Bringing up Baby

A reply to Moira Donegan

Alright, this time I’ll bite (smear me once, shame on you; smear me twice…). In her recent Guardian column “What is America’s pro-natalism movement really about?”, Moira Donegan, having dutifully lambasted right-wing pronatalists—for the eugenics, for their uninventive and ineffectual proposals, for cruelly burdening their children with silly names—sets her sights on mealy-mouthed col-LIB-erators (reckon it’ll catch on?) who have “chosen to join in the pro-natalist chorus,” “call for the left to join in the pro-breeding cause” and argue that “American women want babies (as, it is assumed, they should) but cannot afford them.” Alongside myself and my co-author, Rachel Wiseman,¹ Donegan points to pieces of writing by Liz Bruenig in The Atlantic, Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the New Yorker and Rachel Cohen in Vox. “In their rush to affirm that American women should be tricked or coerced into having more babies—or encouraged in doing so with an expanded welfare state—these thinkers,” Donegan argues,

are abandoning the crucial point: that women should be able, free and encouraged to live lives that do not conform to regressive notions of women’s proper roles as wives and mothers, that they should be free to invent themselves on their own terms—including as permanently childless adults. This is not, as the pro-natalists would have it, an abandonment of their biological duty—and it is not, as their liberal sympathizers would say, an example of cultural decadence.

Why is it that the smears are less humiliating than having to explicitly rebut them? Still, here we go. In our book, Rachel Wiseman and I do not join in any pronatalist choruses (instead, we write: “Bringing a child into the world, to state the obvious, is not the only way to take a stance on the worthiness of human life”) and call upon no one to “join in the pro-breeding cause” (“It is because the decision to have children entails just such a commitment—as personally consequential as it is philosophically profound—that only you can determine whether it is the right one for you.”) Our interest in birth rates is peripheral at best. We never argue that women have a biological duty to reproduce (if for no other reason than that “a biological duty” is a piece of nonsense) and “cultural decadence” is, by this point, an unforgivable cliché that is no longer of any use to an even moderately serious thinker. We do not believe women should be “tricked,” “coerced” or “encouraged” by means of an expanded welfare state into having more babies. (In fact we point out that we have good reason to doubt, based on policy results in other countries, whether such expansion would make much of a difference to family planning.) Likewise we obviously agree that “women should be able, free and encouraged to live lives that do not conform to regressive notions of women’s proper roles as wives and mothers.” We express this sentiment not only in explicit statements but over the course of an entire chapter of the book that explores what such commitments might mean in practice, for feminist thinkers, when it comes to the question of children.

Our positions are not hidden or difficult to interpret; they are all right there in the book that Donegan claims to have read, in many cases spelled out with painstaking care. The same is true, with only minor variations, for Bruenig, Lewis-Kraus and Cohen, all of whom would if compelled (tricked? coerced?) likewise affirm most if not all of this banal pablum in its entirety. Although all of us are in one way or another keen to make room for a more capacious conversation about the role of children in liberal and progressive discourse, we are also all well aware of and are forthcoming about the ways in which bearing and raising children has been and, despite much progress, to a significant degree remains a means of perpetuating the restriction of women’s horizons. All are likewise committed to the social and political norms that underlie gender equality, in principle and in practice: if we were not, we would not spend so much time developing nuanced cases about these issues in ostensibly progressive publications, as opposed to the conservative ones that would surely welcome us.

So why lie about it? If none of us is actually guilty of what Donegan says we are, what is the function, for Donegan, of alleging otherwise? Can’t what this group of writers has written and argued be responded to? Perhaps just ignored? What is it that we actually do that Donegan finds so perturbing as to justify misrepresenting our arguments so crudely? Or, perhaps another way of putting it: What about our arguments makes them so hard for her to address directly?

There are different methodologies one can employ in search of an answer: sociological, psychological. I’ll leave these here as a fun exercise for the reader. I will instead examine her choices qua political strategy. For it’s as a political move that Donegan’s way of arguing seems most often to recommend itself. If it can be demonstrated that everyone who breaks with progressive orthodoxy on a given issue is in fact a J.D. Vance conservative in sheep’s clothing, the argument goes, then this will redound to the advantage of those with a stake in defending the orthodox positions. (Notice that this strategy, which almost always favors tactics like the imputation of bad faith and some flavor of guilt by association, is an alternative to what one might think would be the most straightforward response to a challenging argument: to argue back, assuming one’s adversary means exactly what they say.)

It’s important to recognize, in the first place, that Donegan is not only committed to misrepresenting our arguments, she’s also determined to misrepresent the basic facts on which they are based. “The founders of a pro-birth organization, the Collinses,’” she writes in the Guardian column, “assert that there is a crisis of declining birth rates in America. (In reality, the slight dip in America’s birth rate in recent years is almost entirely due to the decline of teen pregnancies.)” The point of this “but actually” parenthetical is to assert that the birth rates obsession is much ado about nothing. But Donegan’s claim is unfounded: as the source she links to makes patently clear, the dip is not slight, and it is certainly not the result of a mere shift in the timing of births.²

But Donegan’s implication that the subject does not warrant serious discussion is wrongheaded in another way. Regardless of its causes, a below-replacement birth rate—any below-replacement birth rate—means depopulation at an exponential rate. This is, to be clear, a literal, technical assessment, not rhetorical hyperbole. Here’s a simple visual of what happens to global population when it falls below replacement (borrowed from this New York Times report):

Most people today live in countries with sub-replacement fertility, which is about 2.1 (Europe’s birth rate is 1.5; East Asia’s 1.2; Latin America’s 1.9), and demographic inertia suggests that it won’t be long before we all do. Whatever you think about depopulation—personally, I think this is a very hard question, and have not settled my mind on it—below-replacement birth rates are a big deal. Everyone should be allowed, at the very least, to have access to this information, to wonder about its meaning and implications, to ask whether this is something that they should worry about. If it is, they should be allowed to ask whether there is something, consistent with their values—including values like economic and gender equality, ecological concern, or individual autonomy—that they could or should do about it.

Yet for Donegan the only legitimate “progressive” response to this fact is to turn away from it. And it is with the purpose of encouraging everyone else to turn away from it too that she has made a point of attacking and slandering those who believe—as Bruenig and Lewis-Kraus do, for example—that it is a legitimate subject for discussion.

Five years ago in our letter on denialism, Jon Baskin and I summarized this rhetorical move as follows: “What you’re talking about doesn’t exist—and, even if it does, it’s so insignificant that your desire to focus on it merely betrays your hidden agenda or bias.” The idea being that if the phenomenon under discussion doesn’t exist, then you have to be either stupid, malicious or pathological to keep talking about it. At the time, our main objection to this move was on moral and intellectual grounds; we believed it corroded our public conversation to constantly be telling others that the problems they cared about and in some cases had experienced directly were illusory. But we also noted what we saw as its likely political trajectory. “An excessive focus on the bad faith of others,” we wrote, “far from rooting out adversarial ideas or movements, can imperil one’s own capacity to engender loyalty or trust.”

Subsequent political history has made it clear we were understating the case. When people see phenomena unfolding in plain view being denied—whether it’s progressive activism and policy on college campuses, issues around crime or immigration, or, as Lewis-Kraus details in his article about South Korea, the prospect of preschools being repurposed as nursing homes—their reaction is not to turn away from the phenomena. Rather, it is to turn away from the deniers and toward those whose starting point is acknowledgment, regardless of their motivations or political ends. What this might look like in the case of denialism about birth rates is not hard to imagine. “If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas—of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control,” writes the economist Dean Spears. “Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction.”

But there’s another kind of denialism that Donegan practices in her writing on this subject, one which is perhaps harder to see, but no less damaging. In writing our book, Rachel and I were animated by something less overtly dramatic than international fertility despotism. We were provoked by the personal difficulty many of our contemporaries reported in navigating a decision of the utmost importance to the course of their lives. We hoped, having undergone some of the same difficulties ourselves, that we could help these readers think through how their values—their ambitions, aspirations and ethical frameworks—might inform this decision. We addressed ourselves to someone who, as Rachel writes of herself in the introductory essay that opens our book, is struggling. Struggling to imagine their existence with children, struggling to see how it might change them and their lives and whether they could welcome these changes, struggling to think through whether having them would be a betrayal of success, of romance, of feminism, of the planet; struggling to so much as raise the question.

Here’s what Donegan has to say to such women:

It may be true that Berg and Wiseman know many such rudderless adults, people unable to determine what they value and desire. Perhaps their social world contains such women. Mine does not. The childless women I know are determined and principled; they know how to live with integrity in the face of social disapproval. If I were to encounter such listless people as Berg and Wiseman imagine, I’m not sure that I would trust them with a child.

From readers and critics of our book, we’ve received much praise, including from some renowned feminists, and a healthy amount of productive critical engagement, especially from the right. (Contra Donegan’s claim that our book is “designed to convince you to have a baby,” many of them chide us for leaving the question far too open.) Only one writer has accused us—for so much as posing the question “What Are Children For?”—of meeting childless women with “pity,” or of implying that “millennial mothers are too whiny about the difficulties of parenthood.” Only one said we had argued that “motherhood is superior and childless lives are comparatively impoverished.” None of this is true. We didn’t write these things, because we don’t think them. Pity, accusations of whininess, grading life choices on a curve—these aren’t our habits of thinking, they’re Donegan’s.

Personally, I fit into Donegan’s “social world,” at least as she describes it. I am determined and principled (or pigheaded, depending on whom you ask); I’ll risk an unpopular opinion. But I have room in my world, and love in my heart, for women—and men—who are less perfect than myself and Donegan. And many of the people who wrote to us with gratitude for our work—those who decided to try to have children, those who embraced childlessness and those who were yet unsure—saw themselves not in me—opinionated and spoiling for a fight—but in Rachel: “I was indecisive;” she writes. “I was tentative and overaccommodating, slow to come around to my own convictions.”

As I reread Donegan’s review and her claim that people who are uncertain about whether or not children are the right choice for them either do not exist or are ipso facto disqualified from having them, I thought about feminism. While Donegan accuses the liberals for “seeing little downside in antagonizing an American feminist movement,” the only party to this debate that seeks to restrict the horizons of possibility for women is Donegan herself. It is Donegan who vilifies women who are uncertain about what shape their life should take; it is Donegan who systematically rejects the idea that bearing and raising children could be a legitimate undertaking for a feminist; and it is Donegan who dares castigate and shame human beings for their reproductive choices (I have too much dignity to waste time digging up historical examples of the uses of “breeding” with reference to human beings or spelling out for an intelligent reader to what effect was this terminology used. You get the point.) And, well, I suppose this is all I’d like to share, today, about what I think about the causes for, as Donegan puts it, “the American feminist movement enduring near-fatal blows in politics and popularity over the past decade.”

1. In principle this is a bit of a conjecture. Among the “outlets” Donegan claims the liberals have used she links to The Point and the University of Chicago. The former links to The Point’s symposium, “What Are Children For?,” for which Rachel and I wrote the editorial (and which was the seed for our book) and the latter links to Donegan’s review of Peter Hujar in Bookforum, which is not related to pronatalism or the University of Chicago in any way. One assumes she meant to link to her colorful review of our book in the same publication. (At the same time, one wonders, does anyone work at the Guardian anymore?)

2. The statement links to a March 2025 Substack post by demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba. But Sciubba decisively does not think the 22 percent dip in America’s birth rate from 1990 to 2023 is “slight”: “There were over half a million (562,195 to be exact) fewer births in 2023 than in 1990. That’s a number just shy of the population of the US state of Wyoming.” She also does not say anything to the effect that the decline is “almost entirely due to the decline in teen pregnancies.” To see what she does say will take a little bit of work but bear with me. The idea that the decline in the birth rate is almost entirely due to a decline in teen pregnancies is the idea that overall people are not having fewer babies, only teenagers are—in other words, it’s the claim that the decline in overall birth rates represents a shift in the timing of births, so that all that’s happening is that people are having kids later and in particular that they are no longer having them as teenagers. Now, it is true that there were fewer births among Americans under twenty in 2023 than in 1990 (390,740 fewer, or a 73 percent drop). It is also true that birth rates declined among all women under thirty (down 44 percent for 20- to 24-year-olds and 23 percent for 25- to 29-year-olds) and that they are increasing among those over thirty. But the impression of a mere temporal shift in birthing age is misleading. If what we were dealing with is a mere shift in the timing of births, we would see the decrease in teenage births offset by an increase in births among other age groups. We don’t. Indeed, the national decline in the birth rate indicates precisely that we are witnessing, in addition to women having children later, an overall reduction in the total number of children they are having. American women are, in aggregate, having way fewer children than they did a generation ago. How many fewer? In 2023, almost as many people as live in Wyoming.