Suzy Weiss on the Childless Lives of Young American Women

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, a number of young American women are pursuing the stuff of dystopian novels: the prospect of a childless future. These young women don’t just choose to avoid motherhood—they actively embrace that choice as a marker of their identity. Some embrace the label “child-free,” with the implication that they don’t want to have children themselves but are okay with other people doing so, while others are positively “anti-natalist”—they don’t want to have children and they also think that it’s immoral for anyone else to do so. Many of these women have even turned to surgical procedures to ensure they will never become mothers.

It’s difficult to estimate how large this group is, but it's likely quite small. Nevertheless, despite its small size, it reveals something about American culture and its attitude toward the tradeoffs of family. What is it like to see the world as someone who is ideologically committed to not having children? This week, the writer Suzy Weiss joins the show to discuss a recent article of hers that tries to answer that question. In conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, she explains how the child-free think, what motivates them, and what their existence says about mainstream American society.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Back in 1993, the British writer P.D. James wrote a novel called the Children of Men,
0:15.9	which was set in the then-far-off year of 2021. premise of James' novel is that in the year 1995,
0:24.0	a mysterious illness rendered all the men in the world sterile, and that the last baby on
0:29.4	earth was born that year. It's now a quarter century later. The youngest person on the planet
0:34.8	is 26 years old, and the world has become a very different
0:38.0	place, with politics, culture, the economy, every domain of human life, utterly unlike
0:43.8	what it was when humanity could imagine a future.
0:47.3	In the novel, there are mass euthanasia gatherings, and the buildings that had formerly
0:52.7	housed schools stand empty.
0:55.0	Imagine there would never again be a third grader, or a first day of school.
0:59.0	The world had seen its last ever graduation.
1:03.0	Well, in the pages of P.D. James' brilliant novel, this is the stuff of dystopian worry,
1:08.0	and the novel surfaced a set of theological and cultural questions
1:12.1	about the civilizational importance of parenthood, children, the past, and the future.
1:17.0	Today, not in the fictional 2021 of P.D. James Imaginings, but in the real 2021, the prospect of a
1:23.9	childless future is being actively pursued by some number of young women who,
1:29.3	more than choose not to become mothers, actively embrace that choice as a marker of their identity.
1:35.3	Some embrace the label child-free, which means that they don't want to have children.
1:40.3	Others are positively anti-natalist, which means not only don't they want to have children, they also
1:46.7	think it's immoral for anyone to do so. Some of these women have turned, at a very young age,
1:51.9	to surgical procedures that ensure that they will never become mothers. This, in turn, has ceded
1:57.2	the ground for the growth of a niche medical industry that caters to them.
	...

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