what is the status of motherhood today in a world where marriage is put off
kids are put off the fertility rate is dropping dangerously low and do we have a culture that holds up on a pedestal
careerism versus motherhood and staying at home which by the way Christianity
seems to be going right along with just a few steps behind of course I believe in options for every woman my wife works
full-time now that our kids are gone my two daughters work full-time they're well educated so I think that options
all need to be there of course but where do we hold motherhood among all of these revolving parts i came across an article
written by Leia Labresco Sergeant who is an author that covers religion and statistics she just came out with a
recent book called The Dignity of Dependence a feminist manifesto where
she attempts to approach feminism on its terms by inserting her own values that
are much more conservative she also runs the Substack called Other Feminisms
she's very articulate and has plenty to say i think you're going to really enjoy this now this episode is brought to you
by Go and Do Travel and our Wavemakers podcast crews i've been pumping this as much as I can it is going to be an
absolute blast we're going down the Mexican Baja we have several high-profile podcasters and YouTubers in
the Latterday Saint online community that will be there we've got Jacob Hansen of Thoughtful Faith and Cardon
Ellis of Ward Radio Hayden and Jackson Paul from Stick of Joseph Jasmine Rapley
David Boyce of 52 Churches in 52 weeks and Dave Butler of Plain and Precious
Things this is going to be really it's going to be fantastic we'll have a lot of fun we'll have a lot of great
presentations and an opportunity to mix and mingle with those YouTubers and podcasters and with that online
community that we're very familiar with but in person go to quickdia.com up to
trips and events and then scroll down to Wavemakers podcast this is November 15th through 22nd and would love to see you
there here's the interview [Music]
all
right so Leia going back in time we look historically at technological advances
we go everything from the washing machine vacuum cleaners laundry uh
dishwashers etc there's all these different things and and technology seems to kind of address these things right things of convenience
and so the role and need say of a domestic wife mother historically is
starting to change going back especially in the 19th century and then we come all the way up to the pill uh in the late
50s early 60s to which to me is the the biggest cultural change of any
technology anywhere that happens uh in the late 50s early 60s and we're moving
all the way up now to this uh freezing of eggs which is again a convenience it fills a role it's an important thing I
think but it ch can change the mindset of an individual of a woman in thinking
about well do I defer to having kids or do I start having kids earlier on which
we're seeing a major shift in these days is technology overall a net plus for
women and families or is it a negative you know I think it is a net plus but
that doesn't absolve us of our duty to be good stewards of the tech we have and make prudent decisions you know my first
kid who was born was an emergency C-section so I'm a direct beneficiary from a lot of the tech that means I'm
here and she's here we both might both not have been otherwise but that in no way means we use the good tech to excuse
the bad tech or think of ourselves as just kind of passively participating in progress without making deliberate
choices about what serves the human good and what doesn't and the way I think about it is you know technology helps us
when it gives us more room more leisure more slack that we can devote towards being human beings caring for each other
being connected to each other so I like using my washing machine uh perfectly well i'd be pretty sad if I just had
food pods that you know popped out of my fridge to feed my family because cooking for them is part of expressing love for
them right and like the deliberate work the engagement with the real world feels more central to me to being a human
being learning how to live within creation than personally scrubbing out every you know mud stain on a pair of
pants does um and even there I think people can make different trade-offs it can be that mending and fixing is more a
part of how you care for the world and teach your children to care for it but when you look at things like the pill
you know that's not just giving us more free time to spend doing things it's not just you know offloading a task it's
changing people's understanding of what sex is um it's making sex as something that connects you to a partner and sex
as something that is open to life as two seemingly different things and whenever we have tech even when it's good tech
which I don't consider the pill to be that kind of fundamentally changes our relationship with a basic human process
that's a moment to slow down and say do we really endorse these changes this is
a part of being human that we need to give up so we come down to the point of you
wrote a article recently for fair disputations and you bring up a company called Co-fertility which was founded by
one of the execs of Uber and and she had a personal issue with this she was worried about having kids later on in
life she had dedicated her life to a career uh and she's 35 years old and
she's saying "Okay well what am I going to do i've only got a few years left how do I make sure I'm going to have kids
going forward?" So she's trying to solve a problem for her right in using
technology here but you call Kof Coertility's offer freezing eggs as an
example of you quote a modern-day Rumple Stillskin riff okay what does this image
this metaphor capture about the moral and and emotional cost of these these
fertility deals well co-fertility is unu a little unusual the reason I reached for rumple stilled skin as the uh the
analogy there is co-fertility helps much younger women freeze their eggs to store
for when they're older in case they need them and it lets them do that for free because half of their eggs have to be
donated to paying clients of co-fertility who are getting those younger women's eggs and then are having
those younger women's biological children so it's locking your future at the cost of giving up some of your
children children to whom you are a mother even though they'll also then have this adoptive or gestational mother
and again that's that question of trying to take a lot of basic human functions that a mother has always been until very
recently you know the woman who is genetically the mother of a child the woman who carries the child and then the
woman who mothers the child and when there's a break in those linkages like through adoption it's a response to
tragedy it's not something we engineer for its own sake and I think the more you look at fetal development and how
children grow up you babies when they're born recognize their mother's heartbeat in a way they don't recognize the
heartbeat of anyone else so you're kind of unwinding these pieces of being human without that much thought about what
they do for people and what you give up by reformulating humans
so it's interesting there because if you look at fertility as an economy in itself right you're what what seems to
be happening in that case in the description you give there is that you are trading
your your children in your youth giving it to somebody else who wants
that for your youth personally right it's more of it's more
I mean honestly it's more of a selfish type of a a move to say I want my you I want my career I want to travel I want
to postpone the responsibility of this perhaps and in return I'm going to give
this to someone else who perhaps wants to take on that responsibility right now
whether it's a younger person or an older person an older woman you're there is a there is a trade there you're
giving up what would have been possibly your kids a as a younger woman to someone else so
that you've got your own personal time well and I would say it's not I think experienced by women who are doing this
as selfish um but I think it's a bad trade-off i think women often think about a sense of responsibility to their
kids in the future as much as a selfish desire to travel or do things in their 20s they think "How could I be a good
mother when I'm unsettled in my career when the young men around me don't seem like they're ready to get married so how
can I maximize my chance of being a good mother later when I'll presumably be better prepared to be a mom versus right
now there's a great ethnography of women who do egg freezing called motherhood on ice and a lot of the women are not women
in their 20s co-fertility is marketing to those women because it needs their eggs but women in their 20s mostly don't
opt for egg freezing it's women in their late 30s who are trying to extend their last chance at having a child when it
feels like the possibility is almost out of reach you know and a lot of the time when that happens they feel less like
they've picked career over family and more like they kept wanting to pick family but didn't see the opportunity
arise and I think that's really where people need to think about family not just being a thing that could happen to
you in the future or that you'll be best prepared for when you're in your 30s or that people all around you have to
mature for it to be a possibility people are ready to be parents earlier than they think in part as you grow and
change with your children so So I think that's right i I do think
that mostly it's women that are number one they've got the resources to take care of this number two their their
biological clock that the sound of that ticking is much louder but I mean co-fertility what I understand is it's
as you said it it is free right you're going to have it done for free so doesn't that target the younger woman in
that case it certainly does and I think target is the right point because the as is the case with many free services like
social media sites when it's free for you something about you is being sold to someone else um and I assume
Co-fertility does a certain amount of screening so I wouldn't assume it's free for all women it's free for women who
are going to be attractive donors to co-fertility's stable of actual paying
clients right when I was in college there were ads for egg donors and there it's not the pitch to freeze your own
eggs for your own use later it's just a pitch of cold hard cash in exchange for helping someone else start a family and
those donor advertisements are very exhaustive in terms of you have to be this tall you need to play at least one
sport you know you should be of this ethnicity eye color etc because fundamentally what egg purchasing
companies are doing is trying to satisfy the desires of their clients which often
go beyond just I want to give a home to a baby and I'm struggling with infertility but I want to be the author
of this baby i want the baby to have certain traits I value uh which my love
is conditioned on yeah it's that get that opens up something completely different it's it's
uh it it it to me I I mean I understand it
i you know if I was in that situation I probably would do the same thing but it
also removes
it removes the the the the differences of you not knowing what you're getting
necessarily whether it's the sex whether it's the the eye color or anything else
and saying "I love this person no matter what." Right i I I this is my this is my
child i am the mother or the father of of this child and I love this person no matter what there just seems to be a
little bit of again it's an issue of convenience and in some ways not completely but in some ways it seems
that convenience on a balance is the
opposite end of that can be a requirement of love i think it matters a
lot that children are unchosen right that's why the phrase is about being open to life rather than even just you
acquiring a child through sex would be a weird way of putting it you can want a child very badly and not receive them
you can want a child and then be surprised by who they are you can be surprised you know at 10 weeks when you
if you're me and you're the kind of person who does this does the blood test to find out right away what gender of baby you're having and I do that because
I like to name my baby right away but you can be surprised and even disappointed at that point you can be
surprised after birth you know learning more about who your child is your child may be more athletic than you less
interested in art that you love um and you love them the whole time because what you sign up for in a child is just
the gift of a person an individual human soul who is given to you in particular to love you don't get to customize them
you don't get to specify your criteria and you then get to watch their life unfold all of it as a gift sometimes
better than you would have asked for sometimes different than you would have asked for but you get to rest in that
love and their unchoseness forever yeah that's I think an important aspect now
you've you use the metaphor of a of a ribbon unspooling right for a timeline
which is kind of interesting right and this is to describe life your own life and your relationships for example
marriage or eventually if you're married you have now two ribbons together on spooling um how has this view shaped the
way you think about marriage and parenthood i think the thing it really reminds you is when you delay things you don't get
to have them maybe necessarily at the best time of your life which a lot of people think about well they put off
marriage till I know enough about myself or till I've settled my career put the kids off even further till we've got
enough in the bank you don't get the same amount of marriage or the same amount of kids and you think about that as that ribbon my ribbon of life is
finite my husband's ribbon of life is also finite and what I'm picking is not if I wait longer I'll find necessarily
an even better husband all I'm guaranteeing is I'll have less husband less time you know when people think
with those questions of is the right thing to do to wait to be responsible till much later in life to have kids you
don't necessarily get a better life you may or may not but you guarantee you
have less of your life that overlaps with your kids' lives and even less with your grandkids lives especially if your
kids take your example and wait till their late 30s to have kids and then you know you were 36 they were 36 now you're
72 as your grandkids are born you may not be able to lift them or play with them or babysit them in the way you
might have hoped so I think when things are good it makes more sense to plunge into them earlier none of us know how
long we will live uh you know I hope to live a long life and see grandchildren
but if I live a shorter life if my children live a shorter life what I can rejoice in is whatever time we get to
share and having more of it by virtue of embracing them earlier yeah and you explain also I mean when you do that and
you're unfurling the the ribbons you don't know when it ends you're you're don't know where that
in the timeline is going to end it's still wrapped around whatever it's wrapped around and I think the sense
that you're trying to you know time things carefully like you're buying and selling stocks on the market you're trying to you know sell at the peak you
know creates a sense of that you both have more control over what will happen and how long it will happen for i have
three living children and six children I lost to miscarriage and each time when you're pregnant you don't know how that
pregnancy will end you know I started to have more worry than other people because of my history and so each time I
was pregnant three of those children made it to birth but I wouldn't know for weeks what would happen and so I had the choice of saying well is this kind of
not real to me because I don't know what will happen or do I know well today my child is alive as I want to think about
what does being a mom to this baby look like today while I'm pregnant in this
moment that could be the only week we share together and I'll never regret kind of loving my children wholly deeply
fiercely for whatever amount of time we have the children who made it to birth i never think "Oh well I loved them too
much in the first trimester when I was nervous you know I should have saved that for later." And the children I lost
i'm glad that sometimes my husband and I went to playgrounds and just sat and thought about the children right you
know and we didn't get to hold them so we wanted to make sure we were doing something to actively spend time with
them in uterro knowing we might or might not see them face to face
yeah and you know I I had a recent conversation with a female therapist and
she argued with me about making sure that we hold off on marriage
and that we hold off on having kids and her reasoning was number one your
frontal lobe is not even developed enough to make the best decisions until you're 25 or 26 cortex or whatever it's
called and and secondly give yourself a chance to have a career
and make your choices get to know your partner a lot better she said and and make sure that you have an understanding
of how far you want to go in your career before you have kids so there are all these other logical things to think of
and to have in place and so she typically is taking women who are who
have anxiety who have depression and she's interpreting it in a way that says well you have taken on too much too
early without thinking of yourself first what would you say to someone like her you know I think there are a couple
careers where you can really plan around well by this year I'll do this and on this year I'll make partner etc most
careers aren't like that especially right now you know I'm someone who's more typical of my generation i've held
a number of different jobs and to progress in my overall career it's meant looking for opportunities changing
positions not moving in a predictable steady way up a promotion track at one
company that I'll retire from after 40 or 50 years with a watch right and so
if your life is marked by more uncertainty you can say well there's more uncertainty so I want to be more
cautious i want to wait longer because I don't know what will happen or you can say you know what I know a lot less
about what the right time will be than I might have thought or even than my parents knew so I want to lean hard into
the things I think are good right away and that includes marriage and that includes children and I expect whether I
get married early or have kids early or not there will be some turbulence in my career and I think my whole life will be
better if while my career has ups and downs I have someone next to me who I love who I'm doing this with and I'll be
happy if during the days when I'm having a tougher time at work or if I get laid off I'm coming home to my kids and I can
kind of rest secure in my identity as a mom alongside my more fragile and contingent identity as a worker at this
company um and that will stay constant through my whole life while other things sometimes are better and sometimes are
worse yeah you know I mean I think there's a reason the traditional marriage vows are about for better for worse for sickness
and for health and not for this totally placent time ahead now that we've squared everything away and found
ourselves and established everything you know marriage is built for uncertainty
it's built for uncertainty and and and it should be built for kids in my mind that's that should be what it's built for you know I had I I got married when
I was 23 mhm uh I had my first child when I was 25
and there are so many benefits to this no am I ready for it no I'm not ready for it i don't think anybody's ever
ready for it i'm not ready for marriage i'm not ready for I'm not ready for it to be a father i'm not ready for any of
these things but what it does is it puts you in a position where you say "Am I going to stand up with this am I going to step up for for uh what needs to be
done grow up take on the responsibility and and it just seems to me that in our
culture today we have moved to a position of convenience and and avoiding
responsibility and I think seems to me to be a big part of that i'm pushing off marriage because
I'm not ready to commit and it's not always that way i'm not saying it's always that way i think I think there
are some difficulties in the dating scenes today that that uh that push that off also in economics etc but but a push
off of responsibility seems to be a common theme to me of hey I want to take this on now i want to go through the
difficulties that are there for marriage which also produce joy and I want to go
through the difficulties of being a parent and take on that responsibility because of the fruits of what that
produces uh do you see it that way you know I think partly people sometimes have such
a such a great respect for marriage and children that they think they're not equal to it and they almost never will
be right it's that sense of you know that less selfish sense of I want to grow into this responsibility but I have
to grow into it while not doing it right it's I don't expect the institution of marriage to help me be a better husband
i don't expect the experience of being a father to a baby to make me a better father i've got to go get good at this
first without practical experience and then enter into the institution you know and I think that's also related to the
rise of secularism where if you don't think God has your back for any of this right then it does create greater
pressure of oh you know I I want to be married i want to make all these lifelong promises but can I keep them am
I am I a good enough person to keep them and you know the Christian facing marriage thinks well I hope I hope I'm
going to keep them but I also know I'm not relying solely on my own strength and I think the more people feel that
they're operating purely with their own strength their own conscience their own moral fiber and nothing else outside
that the more they feel slightly accurately I'm not up to the task of
loving one woman forever with my whole self like I can't do that by myself i'm not up to the task of what's the full
range of what a baby could ask of me you know and the reality is you're not doing it on your own you know you have the
support of your spouse but you have the support of a loving God um but if you don't believe that it's harder to enter
into any of those things yeah that's a great point that's a completely different mindset if you take a secular
view of that it's a completely different mindset number one I think even a foundation that's already in place that
says this is the order of God number one and I think it's the right thing and then number two saying well because it's
the order of God and it's the right thing I've got someone I can lean on i've got God that I can lean on and fill
the void of any inadequacies that I might feel that's that's a great point now you talk
about taking on um projects that are too large for one wife yes right and you
have children is one of those what other projects do you think modern people
should be brave enough to begin you know I'm I'm a nerd and I'll admit it i think space travel is one of those i do love I
don't love Elon Musk's approach to his family life but I love his approach to rockets right um and this question of
what is the kind of you know big science or big engineering that will change the world but in a way I may not live to see
um you know and I think you you don't have to go to Mars to do that you know friends I know who have taken on
projects like that though a little less explosive one would hope have founded a school in their local community where
you know you're around for most of the most turbulent difficult years and in the long term this may become a
sustaining school that your community grows up around uh where kids are often these are classicalmmies reading the
great books together growing deeper in friendship more connected to history more prepared for education and
conscience uh to live generously and to love the good but if you found a school
you are signing up for what like 8 to 10 turbulent financially fragile years uh
and then by the time things seem stable enough that you can step back the school will have grown past your recognition
and you will be old uh and your kids will have aged out of the range of it right so those are folks taking on a
real project of stewardship for something whose fruits they know they will not fully enjoy
you know you talk about all the million nos that come with having children the
things you have to turn down the things that you sacrifice for yourself um but you say those those nos make
sense if you have a big yes okay what is the yes for you and talk about how you
make peace with making these sacrifices you know for me a lot of the the big yes
to my kids is that you know I hope they'll be saints of God right like I hope that their lives are really
transformed by knowing his love and it's my job to provide a small image of that
and so sometimes that means a less full or less busy life because I want the leisure and space for peace and for
exploration with each other um you know my daughter just decided spontaneously
who's five that she wants to build a big house out of cardboard and she's just taking on this project it's taken over our dining table when we have friends
over we have to kind of apologetically but not too apologetically clear it out of the way our whole house is messier
than it would be in the ideal not just with cardboard but with everything else and part of that's because we give our
children a lot of space for creative pursuits where we don't know how they'll unfold and I think embracing uncertainty
is a huge part of being a parent and sometimes it's gosh like it's been awfully quiet and I know they have
scissors with them i wonder what's happening where my children are you know that kind of nervous uncertainty but
ultimately it's a preparation for the uncertainty of sending our kids out into the world to make families of their own
and knowing we won't author their lives and that my job is to prepare them to make good prudent generous trusting
decisions um and really communicating as a Christian that you know the dice are
loaded in their favor as long as they're acting out of love and generously towards others
yeah uh you quote I'm I don't know I'm not gonna say his name right Tom Scotcha Tom Tom Skco Skoka I'm not sure what his
name is but he says you are not banking extra years by deferring children right you are subtracting years from the time
you will share the world with your children I think that's such an important point to understand last year
my son my third child uh he and I went to Spain and ran with
the Bulls now I can't I probably can't do that in 10 Right i can't do that but that's my
third child and and he's he was 27 years old time and I'm still out there running with him and doing this this that was an
incredible experience for us very bonding it was wonderful experience right if I'm waiting another 10 years I
I and and we come to that point at this point in in my life or his life you know we're not going to be able to do something like that i'm not going to
spend that time with him doing that kind of activity right a couple years ago I
went high you know up major mountains with with my other son and and so that's
something I can still do with them even while they're adults uh because I had
children younger i would not trade that for anything yeah and you know being
being parents of young kids really brings home to us how much our parents do for us like and how much our kids
love having grandparents and how rich and varied it makes their life it brings
home to me i love my mother more now as a parent because I see and hear from her more about my own earliest years and how
she felt as a mother as we kind of talk about what did you do when this happened and I want to share that with my kids
you know and I'm grateful that our kids have three living grandparents my dad passed away a few years ago and again
there's that question of okay you know I'm not just thinking about well what do I want to be like as a mom and can I be a better mom if I wait three years four
years it's well what does it look like to be a grandparent i'm getting a glimpse of that now and what will
prepare me to do that and how much of that do I want i want a lot of it it seems wonderful
yeah now now you challenge the idea of before marriage life is a neutral right
for parent you know why is it so important to claim reality and I'm going to say also responsibility for that
reality right now or or or when you know early on earlier
than we're doing as a culture right now you know the thing I say a lot you know to folks when I chat with them is just
this right now wherever you are is your real life there's no part of your life
that's kind of the training section or the demo part where you're learning who am I what will I do you are who you are
you are what you're doing right now so you whether you're waiting for marriage or for kids or for something else or to
finish school or get the job you need your real life is always still happening right now and you're never promised that
you're going to reach that goal you want you know to marry even if you want it to have children even if you long for them
and you may find that large stretches of your life are the period you thought of as kind of the waiting room for your
real life that will never begin in the way you hoped um so whatever life you live you want to live sacrificially for
others with deep friendship strong gifts nos for the sake of a yes again even if
it's not specifically for your spouse and kids so you kind of you're never off the hook right when people are like "Oh
in my single days I can do whatever I want." No in your single days you have to die for the sake of your friends right or die to self out of love for
others and that's always true marriage is just the most common way of doing it but your real life is always happening
right now and your real life involves deep sacrificial love for others
now you speak beautifully about how your friends invited you into motherhood by asking you to be a godmother this is I
think is a wonderful wonderful Catholic tradition that is uh I wish more of us
had that uh and and where where you're asked to give a little bit of responsibility you know toward other
children right even if you don't have any of your own at this point um how did that help you in in in inviting
you into being a mother it was a big gift for me because this came during the period where we were having miscarriages
so you know I had a heart for motherhood i was loving the children God gave us as best I could but that still wasn't the
way I wanted to get to love a child and again I had that sense both of well one day this will happen for me and as it
happened it did but also I have to find a way of living and loving that doesn't
presume I will ever carry a child to term successfully and my friends really gave me that opportunity by saying look
we want you to be part of our lives forever to be personally concerned with the spiritual development of our child
and have that continuing relationship where you're going to know them as a baby as a toddler as a teenager years
from now you know I'm a godp parentent for someone's whole life so I will note them as themselves a mother you know as
someone who is if I'm old enough you know when I'm still living who is 50 I'll be a godmother now no longer to a
child but to an adult uh an older adult and that sense of my life being so
closely knit with someone else permanently meant a lot to me as a reassurance that I could give my love
fully whatever the circumstances of my fertility held
you know so much of of our culture today I was driving uh just a while ago
there's a there's a a university here close to me and there was a billboard up
and and the billboard said um basically it was it was you know come to it was
Northern Arizona University come to Northern Arizona University uh because it's all about you
right that that was the billboard mhm and and this is a very common thing you know that we're pushing in advertising
and our culture and and unfortunately I think it results in in bad choices
uh when our lives are not the longer you're in a position of what I would say something like never neverland you're
sitting in never neverland without growing up and and and creating bonding long-term relationships that are best
manifest I think in family right the longer you're pushing that off or
avoiding it completely I I think you're you're missing a a purpose of
life and you're missing a joy that cannot be found anywhere else is there any way that we're going to be able to
reverse the uh the speeding train that I see in our culture moving towards self
instead of understanding that our true happiness and joy comes through these entangled relationships that are
beautiful and and and you know as far as a a believer goes it's the only thing that we take with us
i don't know if this is going to be enough to turn us around but I think you know kind of the demographic trends where we have more and more older people
and fewer and fewer kids is really going to force people to reckon with the cost of not being connected to others um and
the need to affirmatively choose to be because we're going to have more and more older folks dying without children
without grandchildren to be with them and hold their hand to care for them and I think the challenge is when we see
what that looks like that's already priced in like that's coming already based on who has and hasn't had kids so
are we going to in the face of that intense need that intense vulnerability at the end of life step up and make
bigger choices to actively care for people to bring them into our family kind of in a parallel way that god
parenthood brings a baby into your family at the beginning of that child's life what we think about how do we
actively make the elderly unrelated to us part of our lives to see them out of the world with love or are we going to
see what's increasingly the case in Canada and now newly in the United Kingdom that turn towards youth in Asia
and discarding the elderly because they are not connected strongly to anyone or
because even when they do have kids and grandkids we think of their need as somehow missing their children you know
that parents are meant to give children what they need and then step back or even remove or destroy themselves if
their need imperils their kids' lives rather than saying yes what being a parent is is caring fully for your
children when they are very dependent and then in your old age it's kind of returning to that second infancy where
you need your diapers changed and you need someone to sit up with you in the night time and your children do that because they love you and that's the
shape a human relationship takes and you haven't misserved your children by being
a human parent to them you think about what the alternative is
now you work in family policy influencing and creating policy uh do you think that policy can help in that
regard is it is it not enough you know do you think that policies like baby bonuses that's being talked about now or
subsidized child care can shift at a minimum fertility trends that we're
seeing right now that are to me the the the biggest outside of a our soul of a
culture right now that is being disintegrated the the the most important
temporal issue I think we have is the fertility rate yes and and and it's it's
very very concerning but can policies like this at least shift that fertility trend they can shift it a bit right you
know they giving people money when they have kids helps them have kids you know
and helps them have them earlier instead of waiting as long and delaying or maybe not succeeding at all by the time they
try or turning to egg freezing because it's easier to have kids when you're younger and so if you have a $2,000 baby
bonus available then maybe two parents who wanted to try for a kid this year but weren't sure if they could might
feel a little more comfortable taking the leap so we know it has effects on the margin people have kids a little
earlier a little closer together and a little more often and the other good thing to remember is these policies that
make life easier for parents they aren't coercing people to have kids they don't want we know from survey research that
women on average in the US want because it's an average half a child more than they're having which means that some
people are happy but there's a lot of unmet desire for children out there so you can think of a lot of government
policy as it doesn't teach people children are good in and of itself it doesn't by itself change people's minds
about children in a big way it takes this unmet demand and makes it easier for people to have the children they
long to have and to do right by them in a way they may fear they otherwise will struggle to do it's not enough it's a
piece of the equation it's kind of lowering the wall for those people who want kids but can't get over it and then
there are a lot of people who I think would have rich fulfilling lives with children you know but don't think about
it in a timely way and for that a baby bonus isn't changing your mind that takes the witness of people in your
community who are parents or your parents to talk about it and say you know I value your ability to give and
receive love as much as I value your career and I don't want you to miss out on either so how will you balance them
not how will you set one aside in favor of the other yeah I will say I think that it is an
issue as you know policy can change in terms of a baby bonus you know you've got housing prices are through the roof
and there's things that could be done there that will help incentivize people to put down roots get married have
children etc and and those are policy issues that can change and that can help
but I do think that there needs to be a a very strong cultural change i'm not sure if we can get that but uh I do
think there needs to be a strong cultural change as well i want to go back to the egg freezing just for a minute um
Vox Vog Fox wrote wrote you know a uh an online magazine wrote something about
this uh new technology and here's what they said they said "Egg freezing has become like a mantra for how to be an
independent woman right the people who have frozen their eggs are doing a cool new thing." Okay
so what I want to bring out of that is this this brings up a very uh fundamental question and it's a contrast
I believe for of of feminism and and modern culture versus
a traditional perspective a biological perspective and I would say a god-given
model of interdependence we talk about those entangled relationships right
why is the appeal there seems to be I mean it's working this advocacy for
indep being an independent woman that is buoied by a thriving feminism
why is this so appealing to women i'd say two things for that you know one is
just a lot of our culture communicates hatred for or disgust with people who
depend on others and women are correct in thinking if I have a baby not only
will someone depend on me but pregnancy makes me physically vulnerable you know
I will be physically weaker more of my whole being will be directed towards this baby and I will need other people's
help now if you live in a culture where needing other people's help because the baby depends on you and that makes you
need other people makes you disgusting inhuman
in countries with euthanasia elicit target for killing obviously it sounds
better to be independent it sounds better to try and put off that period of intense physical dependency for as long
as you can or try and you know stock up enough money that you'll be able to solve all your problems of dependency
with hired help rather than by needing people in as direct and relational a way
so I think when women feel that desire to be fully independent and autonomous
that comes from the way we communicate our failure to love children the elderly
the disabled pregnant women that's a real message we're giving and the second thing I'd say about egg freezing in
particular is feminism I think for its whole history has always been a noisy
conversation at best you know an active fight at worst and there's certainly strains of feminism that look at the way
that businesses will actively subsidize egg freezing for their employees and say you know what like what's going on here
is this something that's being given to you a female employee as a gift or is this your boss trying to make sure he
has the claim on your youngest most energetic years and that your family doesn't interesting so you know you get
some strains of feminism that have more of the sense of it's great to free yourself from your biology your biology
is fundamentally a bad thing for you your potential to give life is mostly a danger to you and you have other I think
more fruitful strains of feminism that say you know what when someone says they can buy you out of your fertility like
why are they offering to do that for you and why do they see your womanhood as a threat to what they can pay you for at
work yeah you know I think we came across you on Substack
and and so you've got a Substack that's called other feminisms what What do you mean by that so you
know I'm a woman raised by a second-wave feminist i would say we have our agreements and our disagreements but
what I think is the fundamental truth that attracts people to feminism in any of its variations is just it requires
something specific to advocate for women as women and when you consider the human
race neutrally you first of all wind up kind of male skewed when you think about what does a neutral human being look
like and you ultimately wind up shortch changing both men and women you know
where I situate my own form of feminism is really saying that men and women are equal in dignity but being equal in
dignity doesn't require that we be interchangeable and where I see kind of the primary error of some strains of
modern feminism is trying to make sure it's proving men and women should be treated fairly and similarly and is
willing to throw parts of being a woman out the window because they represent a
threat to that idea that men and women are the same i don't think we have to be the same to be equal in dignity and
equal under the law i think also the one of the issues that I see I I think that it does concern me
because I look I look at the tree of feminism right and the fruit of that
feminism I don't it it can there is a spectrum you've got first second third wave feminism you got radical feminism
you've got white feminism intersectional feminism all these things but to me to some degree it's still the fruit of that
original tree that is based on ideological uh
an ideological agenda And uh that does say uh that yeah somehow we need to
force it's it what it really comes down to to me is it's are we trying to be
like men mhm you know and and when you when you start with that assumption I I
just there's nothing that to me can come out of that except division number one
and a constant movement that goes nowhere to some
degree at least nowhere good because it's an impossibility yes right if if you are there because
it's you're never going to get to a place where women are the same as men and I don't mean is one higher than the
other i mean they're not the same as you say and so if you're trying to force
this as a sameness it's never going to happen so you'll always have the objective in place and
you'll always wind up hating women somewhat you know for not being able to achieve it right that's always the challenge now I don't think that idea of
women have to be able to be men is at the very historical roots of the
movement i think it's always a question right is the easiest way to prove you're equal is by doing the exact same thing
in the exact same way so there's always that temptation to say well can we make the case for our equality this way and
there are places where that's appropriate you know in a workplace of saying well I'm doing the same job can't I be treated the same way but that's not
who women are fundamentally and I think when you look back at the very you know beginnings of feminism often Mary Wilsoncraft is identified as one of the
first feminists and Erica Bakyaki in her book the rights of women kind of does a lovely job explicating this she founded
a lot of her claims that women were entitled to more schooling that they were excluded from on the basis of
women's potential to be mothers so she wasn't saying women should be able to go to school with men because women and men
are exactly the same and exactly equivalent and where they aren't exactly the same we should pretend they are the
same or get rid of the parts of women that make them different she said look women are oriented to be mothers and
part of being a mother is giving a full education to your children and if women themselves aren't given that education
then they can't give a moral education to their children so you always have that tension from that very beginning of
as people are making the case for women's rights for women's dignity you know are they doing it on the basis of
we're all just basically human beings that anything that sticks out as different is inconvenient or needs to be
locked off or are they looking to some of the things that are particular to women like motherhood and saying based
on the fact we are mothers have the capacity to be mothers as wen Stonecraft said we need education you know and then
we come to the US the women's rights movement the suffrage movement are all really have a lot of overlap with the
temperance movement and a lot of that is saying look as mothers as wives times we have this political insight about the
destructiveness of alcohol and the way it pres on vulnerable men that is being excluded and we want to be fully
included in politics because we see how women and children as women and children are being miserved by the politics we
have would you say that and again you've got different branches that of feminism
that come out uh from that trunk but do you would you say that as a as a generalization
that feminism's goal is an independent woman and if it's independent is that independent of everything because that
that seems to go against what you've been saying so far and this kind of leads into your your more more your
recent book that you wrote i'd say there are two goals that are intention you know one is the sense of I want women to
be safe and that's kind of a a harm reduction feminism and that's where you get more of that desire for independence
because you know you respond to real dangers in the world and say okay well what will it take to make women safe
from these things you need enough money enough space enough legal defense you know a lot of those individual goals I
support you women can have a career can earn money have certain protections that are often you know asymmetrical from
domestic violence responding to the reality of men and women's bodies But if you stop there that's kind of a
negative freedom women deserve to be free from these particular dangers or oppressions etc and what I want is also
the positive freedom freedom for motherhood freedom to love expansively
freedom in order to put our bodies at risk through pregnancy and if you just start with that safety mindset of how
will I make women safe from the world you wind up ultimately always looking at
femininity motherhood fertility as one of those threats coming interiorly right
because pregnancy does make women unsafe even when we improve medicine it makes
women unsafe because it's physically hard and it puts you at physical risk so I don't think we ever should start our
politics from the idea of our goal is to make people utterly safe drive risk to zero it's always that trade-off of we're
made for flourishing what risks are good how do we cushion the risk as best we
can but how do we leave people free to enter into these relationships that expose us to the needs of others
so let's finish with this question where do you see the status of the American family today as compared to
historically and where is it going i think one of the challenges is we're
more prosperous than we've been at almost any time there are real strains in terms of the cost of housing etc but
you know we're freer of childhood disease there's more money a lot of good things but people respond to them in a
very nervous and now this is not just feminism but men and women both in that more sense of seeking safety seeking
harm minimization and of course you're always minimizing your risk by not having children or having fewer children
than you hoped for and what I want people to do more is feel like the risks are worth it um and that the more you do
take risks and you even set an example in your community and your friend circle of you know like we're hoping to have
another baby we don't we don't know exactly what's going to happen with college costs like we're going to figure that out in 18 years we want to have
another baby right now um the more that you have people shouldering that risk together i live in a neighborhood where
at my Catholic church any mom who has a baby automatically gets 10 meals from the parish you know people sign up the
more people take bigger risks together and we may not go to Mars you know with the rockets but you have the sense of I
can take on things that I don't know if I can sustain all by myself and we all wind up the richer for it because we
step in when the other person falters we expect other people will love us not despise us for our need and that they'll
love our children and want to support us in having them and I think it's that lack of trust that both one's own
children are lovable by people who are not you or that you will be lovable when you need help as a mother that makes
people so fearful even in the face of material prosperity medical advances etc
and you almost hear the way people kind of reach for reasons to articulate why it's unsafe or bad to be a parent
maternal mortality is very high you know it's higher than it could be but it's very low historically well prices are
high job markets are unstable there are challenges again this is one of the best possible times to be alive
and America is one of the best possible places to live what I think people articulate is this deep sense that other
people won't care for them or that when they are vulnerable they will be tossed aside like trash in exactly the way
we're learning to treat the elderly and then you reach for medical or material excuses for that deep sense of
uncertainty but I think it comes out of our relationships with others yeah well I really appreciate your time
uh we came like I said we came across you on Substack i love your writing that is you can be found then on Substack at
other feminisms correct that's right other feminisms.com and you can find me in October yes and and plug your book
real quick with my new book uh the dignity of dependence and this is making the case for a pro-women fully pro-women
feminism uh that we can't have a vibrant reality based feminism unless we're
advocating for women as women rather than women as defective men great leia
Labresco Sergeant really appreciate your time and your words and you articulate things very well thanks so much thank
you so much
