Part II: Why is America's birthrate declining?

Becoming a parent was once a social norm. But today, more Americans than ever are ambivalent about having children. What could create a renewed sense of meaning in parenting?

Today, On Point: Why is America's birthrate declining?

Rachel Wiseman, managing editor of The Point, a Chicago-based literary magazine that publishes philosophical writing on everyday life and culture. Co-author of "What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice."

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: If you were to ask me why I had children, my honest answer would be I'm not really sure. I don't exactly have a rational, concrete reason. I just kind of always knew I wanted to be a mother. I felt some kind of ineffable drive to have a baby, and raise a child, and love it like crazy, and maybe selfishly feel like a part of me would exist far beyond my own future.

And when I once asked my dad, who believed in logic as the superior way to interface with all of life, I asked him, hey dad, Why did you and mom decide to have kids? He smiled and said, Daughter, it took mother nature five billion years to reach the state of genetic perfection found in me and your mother.

It would be wrong not to pass that perfection on. Sorry, sorry. That actually still makes me laugh. Because as the recipient of those genes, I can assure you I am far from perfect. Sorry, Dad. But my dad, the scientist, what was he doing there? He was jokingly acknowledging that people have kids for the same reason that any life form procreates.

It's the survival instinct. It's the genetic imperative of a species. But he was also, through laughter, acknowledging that he didn't really have a rational reason beyond that at all. Parenting is as hard as heck. He just loved his children. He couldn't make any more sense of it than that. So again, if we're honest, rationality almost never factors into people's conscious decisions to have children.

But rationality plays a very, very powerful role in why people consciously make the opposite choice not to have children, or a rational assessment of the state of the world is what drives many people to be anxious or ambivalent regarding whether or not they want to be parents. I'm talking about rational reasons such as having kids and raising them is very expensive in 21st century America.

Also, in 21st century America, social supports for families like child care, health  care, all of those things are fraying. And for women, especially, it might mean an ebb and flow to a career and lifetime income and advancement, if they want those things. Some people fear bringing a child into a politically divided world.

Or into a world where they can see only a future planet on fire, due to climate change. And almost never does the possibility, not the guarantee, of course, I'm stressing here the possibility, of children simply being a profound good, or of the future not being as dire as it seems today, or of the change that becoming a parent makes upon a person.

None of those things seem to penetrate this seemingly rationality-based anxiety for many Americans, especially under the age of 40. And especially for college educated, self-identified young liberals. Now, birth rates have been falling across the board in the United States for years, but for this group of Americans, the anxieties around having children seem particularly overwhelming.

So today, in the second of our two-day exploration on U.S. fertility rates and the question of meaning in parenting, we turn to Rachel Wiseman. She's the managing editor of The Point. A Chicago based literary magazine that publishes philosophical writing on everyday life and culture. She's also coauthor of the book, What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice. And she joins us from Chicago. Rachel, welcome to On Point.

RACHEL WISEMAN: It's so good to be here. Hi, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: So I gave everyone a little bit of my story about I don't actually really know why I had children other than I wanted them. Did you ever ask yourself those same questions?

WISEMAN: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. All the time. When I started writing this book with Anastasia, I was in my late twenties. And I didn't really know whether I wanted kids. If you really pressed me, I guess I would have said yeah, I suppose so, but it really didn't feel urgent. And the idea of starting a family seemed like it was opposed to all of these other priorities that I had and these ways that I was living.

And it felt really abstract. The idea of me being a mom. Sometimes people would tell me, Oh, don't worry about it. You'll feel some biological urge eventually. And you'll just suddenly, you'll know, it'll become clear. And as I was waiting, I started realizing that maybe it won't just happen.

Maybe it won't just happen to me. Maybe I have to think about it really intentionally. And it felt like intuitively the question of whether or not to have a parent, whether or not to become a parent was something that I really had to justify. I had to be really sure, but I also didn't exactly know how to articulate the question for myself.

And what was standing in my way.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, but that's different than the kind of ambivalence or anxiety that you and your co-author Anastasia Berg explore in the new book, right? Not being sure, that makes a lot of sense, right? We're not sure about a lot of things in life, but we eventually, in most cases, we eventually may decide to do them.

What, when you're talking about this question of anxiety around becoming a parent, tell me specifically more about what you mean and who you're talking about.

WISEMAN: Yeah. I think there are different groups of people who experience the ambivalence in different ways, right? So there are some people I think who shared my sense of not being sure, being in a position of maybe postponing the decision over and over again, to the point of it no longer being biologically feasible, potentially, for them to have children without interventions like IVF. Then there are people who are real fence sitters, who are trying to weigh the pros and cons. And thinking about things in terms of benefits and harms to their bank accounts, to their social lives, to their romantic prospects and their sense of self fulfillment.

And then there's an increasing number of people who are deciding explicitly that they want to be childless.

CHAKRABARTI: So this sounds like the utilitarian version of the question of whether or not to have children, right? If the decisions are being made along those sort of, again, I use the word rational, but measurable factors?

WISEMAN: I think what that mentality betrays is a really sort of fundamental shift. While for our parents generation, having kids was more or less the default of adulthood, it was understood as a cornerstone of being a mature person. Now it's considered kind of an option, right? It's a menu, it's one option in a very broad menu of potential life projects and choices that are seen as being on like an equal par. And when you are thinking about it in that kind of utilitarian way as benefits and harms, pros and cons, it's not a surprise that having children doesn't measure up. Because it's really hard.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. It's honestly beyond the ineffable aspects of having children and I'm speaking from my own experience. They changed me as a person. I can't imagine loving anybody more. It shifted my worldview as to what my purpose was on planet Earth. But these are not things that I can actually say.

And the dollar benefit of that is X, right? But I can definitely tell you how much they cost and the amount of time that trying to be a good mother has taken, and the tradeoffs that I've had to make in my career. But it's almost like an unfair set of comparisons, and these are apples and oranges things.

So why in your book, you and your co-author, Anastasia Berg, tried to explore why the apples, let's say, those sort of measurable things that may lead to ambivalence or anxiety, have taken on a greater importance in a particular group of people. Why do you think that is?

WISEMAN: Yeah. So before, having children was understood as part of the basic framework of what it meant to be a human being, right?

They understood themselves. People understood themselves in intergenerational terms, where they had a past and they had a future. And when they thought about their own personal lives, it wasn't just that they had parents, but they understood themselves as prospective parents. And these kinship relations were really important and constitutive of their very identity, now having children is seen as something that you have to weigh against lots of other equally valuable lifestyle choices, like travel, career, social life, romance, owning a house. And when you think about it in that way, given the fact that children, having children always involve sacrifices and risks, it means that having kids is something that people try to justify in terms of satisfaction, right?

That seems to be the only way that we can really understand it, within this kind of mind frame. But, of course, when you have kids, you open yourself up to lots of potential tragedy and risk and loss. And so we need to see if there's a way to recover or rediscover something within secular progressive tradition that would justify this choice on its own terms.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So I want to drive at something just to clarify what you just said. In the book, you and your co-author, you're not talking about everyone. You're really talking about, as I mentioned earlier, a specific group of Americans, right? As you say, Zoomers, Millennials, and Gen Xers, who are what, self-identified liberals or progressives?

WISEMAN: Most of the people we talked to, and we did these qualitative surveys of hundreds of people in those generational cohorts, and then also some in depth interviews. And we also look at kind of cultural products that we grew up with and were important to us in pop culture and literature.

And so there was a specific sort of social milieu in the U.S. that we were talking to, although we spoke to people across socioeconomic categories and this is also, importantly, a very global phenomenon, right? So countries like, it's not just in Western societies.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Rachel, you were describing the group that you were looking at here, and I take your point about birth rate declines and the rise of anxiety and ambivalence being a global phenomenon. That's absolutely right. But, for the sake of discussion today, we're focusing here on the United States. And I just want to be sure, because your books seem to be clearly focusing on this younger cohort. Or a couple of different generations. Most interestingly, almost all of them, more than 90% of them have a college degree. And 70% of them have a graduate degree.

Yes?

WISEMAN: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: How did that happen? And why?

WISEMAN: We were trying to find, we sent this out, very broadly. We weren't trying to do a nationally representative survey. We wanted to create a space where people who were thinking about this question, struggling with it, could have an opportunity to give open ended responses to why they were sitting on the fence or unsure about whether or not they wanted to have children. We even spoke to some parents who had a hard time explaining why they made that choice.

Kind of like you said in your intro earlier, Meghna. But I do want to emphasize that this is something that's happening across socioeconomic groups, across races in the U.S

There are a number of sociologists who have reported how this kind of logic of thinking of children as a potential risk or harm to a fulfilling life, something opposed to their very happiness.

That's something that has been pretty well documented in working class and lower class communities as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Fair. Fair. Absolutely. Working class Americans, middle income Americans, there has been this long term sort of inexorable decline in birth rate. And interestingly, the only place where we see anyone bucking that trend is in Americans whose household income is, what, above $400,000, right?

Birth rates there have actually been going up, which we'll just hold that thought in for a second. But I do want to, again, just to be clear, you talk to a lot of folks who are higher education, and it seems like your book is truly aimed at a particular set of anxieties and concerns amongst people who are self-identified progressives.

Yes?

WISEMAN: Yeah, that's right. Liberals and progressives for the most part. Yeah. I think there are some fairly readily available arguments within traditional, conservative, religious communities about why one ought to become a parent. And increasingly, within our milieu, those frameworks no longer hold water.

So we were interested in thinking what fills that gap?

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. Yes. So that is so important because yesterday in our first part of this twofer on parenting and meaning. We talked about how for women especially who choose to have much, many more kids than average, five plus, what unified them in the author's experience who we talked to yesterday was a framework provided by conventional religious belief.

And so it's very interesting to me. And I want to learn a lot more from you about, again, like you said, what happens in the absence of that framework. So in order to dive into that, Rachel, I just want to share some of the thoughts that our own listeners sent us, because we got a ton of responses to this question.

So let's go through a couple of them. First of all, this is Kayla Duran. She's from Los Alamos, New Mexico. And she told us that the expectations around marriage and having kids are just different today.

KAYLA: It's no longer a necessity it's more of a choice, and so you really have to love or care about that person in order to plan a relationship out and a family with.

I think in our grandparents' days, it was just something you did, whether you like the person or not. It was just an expectation that you had to meet.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Kayla Duran in Los Alamos, New Mexico. And Kayla, I just want to dovetail your point there. Having choice is actually a great thing, right? I mean, back in the day maybe people did not have a choice about whether children were going to be part of their lives.

Now, here's some interesting, a couple of related thoughts that we got on what I think actually is a major issue in many people's minds. And Rachel, you write about it in the book. So this is Mark Russell from Austin, Texas, who says there are two main reasons he and his wife have been hesitant to have children.

MARK: It's frustrating. It feels irresponsible if we can't keep up to bring a child into this world where they're going to be faced with our financial problems, plus all of the fears that the far right seems to be stoking constantly, the rights being taken away. If we had a daughter, what kind of world would she be living in?

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that was Mark in Austin, and here's Heidi in Boulder, Colorado.

HEIDI: I would love to see a world where I wanted to have kids, but we'd have to live in a world where stopping genocide isn't political or controversial and where we're actually working together to save this beautiful planet that we know and love.

And I'm just, I'm not seeing that happen.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Rachel, talk about that.

WISEMAN: Yeah. The kids question today has become so fraught for so many people, both personally, politically, socially and it's also become so polarized in our discourse. That's something Mark was talking about in his response to this question. But the discourse has hit a dead end. So in our book, we're really trying to help people navigate this question, because they're lost and confused. And there are a lot of different kinds of narratives that I think secular progressive people like me in America are exposed to, that don't necessarily help, right?

That it's just too expensive to have kids, that having kids will be a threat to one's romantic prospects or the happiness of one's marriage. Or that it's no longer even okay to have kids because of climate change political unrest. And one of the things that Kayla brought up in her reflection is this idea that a relationship has to be really stable and secure before one can even contemplate talking to one's partner about having kids. And that's something that we found too, in talking to a lot of people.

So there's this sort of widespread social script that dictates that pursuing romantic fulfillment needs to be separate from this idea of one's family timelines. I was told, oh, take your 20s to really find the right partner. And so, but what does that mean?

How do you know that you have the right person or that relationship is good enough to really weather the storms of parenthood. And I think what happens is a lot of people end up putting off those kinds of really serious and important discussions until very late into their relationships.

And sometimes that means six years into a committed, loving relationship, you have to have this really seismic conversation that has the potential to break up a relationship that is really meaningful to you.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And so then thinking about what Heidi in Boulder and Mark in Austin said, what really stands out to me with those two On Point listeners is that they are sharing their honest assessment of the state of the world right now, and there's lots of reasons to be unhappy with it, right?

Heidi is absolutely right. When she says we're living in a world where stopping genocide isn't a political conversation right now, or we're not actually working together to save this beautiful planet. Point taken. But what I struggle with, and help me understand again, this frameworks question is, I'm not sure the world will ever achieve a state of perfection, of political perfection.

Especially if we're talking about all of humanity working together towards one goal. It's just not going to happen. Why have we come to a point where the absence of that perfection is leading people to make major decisions about whether or not they're going to become parents?

Because we've lived through horrible periods in the past. History is full of them. But in the past, I wasn't, I guess I can't really think of a time where there was such widespread, a widespread response as we're seeing now, to not have kids in the face of those major challenges.

WISEMAN: I think any kind of worry about the future is also a worry about the goodness of the lives that we're leading today. It means something that for people, it's actually very difficult, when they think about, do I, is the world safe enough for me to bring a child into it? They're also asking themselves, is the life I'm living good? And I think increasingly, people are feeling like they cannot justify, the ways that we're living today, that life is wasteful or that their lifestyles are not benefiting the planet. That they're not doing enough to offset these kinds of concerns about geopolitical instability.

But like you said, there is no real, perfect time. Life has always been shot through with contingency. And so I think what you see overall, across these worries about money, about romance, about self-fulfillment, about feminism, about climate change and politics, right?

You see a real need to hold oneself to an almost unattainable standard of what it would mean to be ready and secure enough to have children.

CHAKRABARTI: Absolutely. And that's not fair to people, to hold themselves to that standard, because nobody can meet that. Period. Nobody. But I'm particularly fascinated why this is articulated most powerfully amongst people who self-identify as very liberal or progressive.

Because it seems to me to be in concert with overall reports of mental health distress, there's been multiple Pew studies, but at least one of them shows that people who say that they are very liberal report the highest percentage of needing medical help for mental health conditions, almost 40% percent of white, self-identified liberals say they have needed medical care for mental health conditions.

Is this part and parcel of that sort of overall liberals are more anxious trope, that we have now?

WISEMAN: I think that's part of it, but I also think that there's a real deep kind of crisis of faith in both our human, the idea of a human future and the idea of the present that we're living in right now.

So I think it's hard for people to really explain to themselves, what would I be passing on to my children, what kind of life and values would I be instilling in the next generation. And if you don't have good answers to that, it can really make it difficult to make that choice.

It can feel like so much is ad hoc, that you have to make all of these decisions and come up with this, kind of invent a new way of nurturing a human life, which of course is a huge, monumental personal decision, and also a real responsibility.

CHAKRABARTI: But the thing is that I wonder is, thankfully, none of the people who called us said, I'm a bad person, so I couldn't raise a child well.

I don't have the appropriate internal moral framework. In fact, many of them are making these very conscious decisions based on an internal moral framework, right? They do have some kind of foundation on which to think about the world, and they also have their own upbringings, right?

So why is there this, that seems to me, this should be adequate in terms of having a set of personal guidelines on how to try to raise a child in an imperfect world.

WISEMAN: Yeah. I think the fact that this is something that people are raising points to a really deep philosophical question that has always faced people when they've made this decision whether or not to have children. Which is human life good?

Is it worth perpetuating? The history of thought, going back to the ancient Greeks, through biblical times and up through today, there have been lots of people who have raised these kinds of questions and concerns about whether or not there's a way of justifying this choice, whether having children is legitimate. What is different now is that people are really raising it, not just in an abstract philosophical register, but really, when they're thinking about having kids, they feel like these anti-natalist concerns about climate, about politics, about feminism, for instance, are all things that they have to have sorted out.

CHAKRABARTI: But that will never happen to perfection, as you said. Again, I keep thinking about the cohort specifically that you're looking at. We're talking about highly educated folks, most of whom self-identify as liberal or progressive in this Zoomer to Gen X age range. At least two of those generations have been online from the start, right?

From their birth. And I wonder if this is also an outgrowth of just being very online. Because that is a world in which extremes are the norm. And anxieties are deliberately, algorithmically heightened, and it becomes, it's the air that you breathe when you've grown up in that kind of environment.

Could that be part of this?

WISEMAN: I think there are a lot of things that make life today anxiety ridden, right? Like you pointed to social media, that's definitely one important thing. That we're constantly comparing ourselves to other people. That were very online and this impacts our politics, of course, as well.

But also, yeah, this generation came of adulthood during the recession. So there's lots of stuff that economically makes them feel like, Oh, I really need to have this security. And then, yeah, just yesterday, or a couple of days ago, the Surgeon General said that parenting was in crisis, was a health crisis on par with cigarettes and HIV.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Rachel, I'm sorry I had to cut you off there, but you were right in pointing out that, what, just a couple of days ago, the Surgeon General called the stress that parents feel the equivalent to a public health crisis. So go ahead and complete that thought.

WISEMAN: We live in very anxious times, right?

Rates of anxiety are higher across the board than reported for previous generations. Now, I think there are, like, lots of potential explanations for that, but I think what we are trying to do is help people to move through that sense of stress, ambivalence, the idea that parenthood can only be a negative in one's life.

And to see, like, how might we be able to answer this question without necessarily having to rely on those older frameworks that might have supplied people with justifications before or the kinds of like social pressures that were present for women in earlier generations.

CHAKRABARTI: So about parenting being seen as only a negative, again, I come back to the importance of the digital information space, right? Because maybe this is too harsh of an assessment, but I feel like online, we basically have two big crops of parenting content. Let's call it three.

There's one, like all the bazillion websites and social media channels telling you how to be a good parent, right? Then there's the, like, mommy content of people who are perfect moms and telling you how to do it. And then there's the it's horrible. Like, all the posts saying it's ruined my life, it's very hard. I'm not saying these things aren't true, but between those three, there doesn't actually seem to be a fair and realistic representations of the bad and the good of parenting.

And do you think, yeah, go ahead.

WISEMAN: Yeah, no, I think that's right. There aren't a lot of appealing models of parenthood or family life that feel realistic for, I think, a lot of educated working people today, right? So as you said, either you get these very highly curated over idealized Instagram pictures of motherhood.

CHAKRABARTI: The one I hated the most, I just have to say it, I encountered this after my second child was born, was of the super fit mom, God bless you, who was like doing planks with her toddler on her back and her newborn on the mat in between her arms and I was like, it's not fair.

That is not going to happen for me for a year, but God bless her for doing it. It was just too perfect for me, but.

WISEMAN: Totally. I'm seven months pregnant and I'm already seeing those. So yeah, so you either see these like very mommy influencer imagery, or you get this real picture of parenthood that makes it seem like a nightmare, right?

That it's stressful, it's overwhelming, that in order to, and so what that means is that people feel like they really have to be absolutely sure that this is something that they really want, right? Whereas, before, it might have been easier for us to say if you were sitting on the fence, yeah have the kids.

Why not? You'll work it out. You'll fit it into your life. Don't worry about it. Now, the default is actually, if you don't have that justification ready on hand, don't have them. And so I think, for people like me, not to mention, right, a lot of our friends aren't having kids at the rates that they used to.

So there isn't necessarily that like social groups, it can feel like you're really isolated. Like you have to jump off a cliff in order to become a parent. So it was really for me personally, only by participating in the lives of children close to me, like becoming an aunt and a godmother, that I felt that I was able to start to understand what it actually looked like to be a parent, and why, despite all of the challenges, because it's hard, it was still really rewarding.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Let's take this moment to listen to a couple more On Point listeners who shared their personal reasons for their ambivalence about becoming a parent. This is Layla in Woodbury, Minnesota, who told us that even at a young age, she knew that she wanted to adopt instead of having her own biological child.

But she told us that she also never, or the adoption never came to fruition because she didn't feel certain about her ability to provide for a child.

LAYLA: I have two bachelor's degrees. I have a master's degree and I'm trying hard to make it in this world, but it hasn't been easy. And I haven't been able to make that life that I think can support another human being in it.

So pretty much that's why I don't have a child. And if the society, the way that this is, I would like to see what I need is that I at least get to a place that I feel like I am secure. Not only my present life is secure, but also my future is secure, before I can have another life depend on me. So the real question of the economic aspect of being able to raise a child there.

Here's another one. This is Elaine in Clarksville, Tennessee and she called us with a little secret.

ELAINE: No one knows this but y'all and my husband, I am eight weeks pregnant right now. I've been so hesitant about having children. I'm hesitant even right now because I'm about to be 33 years old and I'm pregnant.

I find that having this first child is going to coincide exactly with finally getting my career in the place that I want it to be. I know I wasn't ready to actually have kids at 24, but part of me wishes I had so now they would be like an eight-year-old while my career is really taking off versus having an infant.

Not that of course eight-year-olds don't have their own challenges, but yeah, just find the ambivalence really is all about working so hard for a career and being terrified that it's about to just be absolutely annihilated.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Elaine in Clarksville, Tennessee. And not just to Elaine, but to everybody who called us or sent us a VoxPop message.

I just want to say again, On Point listeners are the greatest. And thank you so much for your deep honesty and your willingness to be vulnerable about these really tough questions and for sharing your stories. It means the world to us, and it enriches, they enrich our conversations every single day. I'm profoundly grateful.

Now, Rachel, this economic question comes up over and over again, and I want to take a second to encourage you or welcome you to be as courageous on the radio as you and Anastasia are in the book, right? Because especially when it comes to millennials, you write in the book that as attractive as economics may be as a solution to the riddle of the growing ambivalence about having children, it is partial at best.

Many millennials are not as financially stressed as they are often assumed to be. So where is the disconnect coming from then?

WISEMAN: So both of those testimonies were, you know, reflect something that we found in our own conversations with lots of millennials, as well, which is this feeling that they're not ready, right?

That in order to have kids, they would need to be extremely financially secure. And that's something that we're trying to help them kind of work through by peeling back some of those layers and asking, when we say that having kids is difficult, What do we mean by that? So we asked them, what would it take for you to feel comfortable having kids?

And often, there wasn't like a very concrete financial goal that they had in mind. Or necessarily I need this amount of like child care help, in order to work it within my kind of career goals. The reality was that people set the bar so high for what it would mean to feel financially secure to have kids, that it seems puzzling to us, right?

So like when you actually look at how people talk about it, it reveals this need to, again, have this like real standard of readiness. This bar is so extremely high. I think because we see having kids as a potential threat to these other individual goals, like having a career, this kind of flexibility and independence that we prize so much.

And there are these narratives that put pressure on the message that it is blanketly too expensive to have kids in the United States, one is that millennials, although they did get off to a really rocky start in the recession, as I was saying earlier, they've made up a lot of lost ground, right?

So more than 50% of millennials have bought houses now, the joint household income of millennials is higher than any generation before them, largely because of the entry of women into the workplace. And then there's another thing that puts pressure on this explanation, which is that if you look at other countries that have all of the social support that we might dream of in America, a year plus of maternity and paternity leave, child tax credits and benefits, child care and free college, like all of these things, people are having fewer children, even.

So it can't just be strictly a matter of money.

CHAKRABARTI: So all the sort of money and social supports through, let's say, government means, aren't going to fill this meaning gap, essentially, that you're talking about. I do want to say that I also think about people who have this ambivalence with a huge amount of generosity, because for people who have children, almost every single one of them, the one thing I think that unifies parents is this desire to give their kids a better life than they had, right?

And that's also a really American thing. It's baked into the American dream. And it makes a lot of sense to me why a lot of people might think right now that giving our children a better life in the future is more difficult than ever, if not impossible. That really makes a lot of sense to me.

But on the other hand, we're also in this time, and you and Anastasia note this in the book, where this question of having kids is completely become a victim of the culture wars. And it seems like you're arguing that liberals and progressives should not cede that ground entirely, to not just conservatives, but far right conservatives.

So what is the philosophical framework that you would offer, and we've only got a couple minutes left, Rachel, in order to encourage people not to fully, to not fully cede that ground to culture wars, as you're saying?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, so I'll just say that I totally agree with you, right? That this is a really tough question. On its own terms, to figure out on your own and to try to answer without beginning to add politics into the mix. But for that reason, we simply can't let conservatives or the culture wars keep us from having these kinds of honest conversations about what we want in our lives and how we want to go about building a life and building our families.

And there are two things I think liberals and progressives have to keep in mind. One is that, obviously, this has become extremely politicized, whether or not to have children, with the comments that JD Vance and others are making, with the kind of idea that this has become conservatively coded or something, or trad to want to have children.

And it's gotten exacerbated by the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the revocation of the national right to an abortion. But, when we allow conservatives to dominate this conversation and dictate the terms of what it would mean to have a family, we're only allowing them to make our reproductive decisions in yet another way.

And I do think that liberals and progressives have lots of really good policy ideas about how to make family life better and more dignified. But if we want to try to enact those, we have to be willing to acknowledge that raising the next generation, whether or not it's your own child, or you participate as a teacher or a godparent or what have you, that's something that's worthy of recognition.

And something that's meaningful and that we should embrace and outright, not just tepidly.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I'll close with something that your co author wrote in the book. Because first of all, no one's saying that if you don't want kids, you should have them. That is not what we're talking about here.

But this is --

WISEMAN: No, absolutely not.

CHAKRABARTI: There's some, this is about ambivalence. Because Anastasia writes, To have children is to allow yourself to stand in a relationship whose essence is not determined by the benefit it confers or the prices it exacts. That's what it means for it to be not just another good among others.

People say that having a child is a gift, but if that's true, it's not because it's like getting a gift. If having a child is a gift, it's because it's like giving one.