How to live under a curse

If we want more babies, we need to learn how to live under a curse.

American birthrates, like those in much of the developed world, have plummeted way below replacement levels, and an aging, declining population is bad news. But recognizing the problem doesn’t mean people are ready to be part of the solution—sure things might be better off in a few decades if more people have babies now, but will my life be better with a baby right now?

The coverage of a pronatalist conference earlier this year illuminates the challenge. Writing sympathetically for the Free Press, Madeleine Kearns highlighted the difficulties intrinsic to trying to get people to have more babies, starting with the reality that someone has to bear them—and that someone will be a woman. A bitter rant by Sarah Jones in New York magazine titled “Pronatalism Isn’t a Solution, It’s a Problem” honed in on the same point, albeit with more angry demands for “reproductive justice.”

Both writers, like their subjects, came up against the problem of the curse pronounced by God in Genesis 3. To the woman, God famously declared, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” He then told Adam, “cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.”

Even those who view this curse as merely a descriptive myth about the human condition can see how its components are connected throughout the asymmetric nature of human reproduction. Children are not only vulnerable and dependent in their own right, they make their mothers more dependent and vulnerable, especially during pregnancy and childbirth. This pain and dependence is then bound up in the woman’s desire (hunger might be a more literal translation) for her husband, who will rule her as he in turn painfully labors to make the ground bear food. The curse reveals how family solidarity is broken as selfishness, resentment, and domination push love aside amid the struggle to survive.

Despite the wealth and technological prowess of our era, the burdens of having and raising children still disproportionately fall on women—from the physical hardships to the handicaps it imposes on career and education. And many men, rather than being dependable and protective, are abusive, exploitative, or absent. Thus, for many women, opting out of, or at least delaying, motherhood may seem like opting out of the curse. It may not be ideal, but it seems safer—why sacrifice oneself, or risk vulnerability and dependence?

The female vulnerability intrinsic to life under the curse is the heart of Jones’ complaint. As she put it, “You want people to make families? Well, families don’t birth children. Women do that. It’s work that you’re asking them to perform, at some risk to their well-being.” Her proposed solution is to have government take the place of God—removing the curse through abortion on demand and a generous welfare state. This won’t work, of course. It can’t work, because it responds to the curse with its own curses of bloodshed and selfishness, rather than seeking to restore right relations between the sexes.

Of course, Jones does not really care about the baby bust. She just views it as another chance to cheer for abortion and rail against her evangelical upbringing. But her bitterness nonetheless highlights why an instrumental pronatalism will fail.

People will not be hectored into having more children so that the GDP will be a bit higher in 30 years. They will have more kids if they believe that the natural family life of marriage and children offers a better, more fulfilling way to live than careerism and consumerism. Making this seem possible, as well as preferable, requires both men and women to share in the necessary sacrifices. A pronatalist movement dominated by men who preach domestic sacrifice to women while being ruthlessly careerist themselves will deservedly fail. Nor will #Tradwife cosplaying for Instagram work, let alone cheering Elon Musk having an army of kids, mostly via IVF, with his weird postmodern harem.

As Kearns put it, “it seemed to me that most of the people at NatalCon simply want what most people have wanted for most of time: to fall in love and start a family.” Indeed. Love is how we live with the curse. Love is how, and why, we welcome babies as blessings. But love means bearing each other’s burdens in a complementary partnership that counters the curse, not a domination that entrenches it. The love that allows us to live with the curse is modeled in the self-sacrifice of love incarnate that will finally free us from the curse.