Jenny Brown

When House Speaker Paul Ryan urged U.S. women to have more children, and Ross Douthat requested "More babies, please," they openly expressed what U.S. policymakers have been discussing for decades with greater discretion. Using technical language like "age structure," "dependency ratio," and "entitlement crisis," establishment think tanks are raising the alarm: if U.S. women don't have more children, we'll face an aging workforce, slack consumer demand, and a stagnant economy. Feminists generally believe that a prudish religious bloc is responsible for the fight over reproductive freedom in the U.S., but hidden behind this conventional explanation is a dramatic fight over women's reproductive labor. On one side, elite policymakers want an expanding workforce reared with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid women's work. On the other side, women are refusing to produce children at levels desired by economic planners. With little access to childcare, family leave, health care, and with insufficient male participation, U.S. women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike. In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., women have not yet realized the potential of our bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for winning full access to abortion and birth control, and for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.

The Hidden Fight Over Women's Work

Birth Strike

Katy Watkins

The birth rate is a topic in lots of other countries. So why don't U.S. policymakers more openly discuss our birth rate? It's one thing for a government to say, as Sweden and France have, we think the birth rate is too low, so we’re going to extend paid parental leave and institute free public childcare. It's another to say, our birth rate is too low so we're going to make abortions harder to get, make birth control expensive, keep sex education out of the schools, and in case you get any ideas, we're going to prosecute women suspected of aborting their pregnancies themselves. The first sounds like a country yoư'd want to live in, the second sounds like one you'd want to flee.

One obstacle to understanding the value of our childbearing and rearing work is the utter individualization of it in our country. While the whole society gains the benefits—and especially employers—the costs are privatized onto parents, especially women.

Hardly anyone thinks of the work and care required to raise a child as a community responsibility, a community benefit, or a common good. Raising children is primarily portrayed as a lifestyle choice, like an expensive hobby or an exotic pet, instead of a needed job that parents take on at great individual expense and which the larger community, because it benefits, should support and assist.

This fiction that children are only an individual concern serves the employing class well. Budget cutters attack funding for parks and libraries, for after-school programs, for schools themselves. How do they get away with it? Blame the parents: Why should the rest of us pay for your expensive hobby? And U.S. parents tell themselves: Well, we should have known what we were getting into. After all, we "chose" to have children.

To make up for the cuts, parents try to make things better for their kids by putting in more work and resources. School lunches made with cheap, unhealthy ingredients? Make the lunches yourself before work. No after school programs? “Flex” your work time and resume work after the kids go to bed. Parks closed and library hours cut? Enlist grandparents and other family members to do childcare. New costs for kids to participate in sports or school extras? Get a weekend job. Schools cut staff? “Volunteer” in the classroom. Meanwhile little is asked of the employing class, and they give even less.

The average childcare bill in the U.S. is $9,589 a year, slightly more than in-state college tuition. That U.S. parents are made to bear these costs is a political choice. In other countries, childcare is free like public schools.

Black feminist scholar Dorothy Roberts describes the devastating effect on families in her book Shattered Bonds. She writes: “The child protection approach is inextricably tied to our society's refusal to see a collective responsibility for children's welfare.... Thousands of poor families in this country lack the income to meet their children's basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter and live in a deprived environment that is dangerous for children. The child welfare system hides the systemic reasons for families' hardships by laying the blame on individual parents' failings.”

Because child rearing appears to be an individual concern, people complain if they are asked to help. “Why should have to pay for property taxes for schools when I don't have any kids?” is the refrain of many an anti-tax commentator. Well, because those kids are going to pick up your garbage, install your internet, and zap your tumor, not just when you're old but in ten to fifteen years.

What "pro-family'" really means is families instead of government: Cut government, and put the work on families. And by "families" they mean women, and women's unpaid labor.

If one in four of our births is unintended, with our intentions thwarted by lack of contraception and restricted abortion rights, then the U.S. birth rate is being kept up by a coercion quotient much larger than that in other countries. Explanations about religiosity, optimism, and patriotism are unnecessary: if we had the same high rate of successful contraceptive use they have in Europe, our birth rate would drop to the levels that have panicked some European governments into providing universal childcare and other programs.

To get the things that we need to make childbearing and child-rearing fair, we will need to see that we're not just making bad choices within a fundamentally sound system. It is not our 

 failures to get an adequate job or relationship, the right kind of health insurance, or the right childcare arrangement; it is a 

 failure to provide the things that mothers and all parents need to carry out the necessary work of bearing and raising children. And it's not a failure in the sense of an oversight: It is a carefully maintained economic arrangement in which a powerful class of rich people benefit from our work but do not contribute to it.

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