The Unbearable Lightness Of Choosing Children

Dispatch Faith, The Unbearable Lightness of Choosing Children, by Michael Reneau (The Dispatch) & Hannah Anderson (Author, Life Under the Sun: The Unexpectedly Good News of Ecclesiastes (2023)):

Pronatalist arguments—that in order to be a well functioning society we need to be having more babies—are nothing new. But the resurfacing of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance’s 2021 “childless cat lady” remarks has added a new, overtly partisan dynamic to the conversation.

Few religious Americans would argue that having more children won’t have positive effects for society as a whole, but today Hannah Anderson argues that our reasons for having children matter: Do we think having children is good because they help us right what we might regard as a wayward societal ship? Or is having children good because … it’s good to have children?

Anderson’s argument is a bit more substantive than that, and the words “grace and hope” factor prominently. On that point: Before my wife and I said “I do,” folks told us being married would reveal to us our own selfishness in spades. That was true, but in that regard, being a parent has eclipsed marriage (which before we had kids felt more like an 24/7 honeymoon with jobs thrown in). My own mistakes in parenting my four kids have underscored my often errant understanding of God. At times I am unloving or unkind to my children because in my folly I take him to be unloving or unkind. Other times I am too removed or uninvolved because I fail to see how much he cares for his people.

That’s why I appreciate what Anderson writes about bringing tiny people into this world and caring for them as best you can: It must be shot through with grace and hope, not agendas and culture-warring.

Hannah Anderson, The Unbearable Lightness of Choosing Children:

Looming behind the politicization [of reproduction and family formation] is a larger question about the role children play in our collective future—especially as birthrates continue to fall. In their recent book, What are Children for? On Ambivalence and Choice, co-authors Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman argue that children are no longer “self-evident” in the modern West. Instead, having children is now a choice that individuals must make. Additionally, the modern need to construct and project identity affects how we choose whether to have children. They, like us, must justify their right to exist. They must “make sense.” They must be “valuable.” At the very least, they must prove themselves worthier than other endeavors we might undertake with our lives.

Such utilitarian rhetoric is unsettling, but it is particularly insidious when it emerges from religious conservatives under the guise of “family values.” While the left weighs the choice to have children against questions of the fair distribution of resources, climate change, and even competing visions of feminism, some on the right advocate for children as a means of preserving a religious or conservative influence on society. ... Simply put, children are good for the cause. But such arguments invariably reduce real persons with real souls to political abstractions. ...

If our ambivalence toward children is actually rooted in a misunderstanding of our own origins and existence—of understanding life through the lens of choice rather than grace—then the meaning we’re seeking comes to us not only in the future. It also has already come to us in the past. Having forgotten the grace of our own begottenness, we forget how to beget. ...

[T]he Christian story begins with the miraculous appearance of human life out of the overflow of a God who creates in the image of the One who exists in loving communion. But the story of the Scripture also moves forward by improbable birth after improbable birth. This divine inbreaking culminates in the most improbably grace-filled birth of them all, that of Jesus of Nazareth, and continues on by framing the grace-shaped life as a “new birth.”

Because, in the end, it is the improbability of birth and continued human existence that confirms it as a grace even as we remain either ambivalent or try to co-opt it. After all, “be fruitful and multiply” was quickly conditioned by “in pain you shall bring forth children” and “by the sweat of your face.” The degree to which we assume that life and existence rest in our choice belies our modern surfeit and exposes our ingratitude. Having forgotten that our own lives are a gift, we presume upon future ones. Because without a personal experience of the grace and hope at our own existence, we will use their existence to justify our own. Their lives will become the means by which we validate our own and in doing so, we will create the same questions in them.

This is why Scripture also teaches that we enter God’s kingdom as little children. Instead of capturing the kingdom through strength, we become small and dependent. We acknowledge our own helplessness and entrust ourselves to God and others. We remember the grace of our own begottenness, and thus learn to extend this grace to others.

In the end, the flourishing of the human species rests not on biological or political strategy, but on grace and hope—that is, the cultivation of the human soul. It rests on cultivating gratitude, humility, faith, and love because these are the things that make us uniquely human. In other words, our ability to pass on the inheritance of being made alive in God’s image rests on living in God’s image now.

Wall Street Journal Book Review, What Being a Parent Really Means, by Jennifer A. Frey (Dean & Professor of Philosophy & Religion, University of Tulsa) (reviewing Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman, What are Children for? On Ambivalence and Choice (2024)):

Having a child, like getting married, requires making a lifelong commitment—in this case, to someone you’ve never met. ...

Ms. Berg and Ms. Wiseman are not content to leave parenting to religious conservatives. In response to the overarching philosophical question—What are children for?—they treat their readers to subtle and sophisticated analyses of the classics of feminist theory and the contemporary literature of domestic ambivalence. These authors aim to clear a path for young people to choose parenting, without cajoling them into the choice. Particularly powerful is their treatment of the novelist Elena Ferrante, who, they argue, reminds us “that what is at stake in the decision to have children is not just a series of personal experiences to be enjoyed and suffered but the possibility of human life, which is infinitely concrete but never reducible to its significance for anyone else.”

Ms. Berg and Ms. Wiseman make the case for overcoming pessimism about humanity, worries about climate collapse and the problem of evil. In the end, they land in a surprising place: suggesting the rightness of loving the broken world and our fallen humanity. This love is unsentimental and clear-eyed, yet profoundly moving. The mother, in particular, cannot deny her own materiality, mortality and the embodied limits of her autonomy. ...

[T]he question of parenthood cannot be separated from the question of human flourishing. If we value autonomy above all else, and we understand freedom as the maximization of our options, then spending a life sacrificing for our children will seem like a very bad bet. As a mother of six myself, I can tell you that having a child is like getting married in at least one important respect: If you are honest with yourself, you will admit that you had no idea what you were getting into. Marriage and parenthood are leaps of faith that require individuals to go from thinking and choosing for “me” to thinking and choosing for “we.” This is a transition in thought and action that our culture increasingly struggles to embrace.

With parenting, the problem is worse, because the loss of control is greater—parents commit themselves to unconditionally loving someone they have never even met. In a very deep and unsettling way, we do not choose our children. The mystery of birth is that when the child is born it is entrusted to its parents, who must accept, love and care for it. Parent and child are bonded for life; over time, they will change one another deeply and irrevocably. It is ironic that we delay this bond in the name of being prepared for it, because when we do that, we delay the very changes in ourselves that are necessary to parent well. Parenting may make us more patient, generous, hopeful and loving, but these changes are brought about through the practices of family life—a daily, subtle, continuous transfiguration.

If Hannah Arendt was on to something when she declared new life “the miracle that saves the world,” we need to recover our sense of its miraculous nature by being receptive to the real and exacting demands of love. If we no longer cultivate this receptivity in young people, or help them to accept the loss of autonomy that comes with it, we will be poorer for it in a deeper sense than our demographers have the tools to articulate.

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