"There may be hair-dyed snow on the mountain, but there's still fire in the furnace, baby!"
Posted on 05/30/2007 11:21:26 AM PDT by qam1
Contradictory messages about women's fertility are breeding like rabbits this week. In largely-Catholic Brazil, the government is subsidizing birth control pills so poor women can afford the contraceptive, despite a recent visit by Pope Benedict XVI, who mainly used his time to condemn abortion, contraception and sex outside marriage. In China, officials are rounding up rural, pregnant women and conducting forced abortions to enforce the mandatory one child policy.
In Canada, on the other hand, I'm the problem. Thirty-something. Childless. And a threat to Canada's future economic well being. The nation's fertility rate has plummeted to 1.53 children per woman, and Maclean's has published the latest cry of alarm: "Hey Lady! What will it take to make you breed? Your government needs to know."
The culprits, according to the article, are female education and fiscal autonomy, secularization, birth control, Sex and the City, a heightened desire for personal freedom and the angst that comes of bringing a child into a dangerous world. "In a hyper-individualistic, ultra-commodified culture like ours, motherhood, for better and worse, is less a fact of life than just another lifestyle choice."
You don't have to read much between the lines to discern the big class bias behind all of this hand wringing. Stats actually show that young, unmarried, uneducated, non-professional women are doing just fine in the baby department. The elitist worry seems to be that the "right" kind of woman is forgoing kids. Read: middle class and up.
Baby economics?
The Maclean's story goes on to crunch the economic equation such women face -- and believe me, I've done the numbers myself.
The cost of a kid ranges from $260,000 to $1.6 million depending on whom you talk to. Women lose income when they have a child, unlike men, the "motherhood penalty," of about 20 per cent per year. Kids are the "new glass ceiling," only 74 per cent of women who leave the work force are able to return, and only 40 per cent of those return to full time, professional jobs. Mothers are 44 percent less likely to be hired than non-mothers with the same resume, experiences and qualifications. So not surprisingly, while the majority of male senior execs have kids, the majority of female execs don't. In short, women bear the costs -- financial and career -- of having children. "These days, it's not just a matter of a woman wanting children, it's a matter wanting them at the expense of everything else she's worked for."
What solutions flow from this analysis? Cash incentives don't work to address the problem, (paging Mr. Harper) but the French experiment does. Among many other benefits, the government provides an extensive, free child care system where parents can leave children on a moment's notice, a calibrated income-tax rate for families, and a tax deduction for in-home child care help. The fertility rate has soared to 2.0 from 1.8 in just two years. And some feminists say the real victory is that women no longer shoulder alone the social burden of reproduction.
Fine, let's say we wave a magic wand and make all that happen in Canada. The financial and career barriers have disappeared like a stinky diaper in one of those diaper genie things. There's stimulating, free daycare. I can keep working part time and spend time with my pretend child. I can keep climbing the career ladder, rung per rung, with my child-free sisters....
All well and good. But next time my friends and I get together to discuss the baby question, I'd invite the editors of Maclean's, and any wonk they'd like to bring along, to join us. They would hear a conversation very different from the one reflected in their input-output, incentives-driven analysis.
They would hear women struggling to reconcile head and heart.
Real conversation
When my other child-free but child-keen friends get together we don't talk about having kids to stimulate the economy, provide skilled workers and pay for boomers to have hip replacement surgery. We don't consider it our duty to solve the "crisis" caused by boomers retiring without enough young people to pay for their medicare. We don't lie awake at night fretting over the looming labour shortage, even if Canada does wind up, as projected, 1.2 million workers short by 2020.
We don't imagine it our purpose in life to produce labourers, consumers and taxpayers.
What we talk about a lot is whether it is morally right to have a child, given what we know about the state of planet.
My friends and I talk about how people like us in developed countries are vacuuming up the world's resources. We belong to the 10 per cent of the world population who consume 90 per cent of the Earth's resources. We talk about global overpopulation. We talk about children in other countries who don't have enough to eat or access to medicine.
Kind friends have soothed some of those concerns. Some have offered, brightly, that we might find real solutions to looming environmental apocalypse quicker than we think. Others have told me I should feel entitled to do what makes me happy. Hey, you're only here once! And some have provided this reassurance: if I create and raise a happy, healthy person with a small footprint who respects others then that's a kind of service to the planet.
Thanks, everyone. So far, though, your lullaby is still not quite strong enough to convince me.
What I would need to breed are reasons based on ethics not economics. That's how I've approached other personal decisions like which career to pursue, or even what clothing to wear.
THAT MAKES 19 GRANDKIDS FOR ME!!!!!!!
Hey xs, check out the tagline in #50
:)
LOL! “Bellicose babushkas,” or as we’d say in English, “warlike grannies”! I hope to be one someday.
Hell, yeah! I have eight healthy children, with no illnesses more serious than ear infections or strep. (Thank you, God, for antibiotics.)
What planet are these women ON?
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!
A high percentage of the children of middle-class parents will be middle-class or better. A high percentage of the children of chronic welfare recipients will never earn a middle-class income. It is the children of the middle class who provide the structure of American society. If the ratios drift too far towards unproductive consumers, the society collapses
Congratulations to the parents - and you!
Baby #6 is due at the end of October for us. We’re too busy raising children to complain about overpopulation and depleting the world’s resources.
What we talk about a lot is whether it is morally right to have a child, given what we know about the state of planet.
____________________________________________________________
If you really have conversations along these lines.....please please DO NOT BREED!
LOL, I just saw this movie about 2 weeks ago..while I felt my brain lose a few IQ points, there’s no doubt he was on to something.
It has electrolytes!
:)
Well, get busy. The planet needs replenishing.
Another possible problem is the following: In the last 50 years, the total tax burden of the average family has roughly doubled. This has caused both parents to work to maintain their lifestyles.
At the same time, the government safety net has taken the place of the family safety net.
Therefore, cut the size of government and the resulting tax burden half.
If only we could elect a GOP President and Congress. /oh, wait, we already tried that. Things got worse.
But not whether it's morally right to have an abortion.
No mixed up ethics here.
My life is a mess right now!
In 100 years, nobody will care about how wealthy you were. Nobody will remember what kind of job you had. Nobody will care about what kind of person you were.
All that they'll know of you is the quality of children you left behind.
Or not in the case of dingbats like this one.
WOOOOHOOO! Congrats A! (And your daughter and grandd of course ;) )
Best of luck to the bunch of you!
While government policies supportive of families (especially two-income families, the ones that are doing less reproducing) will indeed enlarge family size, it can only go so far. Industrialization of society has changed the basic reason behind having a flock of kids.
"Be fruitful and multiply," works for an agricultural society, where each mouth to feed came with a pair of hands, and a pair of feet to bring in the harvest, and where a substantial number of offspring are going to die prior to reaching reproductive age, but that rule just doesn't make sense in the modern world.
True. Unless of course you are an illegal alien from Mexico or the middle east. Each mouth to feed comes with a pair of hands to mooch off of industrialized society.
Please, lady. You and your friends? DON’T have kids!
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