Transcript: Anastasia Berg

My interview with the author of What Are Children For?

Statistics Canada released new data last week, showing that in 2023, the fertility rate in Canada reached a record low — just 1.26 births per woman — making us one of the “lowest low” fertility countries in the world. It’s true that material conditions, like the housing crisis, have play a role. But there is something else going on, all across the West. My guest on this week’s program has published a fascinating book about that something else: a profound ambivalence towards childbearing.

Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and an editor of The Point magazine. With Rachel Wiseman, she is also the author of What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: Thanks for coming on the show today. I loved the book. I think it's really nuanced, with a lot of original thinking. And the themes that you and Rachel explore are ones that I have grappled with personally and professionally. So, I'm excited to get to speak with you today. The topic, we should also note, has a lot of resonance here in Canada, because our birth rate has hit record lows — well below replacement — and, significantly, Canadian women are reporting that they are having fewer children than they want. So, there are a lot of threads to pull here. I want to start with the personal story of your co-author, Rachel, which she wrote about so beautifully in the first chapter. Can you just summarize some of the things that Rachel was grappling with in that chapter, and how she was thinking through these issues?

AB: The book, as you already hint at, has a personal component, namely an introduction and a conclusion that are written in my and Rachel's voices. The central chapters are analytic and are written in the third person. But the book starts with the reflections of someone who is faced with the choice [whether to have children], Rachel, and is reporting on the ambivalence that she felt. As she would put it, the difficulty, not so much of answering that question, but raising it. What does it mean to ask whether or not I want children to be part of my life? What does that entail? She talks about a period in her late 20s and early 30s where that decision felt akin to having to throw yourself off a cliff and trying to figure out what's the best way of doing that. She talks in the introduction of attending a motherhood ambivalence course titled “Motherhood: Is It for Me?” and uses that as a springboard to begin to assess certain kinds of narratives of how we might go about making this choice, and whether or not they were helpful for her in particular.

That course is premised on the conceit that in order to figure out whether or not you want to have kids, you need to somehow try to bracket all so-called externals. So, anything in your life that's not your innermost desire, you are meant to literally write down on a piece of paper, put in a jar, close the lid, put it away. And then go through the course trying to unearth that inner desire that you allegedly have. Our book really is premised on the idea that that is an impossibility. We can't just bracket off our concerns with our finances, our careers, where we are in our relationships, our age, what we feel society does and doesn't expect from us, and the ethical considerations that we see so prominent in our culture today. We can't bracket them off. But it's also true that we don't want them to be making the decision for us. So, the work of the book is to actually interrogate, or critically investigate, precisely all these narratives and arguments and scripts that we think make it hard for people to make a conscious, clear-eyed, and confident choice about the question whether or not to have children.

TH: It's interesting. I want to start with material conditions. As you would say, these conditions that we are meant to bracket. In both Canada and the U.S., housing is a major issue, and in America parental leave is non-existent. But you argue in the book that these material conditions — and indeed anti-family public policy — cannot fully explain the phenomenon that we are dealing with. That is a conclusion that I came to in my own life, that I can talk about later, when I missed the boat on having kids. Why is looking at the material conditions not enough for this conversation?

AB: Let's start off by saying material conditions are certainly a thing that people mention a lot in the context of being asked, “Why is it that you're hesitating about having kids, or what would've made that choice easier for you?” We do not want to dismiss them. However, when we look at countries where these kinds of obstacles to having children, purported obstacles, have been entirely lifted … The Nordic countries, or places like South Korea, where we have very generous parental leave. We have free universal healthcare. We have free early education. We even have, say in places like Norway, a much more hands-off approach to parenting, reportedly. So, this thought that parenting is just so hard and exhausting under modern conditions, because people are so much more anxious. When we see all of that lifted, people are still not having children. And not only are they not having children at similar rates to the places we're discussing, but we also see the same kind of ambivalence.

We see evidence of the fact that this question is becoming more fraught for people. They don't know how to approach it. They postpone so much as thinking about children until a later age. And so, these kinds of comparisons suggest that one of two things is happening. Either completely two different phenomena are taking place — where material conditions are accounting for low birth rates in places like the U.S. or in Canada. Or in the UK, for instance, that's a very common narrative as well. Or we have something deeper going on. What we do have is that when people are trying to explain their ambivalence, they are trying to give it voice, they are trying to make it intelligible to other people, they reach for various kinds of explanations that are readily available. In this case, the material one.

But if I may, I would like to add one more thing about this question of the material conditions. What we found is not simply that they are not relevant and people are maybe acting in some kind of bad faith when we talk about them. What we have discovered is that underneath the surface of the go-to, tick a box on a survey “material conditions are what is keeping them from having children,” there is something that is very real that is happening. And that is a concern with very high standards of readiness. We have people feeling that across very different aspects of their lives — in their own formation of personality, their romantic lives, and their financial situation and professional status — they have to be very, very successful, fulfilled, and ready, to so much as raise the question of children and its relevance. 

That is the kind of thing that we see across these different societies. This is the kind of thing we talk to people in the Nordic countries, and they say, “Yeah, you're right. We might not be concerned about the affordability of childcare, but we are still worried that we're not ready.” And so we place the emphasis — and this is true of all the narratives that we explore — it's not so much as some sort of gotcha argument against them. We don't want to just dismiss them; we want to take them really seriously. But we think sometimes they are ways of expressing something a little bit more complicated that is going on: These very high, and very murky, standards of readiness, that lead to a situation where a person might never know if they have actually hit them. As they wait and wait for signs that they are in fact ready to answer this question, that question might be decided for them. Whether or not they end up having no children, they have, as you were saying before, fewer than they would have liked to.

TH: I think that's so key. You and Rachel recently published an op-ed in The New York Times, arguing that the success narratives of liberal life don't leave much room for children. This really hit home for me. Walk us through the life script for educated, secular, urban, liberal women. What does it look like right now? What messages are we getting? And why are these maybe not serving us as well as they could?

AB: In addition to the idea that we should be completely financially secure and very secure in our professional standing — which is a pretty understandable narrative — something very interesting, we think, is happening in people's perception of their love lives.

There are two things that are happening. The first is something that we, following a name it has received in popular discourse, refer to as the ideal of “slow love.” So, the thought is that in order to secure a good romantic life, what we are aiming for is a stretching out of the dating timeline, where every milestone of the relationship is being postponed. We wait later to be exclusive, we wait later to meet the parents, we wait later to move in together. Before parenting, we must have a trial fostering of a pet, et cetera. And this romantic procrastination is itself already a recipe for the kind of delaying that can lead to that choice being made for us.

But there is another thing that is happening under the surface here, and it is the following: People are disentangling the romantic life from the family one. So, in a study of women who have either considered egg freezing or have undergone the process, they were asked, “Why is it that they went for egg freezing?” The researchers really expected to find that they did it in order to extend their careers and give them more freedom in terms of their professional lives. They were surprised to find that what was top in their minds is the separation of the romantic timelines from the family timeline. Many women said that dating with a view to starting a family would jeopardize the romantic project at its core, because what it is meant for is the maximization of compatibility and the securing of a kind of foolproof romantic bond — parenthetically, perhaps a complete fantasy, of course — and not the having of the family.

If you aim at family, not only are you coming across as desperate, making it harder for you to find a partner. You are, in fact, instrumentalizing the romantic relationship with a view to this other thing that somehow doesn't belong there — and you are really ruining your chances at both. What is really happening, of course, is that this kind of separation can very easily, and does, backfire, where people are finding themselves dating with a view to every single criteria. So, your political views, your ethical views, your habits, do you like to travel, your financial situation. But not with a view to this very basic question of whether or not this person wants to have children, and would it be the kind of person you would want to have children with? That question is raised within the relationship at a stage where, both in terms of one's own age — and here I'm talking from the perspective of women — and in terms of the relationship itself, it might be very difficult to pull out. Even though you might find out that this person you have spent the past year and a half with is actually not on the same page when it comes to the question of starting a family.

That is something that one of the hopes of the book is — to encourage and liberate us to have these kinds of conversations with our friends, with ourselves, but also with our partners, earlier on.

Then finally, there is also a script, that is becoming louder, that views having children as something that is ethically suspect. There is a long history of finding having children suspect from the standpoint of feminist conviction. So: How is having children supposed to be a part of the life of a woman who is intellectually and professionally ambitious? To that, we are adding today the specter of climate change, and this suspicion that it is irresponsible, with a view to the children we might have, and with a view to the planet, to have kids. It's important to say here that there aren't many people — this is according to the data and according to our own qualitative research — there aren't many people who would name, for instance, climate change as the one reason they won't have kids. There aren't many people who would name, in the U.S. context, the political polarization as the one reason that they won't have kids. These people exist, but it's not too frequent. What happens much more pervasively is that these kinds of atmospheric pressures, they alienate people from the question of children. It makes it the kind of thing they don't want to be thinking about, they don't want to be talking about. And so, they postpone engaging with until it can be, as you were saying, too late.

TH: I want to come back to feminism, which you just raised in a moment. But first, just as a sidebar, Megyn Kelly read passages of your New York Times essay, which I was referencing, to JD Vance on her show. I have been on her show in the past. And this is in the wake of Vance's comments about “childless cat ladies.” Anastasia, you were recently on a progressive podcast where the host asked you about this exchange. I loved your answer, that it was actually great to have more bipartisan conversations about these issues. Can you say more about that?

AB: Yeah, so for the record, I'll give my full answer. Which is I was ambivalent about seeing that mentioned. In so far as Megyn Kelly was attempting to represent our position, I think she got a few things wrong — and it's worth saying. In terms of the book Rachel and I wrote, and in terms of my own personal convictions, I don't think I have a mission to convince people to have children. I do not have the end goal of raising the birth rate, per se. What I would like to address is helping people navigate this question, free of certain kinds of prohibitive and confused narratives and arguments. I think that we have, especially among liberals and progressives, as I was saying, a kind of dominance of both scripts of success and ethical arguments that are misleading and they are causing people who might otherwise be leaning positively towards children to think that it is somehow either conflicting with what it means to be successful or with what it means to be politically and morally responsible. That is different than, I think, the project of others that Megyn Kelly sort of grouped us with.

But you're totally right that the reason I'm ambivalent, and not just negative, is because I think that there is potential here for a kind of speaking across the aisles, a kind of bipartisan cooperation in realizing that no matter how you think we should be organizing human society, no matter what you think a human future should look like, if you are committed to the idea that it's good that humanity have a future, you have something in common. If you have that thing in common — especially with the advent of a kind of openness to economic welfare ideas on the right in the U.S. — we really have possibility here of cooperation. To secure precisely the kind of things we mentioned earlier. To come to agreement about mandatory parental leave, to come to agreement about healthcare and of course education.

TH: Let's talk now about feminism, and about the feminist influences on this conversation. It’s something that I have looked into a lot. I want to raise something with you that I have been thinking about for a while, and this is the possibility that the feminist authors who have shaped our thinking may, in fact, be outliers. I first started thinking about this when I read Boomers by Helen Andrews, a senior editor at The American Conservative. She was writing about Gloria Steinem. I want to read you a quote: “Gloria Steinem had good personal reasons for considering the nuclear family a trap. Her father was a ne'er do well hustler, practically a conman. And her fragile mother spent long stretches of her life institutionalized, both before and after their divorce. This gave young Gloria such an abhorrence of domesticity that in her first two decades as a political organizer, she never spent longer than eight days at home before setting off on the road again. This is not how most women want to live.”

I loved Gloria Steinem growing up. Reading that was a bit of a sucker punch for me. But it's something I've been thinking about a lot. It's something I thought about with the anti-natalists you wrote about. Shulamith Firestone came from a very traumatic family situation and died a pretty awful death, alone in a New York apartment, suffering from psychosis. Sophie Lewis, who writes about abolishing the family, also has a really pessimistic view of family life. I'm quoting the quote from your book. She calls family “a blackmail passing itself off as fate, a shitty contract pretending to be a biological necessity.” These are very extreme views. And are probably, I would think, an outlier for many women. Should we be giving so much weight to these views?