Lifestyle
Women Will Save the World
We always have
Since ancient times, women have kept the world going by giving birth.
Now? We will keep the world going by not giving birth.
It pains me to say this.
I love babies.
I always had a passion for babies, birth, breastfeeding and parenting. I found it so fulfilling that I would quite happily have had a house full of children if I’d lived a hundred years ago.
But I stopped at two, and plenty of women now are having no children or just one, and I don’t blame them. In fact, I think the more women who refuse to reproduce, the better off we are. More on that in a minute.
By my count, there are five reasons women hesitate to have babies now:
- Having children is so expensive that most of us can’t easily afford it.
- Husbands/partners don’t have a great track record. Marriages and relationships break up. Child support can be sketchy. Even if the marriage works out, plenty of men do less than their share of housework and childcare, and women know this going in because women who already have children are vocal about their exhaustion.
- All but the wealthiest women know they will probably have to work full-time while raising their children. And the wealth better be their own, not controlled by their husbands, who may well leave. It’s impossible to put both a career and mothering first. You know you will be juggling every day, making judgments about where to put your time, and sometimes both your job and your children will need you right now, and that’s a very difficult position to be in.
- It’s not just partners who throw mothers to the wolves. It’s our society. Particularly in the U.S., there is almost no support for mothers. It’s almost like the U.S. hates moms and babies. Other countries have the generous leaves women need to recover from birth, establish breastfeeding, adjust to their new role and nurture their newborns. In the U.S., we send still-bleeding mothers off to work with a breast pump and leave them to figure it out. As an added bonus, some of her non-parenting colleagues are resentful that she got a “vacation” of six weeks and they had to do her work.
- Fear of overpopulation and all the nightmare world-ending scenarios that come with it, which is absolutely a legitimate fear, is a good reason why many women today have few or no babies.
Some dads are wonderful, of course.
There are plenty of men who step right up. They wake up at 2 a.m. to change the baby’s diaper and bring their wife a glass of water for her to drink as she nurses their baby back to sleep. They take paternity leave if they have it or vacation time if they don’t to be there in the early days.
When the baby gets sick and has to stay home from daycare, these men take turns staying home with the baby so it’s not all on their wife’s shoulders. These guys don’t get a gold star for this. They are not going above and beyond. They are simply doing what they ought to be. Good for them, yes.
But how does not having babies save the world?
Nothing in this world changes because people voluntarily decide to do the right thing.
Prove me wrong.
You can’t even get everybody to drop their empty soda cans into a recycling bin, wear a mask during a pandemic or make room for a car trying to change lanes. Lots of humans suck. We all know that.
We will not make the motherhood experience better until so few babies are being born that we have no choice but to improve things.
Motherhood can be amazing.
Honestly. It can be.
The moment I pushed my first child into the world, the universe shifted. I felt suffused by intense, life-changing love. She went straight from inside my body to my arms and I said, “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh, Erma!” (Her name isn’t Erma. I am respecting her privacy here.)
I know exactly what I said, because I have the whole thing on VHS tape. Erma has watched herself being born. She watched me scream in pain and fall in love.
I loved every stage of parenting my two kids, including toddlerhood and the teen years and now into the Oma years. I would love to go back in time and revisit it again.
But I was able to stay home. It meant voluntary poverty, but I did it. I did work part-time for my daughter’s first eleven months, and I freelanced and started a couple of businesses later on, but I didn’t work full-time outside the home again until my second child started school.
This is really hard to do today. It doesn’t have to be, but we’ve chosen to make it nearly impossible.
Women are people who tend to suck it up to serve others.
I’ve been guilty of it. I thought of it as “being nice,” but it also screwed me over.
The first inkling I had that I was doing this was three decades ago at a La Leche League conference, when two moms gave a talk on why putting yourself last would teach your daughters to in turn put themselves last.
Most moms are OK with putting ourselves last. We say we don’t want the last piece of chicken. We say we don’t mind changing our plans to accommodate others’ needs. We give up sleep to get things done that must be done.
We don’t think about what we’re teaching our daughters.
Or our sons.
We also don’t realize, for a long time, that by always being the ones who are willing to take care of others, we’re hurting society.
We do not need to provide subsidized daycare because women will figure it out. We do not need to provide good elder care, because women will find a way to take care of their aging family members, even if they end up having to quit their jobs. We do not need to provide paid family leave because women will manage. You get the idea.
We don’t need to pay for any of this stuff because women willingly do all this work for free.
And women did it.
I did it. If you’re a woman, you probably get it. If you’re a man, I hope you do.
Has society ever thanked women for holding everything together?
For doing so much hard work that is not even counted in the GDP?
For doing so much free work that it cuts into our paid work and thus hurts us economically?
Are you fucking kidding me?
We need to be done.
If people want us to keep having babies, society will have to respect us. We desperately want to be good mothers to the children we choose to have. We do not want to kill ourselves doing everything we are expected to do.
Our partners and our society need to step up.
It isn’t just a U.S. problem.
Mothers in Europe do get some of the things women need — longer paid maternity leaves, government-provided service to support new mothers and such — but the birth rate is still low there.
We want more than this. We need more than this.
We need to actually respect mothers. It’s hard work, people. I loved doing it but it was hard work. When women look around at the mothers they know and they see that mothers are respected for all they do, that they’re supported while they’re doing it and that they do not suffer life-long financial loss for having worked their asses off raising kids, more women will decide to become moms.
Until then, enjoy your dropping birth rates, having to work into your 70s because there are fewer young people to pay into Social Security and having nobody to take care of you in your old age.
If you agreed with me on this, read this one next:
About Michelle Teheux:
I’m a writer and editor in central Illinois. Find me on Substack, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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