Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s new book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice is an eye-opening study of the contemporary mindset that regards children today as at best useful goods and at worst positive bads. Published before the controversy over J.D. Vance’s observations, it generally tends in the direction of endorsing childlessness—for “practical” purposes. Read it if you wish to slosh around in the minds of those who find Vance’s concern over falling US birth rates “weird.”

One point particularly struck me: the authors’ argument connecting the Dobbs decision to childlessness. The crux of it is that many women—including those who might otherwise be receptive to motherhood—have now decided against it unless motherhood comes with the guarantee of a nine-month, no-questions-asked return policy. In other words, abortion-on-demand through birth.

Berg and Wiseman are not alone. The trope that motherhood is, er, inconceivable without an escape clause is now practically a defined article of faith on the pages of elite publications like the New York Times. What’s worse, Democratic demagogues have stoked that nexus with a constant drumbeat warning women of potential dangers pregnancy poses. Last spring, the Senate Judiciary Committee under Illinois Catholic Dick Durbin spent an entire (generally biased) afternoon focused on that topic.

The rhetoric around the 2024 election was especially alarming. Many women were intimidated into believing that carrying a child in 21st-century America was risky because competent medical care would not be afforded them should the pregnancy threaten their life. That of course was misinformation at its worst, but it fanned—and still does—the familiar flame that abortion must always be available as a “backup” to pregnancy.  It is frankly irresponsible, done for malign political purposes.

It also suggests a deeper, more subconscious phobia: Are we afraid of life?

In the case of parenthood, the answer, which has been apparent for over fifty years, is yes. It’s the unspoken underbelly of the “reliance on abortion” argument that Casey trotted out to claim Roe was irreversible. But I think the problem is bigger than that, and one which is especially challenging for the current generation in its childbearing years.

Today’s potential mothers and fathers largely grew up with antiseptic-toting “helicopter” parents, whose vision of childhood precluded skinned knees and snotty noses. And scraped hearts, which were remedied by what Berg and Wiseman, adopting philosopher Agnes Callard’s term, call “acceptance parenting,” where mom and dad are primarily hyperactive cheerleaders, not authoritative teachers. (See my discussion of “acceptance parenting” in my review of What Are Children For? here.

The residual effects of this approach to parenting—where children are paradoxically hovered over yet left to set their own rules and essentially raise themselves—on the generation on the cusp of parenthood today seem apparent. Every morning on the Washington Metro, I am struck by the demographic distribution of masks. Four years after the pandemic, the most likely person still to be wearing an N95 respirator in public is a twenty- or thirty-something female. I am unaware of any studies that indicate a particular pathological susceptibility of that population, so why the mask? Secular virtue signaling in an abbreviated nonreligious burqa? I doubt it’s so the wearer can more successfully pull off crimes, though some jurisdictions are now requiring faces to be visible.

Or is the reason for the mask simply fear that other people’s breathing could be a life-threatening menace? If that’s the case, imagine what pregnancy might represent to such a mindset?

No doubt there will be those who brand these observations “weird,” because their own fixation on “autonomy” and “choice” will argue “to each her own.” But a social ethos is created by the sum total of “each of her own’s” choices, and that sum total seems to suggest that many of those now at the stage of passing on life are afraid of it.

A closing observation on post-electoral reactions: What America has been seeing on social media from Donald Trump’s opponents following his reelection has been, frankly, weird. Sure, there are the perennial threats to “move out of America” (always promised, rarely delivered). But other actions—hysterical weeping and swearing, looking for bracelets or tattoos to “identify” other “allies,” threats by women to shave their heads, the “4b” pledge (no men, dating, sex, or babies, a movement started in South Korea where “no” begins with a “b”)—are not normal behaviors. They are profoundly weird and disproportionate reactions to a political outcome, ones that only make sense in the context of a religion, which is why such behavior can be described as cultish. I’ve argued elsewhere that this cult is a substitute faith, an ersatz religion in which those who have “lost their religion” (to borrow from the old R.E.M. song) have relocated it in politics. It is arguably a death cult, at the very least a harbinger of what St. John Paul II called the “culture of death.”

Why? Well, part of its appeal came from Kamala Harris’s unswerving commitment to abortion-on-demand, the only position on which she was generally clear and unequivocal. Part came from a substantial investment in abortion activism, ranging from Democrats linking their electoral fortunes to abortion advocacy to efforts to pass abortion referenda in multiple states. And the pledge to eschew men, sex, and babies clearly professes faith in isolated, individualistic barrenness. (It’s also somewhat not credible because, as one wag observed, if its proponents really had such self-control, abortion would probably not have been their number one issue.) In any event, it’s clear that the other—especially a different other—is the enemy. One social media photo captured it well: a Harris activist screaming at a stroller-bound toddler.

We’re far past the point of “I’ll be me and you be you.” There are darker sides to this mindset, which society cannot simply ignore or write off to individual decision-making. Because enough bent mindsets can reshape a society, and based on its current trajectory, our society is on a journey towards extinction. Of that, however, we should not be surprised when we insist, as Berg, Wiseman, and mainstream Democratic thought all suggest, that maternity is a risk not to be ventured absent a legal (and lethal) nine-month opt-out.