I think it is rather interesting (and telling) that Milo Vetter’s Jan. 23 opinion piece, “Why you should have children,” only mentions women twice. Indeed, in an article all about how we (as in, college-educated, progressive people, which Vetter assumes most at Case Western Reserve University to be—even as Case For Life keeps plaguing Tinkham Veale University Center with pictures of fetuses, or whatever it is that they actually do) are supposed to start breeding before we’re outnumbered by increasingly fertile conservatives. Vetter presents this shift in population almost like a biological inevitability that might as well have been measured on Punnett squares, wherein conservatism comes ingrained with one’s DNA, and there’s no possibility for someone to become more progressive, or even, I don’t know, be part of the multiple identities that get shunned by conservatives on the daily.
Similarly, Vetter’s article carries the assumption that the literal act of procreation is instantaneous, non-problematic and equally burdensome to all affected parties. He assumes that progressives do not have children because it is inconvenient and that their selfishness for wanting good careers and means of living is the sole reason why they are not having children at the same rate as conservatives. Allegedly, this self-preserving instinct will lead to the downfall of civilization as we know it. He presents having children as an act of direct defiance against Elon Musk, as if having children is an inherently revolutionary act instead of a life-changing, risky circumstance that puts severe mental, financial and physical burden on a family—never mind the fact that, if having children comes through a traditional pregnancy, it could lead to death.
Vetter never even considers the fact that some people cannot have children, that some parental figures can have a child without pregnancy and that your children do not need to be biological to be yours, so maybe it’s too out-there to even reference the possibility of something outside of the heterosexual nuclear family. All that Vetter presents is college-educated progressive men and women having children biologically for the betterment of the nation, with absolutely no regard for how awful pregnancy can be, how many physical changes it leads to and, once again, the fact that it is possibly deadly, especially so if you’re a Black woman. Additionally, child-rearing and the burden this often imposes on women are equally disregarded. All that is mentioned is that people (again, not referencing women, even though they are often the ones who end up with the unpaid labor of keeping the house and raising children, even if it’s a double-income household) do not have children because of career compromises. Vetter mentions that South Korean women are often unable to retain jobs following childbirth, arguably implying that this is due to some mystical, unnamed force. The reality is that workplaces around the world discriminate against mothers because patriarchal society still ascribes the place of women to be within a solely domestic sphere. Prospective bosses fear that, if they hire someone who just had a child, she may deprioritize her job in favor of her child.
Vetter argues that people should have kids even if they do not have the time or money to do so, stating that “poor people have been having kids since the beginning of human civilization.” Such an argument is, plainly speaking, garish and ghoulish. Generations of families struggling to feed themselves, suffering needlessly due to their economic conditions and an inability to plan a family effectively due to a lack of contraceptives, all pithily reduced to something positive by an author who really does not know what he’s talking about. Vetter does not realize that poor people are having children now and are suffering from welfare infrastructure that is outright antagonistic toward the people who need it the most. Additionally, Vetter’s argument is completely ahistoric, as most of the time, poor people had so many kids because doing so was an opportunity to make money. You could put your kid to work on the family farm or in a factory, and you could probably offset some of the worst costs of raising them. Vetter makes a gesture at this, saying that “it used to be that a child was a critical source of farm labor or rent. But now? People no longer think that the benefits of having children are worth the massive tradeoffs and career compromises.” It is apparent that he has not looked into the rising costs of childcare or pediatric healthcare, as it would be obvious to him that, even if we all got cool with child labor and started sending little Timmy to work in the mines after his seventh birthday, this labor likely would not be able to cover the costs of basic childrearing if something went wrong. Vetter does not realize that having a kid while being poor does not necessarily mean that you’re not getting a promotion; it means praying that your kids will have at least two meals a day while you can only eat one.
Vetter may acknowledge all these hardships and holes in his arguments, but he doesn’t seem to care. He glances at these feminist and economic arguments (though not the one regarding pregnancy) in simple sentences or offhand mentions, but he does not regard them as valid. After all, all he cares about presenting is “a progressive case for having a child.” I want children, though not in the bioessentialist way that Vetter keeps presenting, but I do not have the luxury of disregarding all considerations in the name of owning the conservatives. I am, after all, a woman, though if I were to talk to Vetter, I have a feeling that he would forget to consider this, too.