Should You Have Kids?

And, is it any of my business?

Should you have kids?

I would, quite literally, never attempt to answer that question for someone else. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life assuming everyone on the left felt the same. While conservatives tell us that in the face of a declining birth rate women need to focus on having babies — after all a woman’s life truly starts at motherhood — liberals would never seek to tell a woman what she should and shouldn’t be doing with her body — birth rate be damned.

Then I listened to the most recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Diabolical Lies (which, fun fact, gets its name from the very speech I linked above, and is a nod to the absurdity of the values espoused within it). If you’re unfamiliar , I’d describe Diabolical Lies as a deeply intelligent and massively entertaining leftist podcast. I happily spend eight dollars every month to be a paid subscriber, and my progressivism has advanced as a result. So imagine my surprise when I opened the latest episode, “Who Wants Kids,” settled in for an enjoyable listen, and was met with a slew of arguments I have heard parroted on the right for decades. A few days after finishing the episode I pressed play again, certain that I must’ve misheard or misunderstood… I had not. Again I was met with a number of ideas that felt fully antithetical to the feminist and liberal ideals I believe in, and that I’ve come to trust this podcast to uphold.

The silver lining here is that Caro Burke, the show’s co-host, concludes the episode stating that her ultimate vision, as it relates to the progressive movement’s family-focused policies, is one of shared responsibility for our communities, where “everyone feels some level of duty to one another”. I share that vision. I am so deeply committed to the idea of community-based care that I uprooted my entire life and moved home to Ohio so that my daughter would always be surrounded by an intricately knit fabric of family and friends who support and care for her.

It is befuddling that I can agree so thoroughly with Caro’s conclusion while disagreeing wholeheartedly with the points she makes along the way, of which I’ll outline three. (I will pause here to note I spent a lot of time debating how in depth to be in covering her argument given that the episode is behind a pay wall; where I’ve landed is I’m going to be as thorough as needed, so as not to misrepresent her. I will also be gifting the first three people who DM me with a paid subscription to Diabolical Lies, because I continue to believe it’s great work worth paying for.)

Let’s start with the argument underpinning much of the episode: Republicans are “winning” when it comes to discussions about family, because they aren’t afraid to talk about how meaningful it is to build and nurture one. Dems, on the other hand, shy away from talking about meaning because it feels too much like propaganda.

I cannot overstate how deeply I disagree with the notion that conservatives are the ones presenting a compelling vision for the future of the family. Let’s return to Harrison Butker’s famous (and famously bad) graduation speech, where he laid out what so many Republicans believe when it comes to family:

For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment," he began. "I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you.

Butker continued, “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world."

Speaking about his wife, Butker said, “I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother."

He said that he is "beyond blessed" because Isabelle "would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: Homemaker.”

"Isabelle's dream of having a career might not have come true, but if you ask her today if she has any regrets on her decision, she would laugh out loud without hesitation, and say, 'Hey, no.'"

Is this what we call meaning? Being told by a man who will never know what it’s like to birth a child, and who has had the good fortune of following his career dreams to their literal pinnacle, that the most exciting thing we can do is get married, have children, and build a home?

“Well that’s Harrison Butker; he’s just a football player,” you might say. Let’s look to the leaders of the GOP to see if it gets any better; from JD Vance:

We're effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC - the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.

Woof.

We can skin this cat a million different ways, and every time we’ll come up with yet - another - terrible man demeaning the value and contributions of women while vaguely referencing the importance of family. I’m not denying there are those who are compelled by these remarks — of course there are, Trump won after all. What I am saying is that I reject Caro’s implicit assertion that we should be looking to the right for guidance on messaging. I’ll take Kamala’s recent (and somewhat rambling) elephant speech over Vance’s diatribe any day of the week.

And I’m not the only one. As this recent Elle article outlines, scores of tradwives, once sold on the idea of fulfilling their “natural role” and enjoying “a peaceful, happy family life” have been using TikTok and internet support groups to escape their oppressive realities. The right isn’t winning on messaging, because conservatives are lying in their messaging. Family for family’s sake isn’t meaningful; like anything else worth doing, building a family is meaningful in so far as it’s meaningful to you. Which of course means it must be chosen by you. And we all know how the right feels about choice…

Caro continues her point about how terrible our messaging is by saying we’re too negative when we speak about parenthood. Here she cites Kate Manne’s recent piece, “Don’t Have Children.” I’ll admit the starkness of this title was tough for me — I’d never tell someone not to have children, just as I would never tell someone to have children. But Manne makes a number of points that shouldn’t be dismissed as “too negative,” including this argument about health risks:

Pregnancy is far more dangerous than it ought to be: the US has the worst maternal mortality of any developed nation, with an estimated 80% of maternal deaths being preventable. The situation is particularly bad for pregnant patients who are Black and indigenous—Black women, for example, face three to four times the risk of dying during or shortly after childbirth compared to their white counterparts, regardless of their income level.

Caro’s response to this is to say that sharing these stats without the numbers to contextualize them amounts to fear mongering. As she notes, though maternal mortality rates are skyrocketing in the wake of Dobbs, the actual numbers are still quite small: for black women in Texas the rate of women dying while pregnant has gone from 31 maternal deaths per 100,000 births in 2019, to 43 in 100,000 in 2022. She concludes that it’s irresponsible to share the growth rates without the underlying numbers, and continues by saying these numbers shrink dramatically when, for instance, black women are under the supervision of black doulas and midwives.

I have to be honest — this is where she nearly completely lost me. To reprimand Manne for not contextualizing mortality rates, then give a vague reference to black doulas without contextualizing that number, feels both hypocritical and dangerous. Just so we’re clear, roughly 10% of the nation’s doulas are black (black women make up ~14% of live births), and doulas and midwives are both extremely underutilized in the US. Given all of that, it’s perfectly reasonable to look at the dangers of pregnancy and make the decision not to have kids, and perfectly reasonable to cite those dangers as a reason to think twice about the decision.

I bristle at the idea that speaking plainly about the challenges and dangers of pregnancy and parenthood makes liberals “too negative.” Democrats can and do speak positively about family — Kamala Harris refers to her stepchildren as “my endless source of love and pure joy,” Pete Buttigieg says this about adopting his kids: “I think the biggest thing that's surprised me is just how much joy there is even sometimes in the hard parts.” I found these quotes with two seconds of Googling and I guarantee I’d find more of the same from almost all of our party’s leaders with little effort. The difference between the right and the left is we aren’t afraid to mention it all — and that’s a good thing. To present the good without the bad wouldn’t be “positive”, it’d be propaganda, and I’m not interested in that.

This brings me to Caro’s second argument: it is anti-progressive to be neutral on the subject of humanity’s continued existence. Here she cites Nathan Robinson’s recent Current Affairs piece, ‘We Should be Neither ‘Anti-Natalist’ Nor ‘Pro-Natalist’, a piece I’ve read and mostly agree with. It’s Caro’s contention that, as progressives, we can’t purport to care about progress but be neutral on whether or not humans continue to exist… she argues that this is a logical fallacy. In an attempt to approach her point in good faith, I’ll offer an analogy. If I’m understanding her correctly, she’s saying this would be akin to me, as a mother, being neutral on my daughter’s adult-life outcomes. If I’m neutral on the subject of who she becomes as an adult (be it a doctor or a stripper or an addict), I have no real incentive to be a good parent to her as a child. In the same vein, if I don’t care about humanity’s continued existence, I have no real incentive to advocate for its continued betterment today. And isn’t that, after all, what all of this progressive politicking is about?

While I can accept her point in a vague “we should all care about the future” sort of way, I do not think it’s illogical to say I do care about building a better and more just society, and I’m not particularly concerned about how long that society continues to exist. This is for several reasons. For one, as Robinson writes, “there is simply no likelihood that insufficient reproduction is going to doom our species anytime soon. The global population is still expanding at the moment, and as long as there are subpopulations that reproduce above “replacement rate,” humanity will be here indefinitely.” But beyond that, I cannot know for sure that our continued existence is a good thing. No to go all philosophy-major on you, but are we certain that we’re even meant to be around forever? That there isn’t anything better than humanity?

Putting my existential thesis to the side, Robinson ends his article with a stirring defense of the left’s position on natalism:

We do not believe it is our place to tell you the kind of life you ought to be living, to take a normative stance on whether there ought to be more parents. We do not claim that parenthood is good—if by this we mean it is preferable to childlessness. We are for personal autonomy, true freedom of choice (not the mirage of freedom touted by the right). We are neither “pro” natalist nor “anti” natalist. What we say is that you ought to be able to have kids if you want kids and to not have kids if you don’t want kids, which is why we support both paid family leave and free abortion on demand. That strikes me as the unambiguously correct leftist position.

I agree.

And yet Caro reduces Robinson’s viewpoint as “not giving a fuck” about what happens to the world…

Make it make sense

This brings me to Caro’s third point, which I found most vexxing of all: Democrats and their policies have failed us, full stop. As she and co-host Katie Gatti Tassin exclaim in unison: “They don’t do anything!”

Caro continues: “What democrats do is gesture vaguely at the need for policy reform and occasionally do wonderful but completely unoriginal things like giving poor people a very small amount of money to live on, then they see the results about how that would improve everyone’s lives and then they go - that’s enough, we’re not going to go farther than that.”

I feel compelled to pause here and say: are you serious?

The fact that she can, unironically, begin a sentence with “Democrats don’t do anything” and end it with “they give poor people money” is completely mind boggling to me. Is the “not doing anything” in the room with us?

Don’t get me wrong — of course I’m frustrated by our current state of affairs. Healthcare should be free, parental leave should be guaranteed, women shouldn’t be dying in childbirth. But when I check the till on who’s actually working to make any of these things a reality, exactly one party comes into focus.

Herein lies my deepest frustration, and what often keeps me from donning the “leftist” moniker Caro and Katie wear with pride. As someone who considers herself to be a progressive at heart, but a pragmatist in practice, I understand that a vision without a plan is just an empty dream. To tout the ideals of progressivism — like the community-centric future Caro advocates for at the end of this episode — while actively shitting on the policies, and politicians, that provide a bridge to that ideal state — is worse than counterproductive. It is, in my opinion, a primary reason we’ve got Trump in the White House and not Kamala. While we can’t know for sure what caused the 2024 dip in voter turnout, my money’s on the constant barrage from leftists about Kamala’s centrist politics. What makes this even more maddening is Caro’s acknowledgement later in the episode that we’re at “the 10-yard line” in terms of progress. Yes things are bad, she says, but they’re better than they’ve ever been.

And so I’m confused. Are Democrats utterly useless in advancing progressive causes, or quite literally the only ones making any moves in the right direction? If it’s the latter, and I think it is, are we better served by abandoning the messaging that’s gotten us this far and coopting the language of the right, or continuing to refine our approach in promoting progressive, community-focused ideals?

We can be many things and hold many different opinions as we fight the good fight against Trump and his fascist policies, but what we cannot and should not do is discount all of the work that has brought us this far. To do so is to take several steps backwards, cede all of the ground we’ve fought so hard for, and end up in a place where we’re aligning ourselves with the worst possible people.

To that I say: no fucking way.

But but but: why does all of this — and by ‘this’ I mean everything I’ve written so far — matter if, in the end, Caro and I end up in the same place? It’s the question I asked myself several times before starting this newsletter, and my answer is this: I think it matters that we took different journeys to get here, and I think her journey is the less stable, more dangerous one. I’m not sure how many people would read a pro-natalist, anti-Democrat, good-vibes-only manifesto and come out the other end with a progressive agenda.

Given their massive subscriber list, let’s hope the answer is: a lot.

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P.S. I’m still on the edge of my seat waiting for the next episode.