“Pro-natalism” should be explicitly feminist
It may not shock you to learn that, growing up, I loved reading, writing, listening to lectures, and arguing in class. Formal education and I had a love/hate relationship.
As an Autist trapped in Alabama public schools, mild depression battled acute rage at the injustice and inefficiency of dumb adults wasting many hours of my time. College was private, infinitely more fun, and far less enraging. I still felt like it could have been faster.
So it was neither the feminism nor the natalism that made me love
’s Why skipping college can be feminist. It was the anti-wasting time in schools part that really resonated. I was never going to trade my classroom time for pregnancy. Gross. I simply still deeply resent being forced to sleep and laugh at Naked by David Sedaris in a disgusting, out-of-control classroom rather than at home after a long day at the fake email job I knew I’d eventually get and knew I could do at 16 if I’d been allowed.This child really did long for the email mines.
But I do want to address her main point, that we should look for ways to help women advance in our careers before our wombs dry up.
There are two main reasons to be skeptical of “pro-natalism.”
1. The eugenicism
2. The misogyny
There’s nothing inherently eugenicist or misogynistic about the idea that maybe fertility declines are bad and worth thinking about.
It’s one of those ideas that’s so obvious and (at least on the surface) benign that whenever someone makes it one of their main things I find myself curious about their less obvious and benign beliefs.
Adolescence is a modern invention and it’s one that I think has been on-net deleterious for humanity. But you don’t have to go that far to agree that forcing women to waste our most fertile, physically strong, sleep-deprivation-tolerant years earning credentials that signal increasingly less over time as more women earn more of them is dumb and bad for women, for the economy, for innovation, for global prosperity, and, yes, for fertility.
Helping women skip the bullshit so we can advance in our careers before our wombs dry up is so obviously a good idea and a win-win-win for economic growth, feminism, and fertility that it’s just baffling that it gets so little airtime. This fact looks especially fucked when you consider how many people have covered the fertility crisis.
Personally, I would love to see more discussion of pro-natalist policies that explicitly support female autonomy. Discussing such policies has one added bonus as well. It helps the discerning ideology shopper discern the wheat from the chaff.
Listen up, ladies. If he’s willing to force 12 year olds to carry their rapists’ fetus to term to boost the fertility rate but cannot be bothered to consider efforts to help girls waste less of our fertile window in school, he’s an anti-woman shitbag wearing pro-baby clothing.
The fact that the “pro-natalist” community has failed to take up this policy, or any like it as far as I can tell, looks to me like evidence that there are many such cases.
At 39, my mild depression still battles acute rage at the injustice and inefficiency of dumb adults wasting many hours of my time. If what you really want is to force intelligent white women back into being barefoot and pregnant in some man’s kitchen, just fucking say that.
"at the fake email job I knew I’d eventually get and knew I could do at 16 if I’d been allowed."
I FEEL SO SEEN. One of my many soapboxes is that we as a society greatly underestimate teenagers. I loved school but also resented being made to jump through hoops for so many years. It seemed like an artificial delay of adulthood to prove myself again and again and again in an academic setting and then still be treated with enormous disrespect and unfair pay upon entering the workforce at 22.
Unpopular opinion, this is part of why I think the voting age should be lowered to 16. Let both the AP kids and the juveniles who are being charged with crimes as an adult have a say in their own community. And a lot of them have jobs and pay taxes already anyway. Bonus, if we stop insisting that youth don't deserve a say in their own lives, they will have more and better options, and it will be plausible for more women to decline to go to college and use more of their fertile years doing literally anything else.
See also Ruxandra's back and forth with Lyman Stone on fertility-span extension. Lyman, whose scholarship I admire and who was very nice personally when I met him, is sorta telling on himself IMO in that exchange.
There is a version of "pronatalism" which sees the large and growing delta between desired and achieved fertility as the root problem and thus focuses on what can be done to give women more tools to achieve their sincere desires. And then there is a version which sees Number Less Than 2.1 as the root problem and focuses on what can make Number Go Up. Ruxandra is obviously and fully in the first camp. Lyman spends some sincere time in that first camp, and obviously wants to come across to liberals as a member of that first camp, but keeps straying into the second one.