“Babies are life, babies are adventure, babies are the future, babies are brothers and sisters for other babies.” — Greg Sheridan, The Australian, November 21, 2023
Like many good conservatives, The Australian’s foreign editor loves babies and is distressed that Australians are having fewer of them. In his column last week titled “We need babies more than we do migrants”, Greg Sheridan fretted about Australia’s fertility rate in which the number of babies per woman has been dwindling since the mid-1970s when procreation became less of an inevitability and the rate of education for women and girls accelerated.
Sheridan claims that no-one should be criticised for their choice, but then says these choices are made “in the face of coercive feminist and green ideology that depicts children as enemies of self-fulfilment and destroyers of the planet, and in an atmosphere where the entire Western project is demonised”.
I guess this kind of hysteria is a response to people who are anxious about the idea of procreating in a climate crisis or who resist parenthood as the default. In other words, people like me. I’m a woman of reproductive age who has thought deeply about this decision — hell, I wrote 80,000 words about it — and interviewed dozens of people about their hopes and fears when it comes to answering the mother of all questions: “Should I become a parent?” Some became parents, others might and others won’t, but they all cared about babies more than Sheridan.
As a former reproductive rights and healthcare reporter, I would never underestimate just how much conservatives love babies — in fact, judging from their allocation of political energy, the closer you are in age to a zygote than a mother the higher your worth! Though this isn’t to say mothers (and the unpaid labour they provide) aren’t romanticised by conservatives; you can idealise something without valuing it.
In every parliamentary debate I’ve reported on, bodily autonomy was discussed by politicians who fetishised motherhood as a noble and selfless pursuit while supporting policies that made life harder for mothers. You can dehumanise someone by putting them on a pedestal because saints don’t have needs. They don’t need climate policy to ensure their child won’t be huffing bushfire smoke or fleeing floods every few years for the rest of their life; they don’t need paid parental leave; they don’t need affordable childcare or housing; they don’t need freedom from punitive welfare programs; and they definitely don’t need safe, affordable and legal access to choose whether they prevent or continue a pregnancy.
The climate crisis came up in every interview I did on the topic, but first let’s address Sheridan’s fears about a “coercive feminist” ideology — because that sounds scary.
Let’s assume Sheridan isn’t just another man sulking that not everyone with a uterus considers it their God-given purpose to use it to procreate, and let’s take a generous reading of Sheridan’s interpretation of the F-word, trusting that he understands it as a constellation of diverse movements with often different priorities. Perhaps in the pages of The Australian, however, he is most frequently exposed to a kind of mainstream neoliberal girlboss “feminism” via profiles of mining she-E-Os, a feminism increasingly out of step with social ideals of equality, rights and justice — and as American studies Professor Catherine Rottenberg points out, one more often compatible with the political and economic agendas of free-market capitalism, consumerism and privatisation.
Under the logic of this corporate feminism, the enlightening, empowering and stimulating potential of paid work is celebrated while motherhood and barriers to making it accessible and tenable, particularly for women without money, can be deprioritised. In abandoning the battles of earlier waves of feminism, which sought to fight against domestic exploitation, this feminism often plays handmaiden to capitalism. As do conservatives. So many women I’ve spoken to are aware of a stubborn ideology that treats unpaid domestic labour and caring work not as work at all, but as something done out of love — see childcare sector salaries — and so need not be recognised or compensated as such.
That is why my work as a journalist is visible, valorised and waged (because historically it has been done by men), whereas my work as a mother, should I choose it, would not be. There are plenty of feminists seeking to address this by pushing for policies that make parenthood tenable for more people — including men who might want to be primary carers — but I’m sure Sheridan wasn’t talking about them!
Interestingly, according to the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), as fertility rates have declined in high-income countries there’s been a reversal in the relationship between women’s labour supply and fertility — so in countries where more women are working, more babies are born. The CEPR researchers noted four factors that facilitate combining work and parenthood: family policy, cooperative fathers, favourable social norms, and flexible labour markets. As John Burn-Murdoch noted in the Financial Times, parental childcare is a crucial part of this equation: “In countries where men do a third of childcare and housework, total fertility rates are roughly a third higher than in those where they do just a fifth.”
Sheridan gives passing thought to the economics of childrearing by praising John Howard and Peter Costello for their baby bonus payment. The scheme — established in 2004 and scrapped a decade later — is estimated to have had a small effect on birth intentions and rates, though another study found the program might have had no effect. Regardless, it is far from a long-term policy response to the types of hopes and fears the people I interviewed expressed about their hesitation in growing their families. It always used to amaze me, in my time reporting on religiously backed “crisis pregnancy centres”, that the staff would seek to bribe women in precarious situations into continuing a pregnancy by offering a few free onesies or a car seat. And then what of the next 18 years?
Sheridan offers nothing constructive in what might actually incentivise parenthood. As Angela Priestley wrote in Women’s Agenda, his column did not mention paid parental leave policy or accessible early childhood education — both solutions with more evidence behind them than cash transfers — nor did it acknowledge people who want to have a baby but can’t due to infertility. Once again, not to doubt his credentials, but a real baby lover would want all babies in quality affordable early childhood education and to have as much time as possible with their parents before they head back to work.
And now to the “green ideology” spooking and guilt-tripping of women out of becoming mothers. For a long time, a person without kids — usually a childless woman — was a symbol of selfishness, an uncaring wench incapable of putting someone else first. Sheridan is not wrong when he suggests the climate crisis has created the conditions for a new kind of shame to grow, in which self-sacrifice can look like a family with no or very few children. We have been periodically reminded that the worst thing you can do when it comes to carbon emissions isn’t boarding a plane or eating meat but having a child. But that debate has matured. People know a huge portion of greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to a few fossil-fuel companies (and they’re more aware than ever that the term carbon footprint was popularised two decades ago by British Petroleum).
The idea that we should abridge our desires for the size of our families and communities before transforming our energy systems was increasingly peculiar to the people I interviewed, whose individual guilt had transformed into a collective rage against the corporations and governments failing to take action on the climate crisis. These people weren’t so much dithering because they thought their hypothetical kids would be “destroyers of the planet”, as Sheridan suggests, but because of the ambient dread they felt about what a world looks like once we cross a critical threshold within a few years. They loved their potential babies so much they were thinking about what their lives might be like when they’re no longer babies and in their millions striking from school, still demanding action on climate change.
“Adults keep saying, ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” activist Greta Thunberg told those gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2019. “And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
Yet, as philosopher Tom Whyman has pointed out, Thunberg was addressing the business and political elite gathered in the Swiss Alps, not us. “Their hope, she is suggesting, is toxic — like bad air, choking out the stuff that we can breathe,” he writes in his book Infinitely Full of Hope.
We need, as Thunberg points out, to found an almost entirely new world — just in order to survive. But they, who benefit from the existing order of things in such disproportionate magnitude that they might realistically expect to survive a massive crisis in the provision of basic resources, have a vested interest in our never doing so.
Our hope is rooted in the potential of transforming our world, Whyman insists. The hope of the very elite is founded on the likelihood that we cannot. Sheridan wants more babies because they signal hope — “a society that turns its back on babies has lost self-confidence, self-belief and a sense of purpose” — but for many people they want a society that feels sustainable for their families before they have babies.
I know conservatives such as Sheridan are ready to prove their love for babies, and I’m sure he is rallying the troops at The Australian and imploring them to start writing fairly and accurately on the climate crisis, the lack of affordable childcare or parental leave options for many families, the policy settings placing millions of Australians in housing stress and the cost-of-living situation in which households suffered the largest fall in living standards of any advanced economy over the past year.
In the meantime, those of us who are ambivalent, indecisive and anxious about this decision, many of whom might never become parents but who have thought deeply about the choice nonetheless, will show our love for members of the next generation by committing to a better world for them.
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