The Conundrum of Caring I: Procreation
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on March 15, 2023.
In Korea, a birth strike is happening: women are deciding not to have babies. Korea’s fertility rate in 2021 is down to .81, the lowest in the world for the past three years – that’s eight-tenths or four-fifths of one baby born per woman of child-bearing years. The number of deaths exceeded the number of births starting three years ago. This is killing the economy and up-ending the culture.
What’s with this? Why aren’t women doing what they’ve always done, replenishing the species? Because they’re fed up. Hawon Jung, author of Flowers of Fire about the #MeToo movement in Korea, quotes a 30-year old woman saying ‘The birth strike is women’s revenge on a society that puts impossible burdens on us and doesn’t respect us.’ (New York Times International Weekly, Feb 4-5/23, opinion section.)
We’re not far behind: Canada’s fertility rate was 1.40 in 2020. Anything under 2.1 means the population is declining (because women have to have babies to replace men, as well as themselves). Many of my age cohort were not confident that we would become grandparents. Many family trees are becoming spindly saplings that aren’t likely to survive into the future.
BC just decided to have prescription birth control paid for by the government, which seems an odd decision in the circumstances. The movement (dare we call it that?) for affordable day care seems a more appropriate direction. But maybe BC is recognizing how hard a job having children is, what commitment and investment it takes to raise children well, and what the cost to society is when it is not done well. Maybe the decision to make birth control free is suggesting that becoming a mother is a choice one should make very carefully.
Because with choice comes responsibility. Any choice, but the choice of motherhood is particularly rife with responsibility. I’ve written in an earlier column about motherhood being a life sentence, and I do believe it isn’t a role one grows out of, although the job changes over time.
Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it gets stuck. I can run out of fingers counting the number of women I know whose adult children have either failed to launch or returned home for an extended adolescence with most of the perks of adulthood and few of the responsibilities. If the choice to become a mother is in serious danger of becoming endless, with children who don’t grow up up and away, little wonder that women are giving serious second thought to getting on the baby train. Little wonder they want free and liberal access to birth control.
How did we get here? Stanley Hall ‘discovered’ adolescence as a developmental stage in 1904. Sigmund Freud and colleagues deemed that the work of adolescence was for children to wean themselves from their mothers in order to make the great leap into adulthood. I see a significant amount of permission for adolescents to declare their mothers passé and redundant without the accompanying leap into independence. The time period allotted to adolescence has always been debated, but there is no question that it is growing inexorably longer as the traditional trappings of adult independence – financial sufficiency, mating, procreating -- become more elusive. If those characteristics are no longer the markers of adulthood, what is?
We know that capitalism runs on scarcity and competition, and successful cultures and economies require an educated work force, so parental responsibility now extends to facilitating (a gentle word for funding) post-public education that will render their child competitive. As credentialism has taken hold, the need for privately-funded education could be, well, life-long. And if the credentials don’t deliver a job, the kind of job that could rightfully be expected as a consequence of the investment in time and money, well, then, the kind of adult independence that used to be the expectation is no longer warranted. Right?
I dunno. What I do know is that messing with the cycle of life that is natural to other living things – birth, growth, procreation, decline, death – creates problems that were foreseeable but unseen, or at least disregarded. I blame – you know I do! – capitalism. Anything I say can and will be used against me, but if I look to nature as an alternate way of understanding how things work -- which, let’s face it, has had a much longer run of success -- I see collaboration where capitalism has competition, and equilibrium where capitalism has scarcity.
With choice comes responsibility. Like it or not, that’s the human condition, the one Eve is blamed for bringing down on our heads when she succumbed to the alure of the apple. Which, as I recall, preceded her procreating. Hmmm….
