What You Need to Make a Baby

There’s a book that’s been making the rounds lately. It’s called What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice and is co-written by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. I’ve encountered no fewer than five reviews or articles on it over the last three days. For many, at least in Western, wealthy, post-Christian countries, having children is by no means an obvious life path. Birth rates are plummeting to far below the replacement rate needed to sustain populations. Many young adults are simply deciding not to have kids. It’s thought to be either too expensive (hard to argue), immoral (climate change anxieties loom large here, as do reservations about how having children reinforces outdated gender norms, “reducing” women to mothers), or simply undesirable (kids can be a real drag).

I have many thoughts on this, many of which I won’t get into now. Suffice to say that I have significant criticisms of the last two of those categories (immoral and undesirable). And given that it’s usually progressives that have far fewer kids than conservatives, it may be at least worth spinning that narrative ahead a half century or so and considering what this might mean demographically, ideologically, and politically. It’s probably too simplistic to wonder if more progressive views might be “bred out” of the culture, but this possibility might give left-leaning people more pause than it seems to.

But the much bigger issue at play here is gestured toward in an article by Christine Emba in The Atlantic today. The real reason people aren’t having kids, Emba says, isn’t because there aren’t enough financial incentives or political policies in place, helpful as these may be. As Rachel Cohen notes in yet another article on all this, economic incentives alone simply don’t seem to be enough:

Germany increased investments in child care. Russia began offering lump-sum payments of about $7,000 to families with more than two kids. Hungary started offering newlyweds loans of $30,000, which Orbán said would be forgiven if the couple had three children. None of these interventions have been enough to fully reverse the population decline.

Why not? Well, according to Emba, the bigger issue is the need for meaning:

[I]n listening closely to people’s stories, I’ve detected a broader thread of uncertainty—about the value of life and a reason for being. Many in the current generation of young adults don’t seem totally convinced of their own purpose or the purpose of humanity at large, let alone that of a child. It may be that for many people, absent a clear sense of meaning, the perceived challenges of having children outweigh any subsidy the government might offer.

I think Emba is bang on here. I don’t think it is a coincidence that young adults in Western cultures are the least religious of any generation in history (most stats have them somewhere between 38-50% identifying no religious affiliation) and that they also are increasingly unlikely to see having children as desirable. If you don’t believe that life has any meaning beyond what you can create for yourself, why would you bring new life into this regrettable state of affairs? Particularly if you are minute-by-minute feeding at the trough of the anxiety- and fear-generating machine that is social media, which so many young people do?

It seems to me that there are at least three things that you need to have in your worldview cupboard in order to make (or raise) a baby or to even consider that these things might be noble and worthy pursuits. I’ll get to those, but first a few obligatory caveats:

• The title of this blog post is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I’m obviously aware that all you technically need to “make” a baby is a a few willing participants (or the right lab conditions).
• I’m also aware that some people have babies completely unreflectively. Sometimes this works ok, often it doesn’t. But I am of course aware that not every parenting journey is preceded by an exhaustive worldview analysis.
• Some people simply are not disposed to be parents. This has always and will ever be so. None of the preceding or what follows is meant to suggest that childlessness is some kind of inherently inferior state.
• Finally, I am painfully (and personally) aware that some people would desperately love to make a baby and have all the right “worldview architecture” in place, but are unable to do so. I am not in any way suggesting that if you have the things below then you will have what is necessary to make a baby. If only.

Ok, on to that worldview cupboard. First, you need to believe that there is a world beyond the individual self, a world that preceded you and will outlive you, a world to which you have obligations. If the sum total of your considerations is yourself—your next holiday, your career, your (unrestrained) sex life, the image you curate online, your emotional state, etc.—then you will be very unlikely to be willing to bring another life into this world. Other lives make demands upon the self, after all. And if our only remaining god is ourselves, who would ever bother?

Second (and related to the first), you need to be at least open to the possibility that suffering and sacrifice have value and are worth the effort. For make no mistake, parenting will require sacrifice and suffering. Sometimes extraordinarily so. Financial sacrifice. Emotional sacrifice. The sacrifice of time. You will have to open yourself up to pain and to being rejected. Sometimes there is incredible joy in the midst of and at the end of all the suffering and sacrifice. Sometimes, sadly, there is not (at least not right way). To have children, someone once said, is to decide to have your heart walking around outside your body for the rest of your life. This is manifestly true.

And finally, I think you need to have at least some conception of divine providence. I don’t mean to suggest that everyone who is a parent explicitly has this conception. But implicitly, I think you need to believe that human life has objective value, that it is good, that there is an author and sustainer of life. And, from a Christian perspective, that there is a God who can redeem and reclaim even some of the harder parts of the journey of bringing forth life and seeking to steward it well in a broken world full of pain and uncertainty. New life is good not because of the pragmatic payoff value but because it was created to be so by a Creator with good purposes and ends in mind for human beings and for the world.

There is probably more to the story than these three things. But I’m convinced that there isn’t less. If you aren’t at least favourably inclined in these three directions, you will be very unlikely to consider bringing a child into the world. Governments can (and will) busy themselves with tweaking the knobs and levers, trying to coax recalcitrant young adults into having enough babies to keep the machine going. But they will ultimately fail. Because having babies is an existential issue before it is an economic one. If life doesn’t mean anything, why keep it going?