Talk to Me Nicely
Unsolicited Advice for J. D. Vance.
Editor’s Note:
Today we have a contribution by , the pen name of a longtime Wisdom of Crowds commenter, who is also a sharp writer with a crackerjack Substack of her own. Here she intervenes in the debate over falling birth rates, which regular readers will know is a big topic for the Crowd. Enjoy! — S.R.
How many times in the last few weeks have I heard the broad strokes of the same story: “No one is having babies”? Millennials are paralyzed by narcissism and indecision. J.D. Vance thinks there’s too many childless cat ladies who don’t have a stake in the future of America. The discourse on childlessness and feminism is vast, but still I felt alone in my personal understanding of the fertility crisis. Though I belong to that same indecisive generation, my upbringing guaranteed that I never felt any uncertainty about motherhood for myself. By most measures, I am both the target audience and a champion of the pronatal goals of the Right: I am religious, unmarried and still of childbearing age, raised both to expect and desire a life married with children. Why then do I feel so alienated by the Right, when I might otherwise be useful to their cause?
I felt a familiar sting at Vance’s words the first time I heard them. I grew up in a conservative evangelical sect, whose narrow norms allowed for only two paths for women: marriage and children or monastic life as a homeless, celibate minister. Over the years as I watched the other single women in my community mature and build their lives, I internalized a practical truth: No outward display of righteousness was enough. Not wearing the right clothes, not showing up to church, not attending every event, every funeral, every potluck — no volume of work was sufficient to broadcast righteousness without either marriage or a role in the ministry first secured. I left my church in part because its ideas around purpose and meaning felt constricting — incomplete. Still, as someone whose life has been shaped by conservative values, I feel some emotional kinship with the conservative movement writ large. And yet here was one of the rising stars of the conservative movement reminding me that I would get no respect as long as I did not first conform to their strict definition of propriety.
J.D. Vance and the faction of the Right he represents is not mistaken in identifying the question of relative meaning at the heart of the fertility crisis even in his negative characterization of childless women as “miserable,” contrasting them with “normal Americans.” Christine Emba’s recent essay on this topic touches on the impotence of statistics and policy in the face of what is fundamentally a different sort of question: “If people are going to have children, they need more than a hunch that human life is valuable,” she writes. Ann Manov, in her review of Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s new book on the fertility crisis, reiterates this point, saying of fellow millennials: “We don’t know whether to have children, or when, or why.” But by reducing meaning to such rudimentary, transactional terms, the Right loses its ability to influence the question of demographic decline. They are missing the point. Unable to effectively define and prescribe an inclusive forward path for a population that by every analysis is either hungry for meaning or satiated to the point of inaction by the meaning they have already created for themselves, the Right ends up worse off than where they began, alienating their opponents and offering cold comfort to women who would otherwise readily align with their cause.
The Right’s focus on motherhood as the highest form of meaning constructs a world for women even smaller than the world I emerged from. It is not that the Right declares childless women meaningless, but that they hold claim to less meaning than mothers and so too hold claim to less of a material stake in life. This makes sense on material terms. If you have a baby, then you have more to demand. However, this framework does not extend to intangibles like purpose, dignity, or worth. By tying meaning and the material world in this way, and granting more dignity to motherhood than to any other calling, the Right instrumentalizes reproduction and undermines the very meaning they wish to ascribe, painting a pragmatic but transactional vision for the future of the American family. I think of my former ministers, nun-like and wholly devoted to a life of spiritual service, who would still have fallen short of the Right’s ideal.
Just as I longed for a place of dignity in my former community, so too do men and women (including childless cat ladies of all kinds) long for a place of dignity in their respective lives. I would hope conservatives can conjure up a forward path built on a rhetoric of greater empathy and inclusivity, with language that divorces natalism from partisanship, religion, or any moral weight. If the Right can find a pronatal lens that moves beyond cold policy and rigid moralizing, and are able to center the beauty of family without degrading the meaning others have found without children, then they might create a greater well of hope for family life in potential future mothers and fathers.
They would also do well to examine some of the pre-conditions for maternal happiness in order to construct a more effective message for all Americans. I tweeted the other day that I would have a baby right now if the Republicans ran on a platform of subsidizing men who would treat me well and love me forever. My sentiment — though exaggerated for likes on X — still communicates something essential. The solution to the fertility crisis rests on more than just future self-consciously “traditional” wives. Men too have a critical role to play in solving demographic decline.
If the birth rate truly is a problem, then the Right must be clear-eyed about our current state and likely future, and recognize all the factors at play, including the great spiritual disillusionment that plagues every aspect of modern life. We must build a new path to address the modern fertility crisis and all its component fears and wounds: a path that pulls us out of the past and out of strictures of rigidity or reaction. It lies on those who are uncomfortable with such rigidity to reject cold policy, a one-size-fits-all narrative or a rhetoric of shame, and to offer a new and inclusive vision of family for men and women.
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Great post and thanks for the link to Manov’s review. The whole JD Vance debacle shows that it is not just childless millennials who “act like eternal children”. In a better world, the way that online rhetoric seems to have warped Vance’s moral sensibility would have forced an honest reckoning with the erosion of the norm that every human being, whatever their choices, is entitled to being treated with dignity and respect. This ideal has never been perfectly implemented, but the Internet seems to have convinced a lot of people that they bear no responsibility for upholding it (because there is always a provocation from the other side that lets them off the hook).
"I would have a baby right now if the Republicans ran on a platform of subsidizing [attractive] men who would treat me well and love me forever."
There, I fixed that for you.