … is to reproduce and provide continual care for infants and young children. If the treatment of women differs from the treatment of men, such treatment could be justified in terms of its biological and evolutionary purposes…
It is not a coincidence that natural mothering neatly dovetails with religious fundamentalism:
Organizations such as the Christian Family Movement (established by the Catholic laity …) became the founders of the La Leche League in 1956… According to one natural childbirth advocate of the time, “childbirth is fundamentally a spiritual as well as a physical achievement …” Breastfeeding was heralded as an extension of this spiritual connection. Out of concern that recently instituted bottle-feeding and drug-assisted births would break family bonds, these religious advocates of breastfeeding prescribed a regimen that included suckling on demand day and night with no pacifier substitute … Any work that competed with the infant’s need for continuity of maternal care was out of the question. One La La Leche League International group leader said that she was “pretty negative to people who just want to dump their kids of and go to work eight hours a day.”
The pressure on mothers to parent “naturally” was supposed to force them back into the home; and for many women the artificially imposed guilt about “what children need” left women competing with each other about who suffered more for her children instead competing with men for economic equality in the workplace.
But now a new generation of women face this false choice and they are choosing differently. Having seen how their mothers and older sisters suffered to meet the ever more elaborate “requirements” for contemporary mothers they are choosing to forgo childbearing altogether. They don’t want to work as long and as hard on mothering as parenting experts prescribe. They don’t want to endure the guilt of failing to meet the arbitrary standards of good mothering. They like children but they don’t want the apparently crushing responsibility that comes with bearing them. Mothering is broken and as a result, they want no part of it.
Who broke mothering?
Advocates of natural childbirth, exclusive and extended breastfeeding, and attachment parenting broke it. Our country is going to pay a terrible price as a result. If the birth rate remains below replacement level our society will age dramatically, our social welfare programs like Social Security will fall apart and there will be no one to take care of us when we grow old.
But, hey, even though there will be far fewer children, at least they’ll be breastfed, right?
