The New York Times decided Mother’s Day weekend was the perfect time to showcase women who openly reject motherhood. Can there be a clearer example of the hatred our country’s ruling class maintains against the preciousness of femininity, of which the epitome is motherhood?
A photographer in Berlin is capturing the lives of women who chose not to have children in a portrait series called “We are Childfree.” https://t.co/wCyBAdyxSj
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 9, 2021
It is an existential crisis for a nation if its women do not want to have children, or if they do not want to raise any children they do have. A dozen women photographed for a glossy spread may be a tiny and completely unrepresentative niche, but the attitudes they exemplify and amplify permeate and damage our neighborhoods and homes.
For proof of this, one need only consult life experience. The sexual revolution’s anti-child, anti-family posture dominates American culture now. That very revolution’s rejection of family and children is not incidentally a fundamental goal of Marxism.
Professional feminist Jill Filipovic, whose attacks on femininity have earned her platforms with The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, and CNN, provided another example of child-hatred on Mother’s Day weekend 2021:
I would really love to read more essays and op/eds from women (and men, too) who regret having children as early as they did, regret having as many as they did, or regret having children at all. There's not much about motherhood that remains publicly unexplored, but that does.
— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) May 8, 2021
This is a call by a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times to publicize people psychologically damaging their own children. It’s therefore wrong and disgusting. Predictably, Filipovic could not understand why. So let me explain.
When faced with the reality that one has brought a child into existence, the proper response is the traditional one that sane and healthy societies encourage: Committing to ensuring that child’s well-being, no matter the cost.
Validating a human being’s existence is intrinsic to loving that person. Love is an affirmation of the goodness of another’s existence. It is an eternal “yes” to the glory and beauty of another person’s being. Love means saying to someone, “It is good you are here.”
Parents owe their children this affirmation of existence, just as children owe their parents respect and gratitude for being given it. So what Filipovic is truly calling for is for media outlets to amplify hatred: Parents’ rejection of their own children’s existence. She wants to see a kind of living abortion. Abortion is indeed the overarching motif of this worldview, both literally and figuratively.
So it is no coincidence that a “child-free lifestyle” cannot develop many adherents without widespread access to and acceptance of surgical abortion, chemical abortion, and the abortifacient effects of chemical contraception. Purposeful infertility is so contrary to nature that it requires violence to maintain. Sometimes that violence may be hidden, as in the two-week-old embryos the Pill may kill without their mothers ever knowing, but because violence is inherent to this mode of being, it constantly flares up within feminist rhetoric.
Even if it is hidden, unknown, or suppressed, this kind of brutality acts to sever mothers and fathers from children in every way possible. What is abortion if not the most brutal form of child abandonment? There are many others in which children’s suffering is more hidden. In every manifestation, however, feminism’s cultivated brutality hacks apart the bonds between mother, father, and child that are crucial to societal happiness.
I would love to see a reprise of the New York Times photography series when these women are on their deathbeds and there is no one to come visit or hold their hands or check that the doctors are caring for them properly. That already happens to millions of elderly every year as families shrink, people refuse to have children, and government increasingly displaces family, as Politico reported a few years ago:
More women work–making it harder for them to take on traditional roles as full-time caregivers. And millions of old, frail Americans—divorced, widowed, or never married—now live alone without family nearby, or without family at all. The most isolated are sometimes called ‘the unbefriended.’… They end up getting care they don’t want, in a place they don’t want to be in—and it costs more.
I double-dog dare the NYT to publish glossy spreads of a smiling grandmother clasping her daughter or son’s hand as they bring her breakfast like they do every day, and quote the grandmother saying how blessed she is to have those children, and what a meaningful life motherhood has brought her. But it’s pretty unlikely. The New York Times is nothing if not committed to helping the ruling class divide people to keep them dependent.
The prevailing anti-family attitudes instilled and enforced by cultural institutions at all levels show how pointless and counterproductive are current proposals from both Democrats and Republicans to pay people to produce children, or to warehouse them with strangers at younger ages even though research finds extensive nonparent care makes children more violent, stupid, and depressed.
Yes, our nation did just hit its lowest birth rate ever and yes, that presents an existential crisis for our bankrupt Ponzi scheme welfare state. Yes, the sexual revolution’s nuclear hit on the nuclear family has caused skyrocketing anxiety, depression, identity crises, social disorders, ADHD, narcissism, psychopathy, and other neuroses.
To a politician with his hands in everyone else’s pockets, every problem appears solvable by shoveling more pallets of cash onto the national debt pyre. But today’s childbearing-age Americans have more government money and programs available to them than every other generation in American history, and still the lowest birth rates and the highest rates of family-related psychosis. Money isn’t the core problem.
The real barriers to more healthy American families are an unwillingness to sacrifice money and careers on behalf of kids’ best interests on the part of higher-income Americans, and an unwillingness to reserve child creation for the stability of marriage among lower-income Americans. On both sides of the income spectrum, it’s selfish choices that are harming the nation’s future. And money can’t solve selfishness.
What our nation needs is not to spend more money we don’t have to subsidize the dysfunctional parenting tendencies of either our upper or our lower class. What it needs is for us to acknowledge that being a good mother or father is extremely difficult, extremely rewarding, and a major life accomplishment deserving of high honor. Raising a strong family needs to be re-promoted as the entire point of a career and an economy, the sine qua non of every society.
Doing a great job at this requires giving up things you like, such as money, sleeping at night, uninterrupted TV watching, and going to the office every day for 45 years in a row. This teaches the priceless truth that many, many things are more important than status and money. This truth will transform your life for the better and give you the best chance possible for finding happiness in this world — if you let it.
If you don’t want to raise your own child, don’t have one. Go ahead and be that low of a person. It’s your life; you are free to destroy it. But you are not free to destroy another’s, especially one you’ve brought into this world. Once your child exists, your duty is to do the absolute best you can for that child, regardless of how much it costs you.
Children are not a lifestyle accessory who exist for their parents’ pleasure like a purse dog. They are not units of future economic production for someone’s GDP projections. They are human beings with souls whose existence incurs reciprocal obligations between generations. Attempting to mass-monetize these transcendent mutual obligations through the federal government is a fool’s errand likely to create more problems than it solves.