Bad Politics Are The Problem, Not Childless Adults

The main barriers to parenthood are political and economic. The right wants to pretend that cultural resistance from espresso-martini libs is equally to blame.

Let me riff off a Twitter thread that’s going just viral enough to make people mad. Responding to a clip of JD Vance disparaging his opponents as “childless cat ladies,” Atlantic writer Tyler Austin Harper argues that, while the right pushes policies that are hostile to families, some liberals also have a cultural aversion to having children.

“A small but vocal quadrant of the professional class within the democratic base is in the grip of a deeply narcissistic, hedonistic, anti-child ideology that sees kids—theirs and other people’s—as a drain on the good life and a threat to their good times,” Harper tweets. “It’s off-putting.”

I want to respond to this line of thinking without going too long on Harper’s tweets, which would feel a little weird and specific, especially because he’s not the only person making this argument. It’s true that some people don’t want kids. That’s their right, even when those people are annoying about it (and overwhelmingly, people aren’t). But even the most cartoonishly r/childfree people are not really changing the superstructure of American family life. The real barriers to starting and raising a family in the U.S. are political and economic—and largely the work of right-wing policies that imperil and impoverish parents.

The right needs to portray supposed left-wing cultural resistance to parenthood as equal-to or worse-than material obstacles to parenthood, because those obstacles are desirable to the right. 

Conservatives like JD Vance have a vested interest in portraying the right as the last bastion of the straight, nuclear family, and the left as a swamp of hedonistic perverts or sexless “cat ladies.” It’s not that conservatives like children any more than their political rivals do; it’s that the right’s goal for society is a hierarchical system in which women are a social and economic underclass who can have their labor exploited and their mobility minimized. A program of obligatory motherhood, combined with the conservative erosion of the social safety net, is a quick way to frog-march an entire gender into this deliberate disadvantage.

Conservatives struggle to engage honestly with women’s objections to this program because it means acknowledging that this program is, well, objectionable. Instead, they’re often left dismissing childless women as frivolous layabouts who are too attached to their freedoms. (“Freedom” is derogatory in this usage, not to be confused with right-wing freedom as it manifests in the ability to open-carry an AR-15 in Chipotle.) Those dismissals can take the form of mocking working women as aspiring “girlbosses” or deriding their purchases as representative of shallow, femme materialism (if you read Harper’s thread, clock that reference to “espresso martinis” lol).

There is, certainly, a minority of people in all political factions that genuinely dislikes kids and wants them purged from public spaces. These people are annoying and I’ve written about them already. But they are also not the major forces shaping parenthood! I really don’t think about these people unless they’re rude to my kids, and even then, good riddance!

It’s not even accurate to suggest that women are opting out of motherhood en masse. As I’ve written before, much of the decrease in U.S. birth rates comes from a sharp drop in teen pregnancies in recent decades. People still are having children, but fewer and on their own terms, after establishing careers in the 20s in 30s.

As writer Aaron Bady flagged on Twitter (I assume related to this discourse), we’re not seeing a huge cultural aversion to parenthood. We’re seeing people make more deliberate choices about parenthood.

“A lot of people that had kids 50 years ago didn't want them and had them because oppressive social forces gave them no choice,” Bady tweeted. “Now that women have more options--including not having kids--about 5-10% more  women are choosing not to have kids. There are a lot of things in society that I find concerning. That whereas 18 out of 20 women in my mom's graduating class would eventually have kids, only like 16 or 17 will from mine... who gives a shit”

If a childless person, facing political and financial obstacles to parenthood, decides not to have kids and instead drink more espresso martinis, who cares? Their choice doesn’t affect me as a mother. Our shared political challenges do.