We wanted to think about that growing ambivalence by starting with the concerns that people take as central to their lives, and to understand why this question of whether to have children has become such a big question in so many people’s lives today, in a way that it hadn’t perhaps for our parents’ generation or our grandparents’ generation. 

Now, our concern isn’t directly with the question of birth rates. And the question that we were really interested in is not quite the same as Taylor’s. The question of whether to believe in God is not an open question for most people, certainly not one where they can just think their way to an answer. But the question of whether to have a child is an open question for people today, yet there isn’t that much thinking and writing about it. Our hope with the book was to do the work of diagnosis and help people think through the philosophical arguments of natalism and anti-natalism. We like to think of our position as anti-anti-natalist. 

There’s a long record of anti-natalist musings, but until quite recently they weren’t taken very seriously. No one thought there was some responsibility to rebut them. No one thought they were going to have a major impact on people’s lives. That’s different today. So when we started engaging actively with the question of whether we should have children, we realized that there was a real lacuna, a vacuum of serious, thoughtful, historically engaged, literarily engaged material to think with that wasn’t necessarily coming from a conservative or religious standpoint. And we thought, if this is true of us, it’s true of many other people. And so we set out to write the book. 

So we start with what at that moment seemed very central, which is the economic concerns. Our goal is to help people place themselves or diagnose themselves vis-à-vis these concerns—not just to dismiss them but to challenge the salience of an economic framework in making this decision and put it in such a way as to help people navigate it. For example, while you’re right that there’s a lot of philosophical engagement (and we take ourselves also to be doing cultural criticism), we also conducted hundreds of interviews, both written and in-depth oral ones, with people who have had children, who are thinking about children, and who decided not to have children, to hear in people’s own words how these concerns figure in their lives. 

We found that many people who would name material concerns or the economy or affordability on a quick questionnaire are very ambivalent about the question when you dig just a little bit deeper. What they’re concerned with is not straightforward affordability but the possibility of meeting very high standards of readiness for having children. In fact, we found the structure of feeling like you have to meet a very high, often very murky standard of readiness is true not just when it comes to people’s finances. It’s true when it comes to people’s understanding of their own psychological stability and maturity. And it’s true when it comes to whether the qualities of a relationship would make it the kind that could be a ground for having children. 

Our hope is that this kind of lens shift, a perspectival shift on people’s own concern, can help them understand and then place those concerns in the right place. And our experience has been, since putting the book out there, that is indeed the case. The narratives that we signal as the dominant paradigms for this generation are really resonating with people, and it helps them recognize their own concerns for what they are. I think that’s true both because for different people different kinds of concerns are more central and, as I said, because the centrality of concerns changes. In order to really help people think through this question, one has to address various kinds of sources of fear and worry and uncertainty. That includes economic concerns, and it includes something else we talk a lot about in the book: dating paradigms and norms are making it harder for people to end up with the kind of person with whom they would like to start a family. These are people who want to have children but for whom that doesn’t work. 

It also includes feminist concerns. How do I as a woman reconcile the possibility of parenthood with my ambitions and with my beliefs that I should be able to pursue the same opportunities and goals and accomplishments as men? It includes how to think about children and threats to reproductive rights. Finally, it also includes recognizing that when we face the question of whether to have a child, we’re facing a profound philosophical question, which is the question of the worth of human life in the present and in the future. 

We found some other texts on this subject dissatisfying. One article talks about people not having kids because there’s a shortage of Mr. Rights, and another article talks about how it’s the economy, stupid, and another article talks about climate change. But the truth is that we as human beings living in this world are exposed to all of it. So if you want to help somebody successfully navigate this question, you have to address all these concerns. 

When I really asked myself, “What is it that’s stopping me from starting a family? Why does it seem so difficult to go through with it?” none of those explanations held water or told the whole story. As we peeled back these layers in our conversations about the book, it became clear that there’s just something at bottom about having children that is hard for people to justify. With all these competing priorities in modern life, it can be hard to embrace the choice to have kids. And that’s because we have lost a certain understanding of what the value of this is at core. What we’re trying to do in the book is to see whether there is a way of recovering some understanding of what the value of human life is and what it is we’re doing when we take on this enormous responsibility. And we do so from a sort of secular frame. 

Importantly, we don’t want to be too naive or too historically condescending, and we want to acknowledge that women have been able to exercise agency over reproduction in various ways for a long time. Certainly to an extent that still leaves open the question why they were having so many children. It’s not just because they couldn’t not. And I’m glad Rachel raised her personal perspective. Just the fact that they have a choice almost does violence to what it means to make a decision for human beings. In a very poignant moment, Rachel talks about asking her mother—who had access to the pill and is a doctor, a career woman with the same ability to exercise choice—“How did you decide to have a child?” And her mother said it wasn’t even a question for her. So there is a radical transformation that happens that is not exhausted by a description of the change of any kind of material circumstance. 

It wasn’t just a technical question. It was exactly the type of thing that you are talking about. It is money, but it isn’t money. It was the standard of having enough, but what is enough? I used to be a trade union representative. I’d bargain with health-care workers and stuff like that. And I always joke that a just wage is a little more than I’m getting right now. 

There’s a little bit of that, right? Anastasia, you said it’s a murky standard or a murky bar. But it wasn’t just that. It was “I want to become who I’m meant to become.” I’m paraphrasing, but there’s a sense of self-actualization, whether it was through education or travel or a number of other things. And those are all good things. Whether you’re religious as I am or not, no one is going to say self-actualization is really bad. 

We want to push against the self-evidence of that logic. It might be for a particular person that having children later happens to be when it’s right, but it’s not necessarily so. One of the reasons I think that having children seems so much like throwing yourself off a cliff, to quote Rachel from the introduction, is that we think of having them so late. You are so formed already in your habits, in your relationships, in your preferences that the impact of having children is objectively in some sense greater because of how much you have established. 

Now, it might not be right for everyone to have kids in college. But reflecting on my own life, I can easily imagine that if things would’ve worked out differently, having children earlier would’ve been objectively less challenging precisely because of these kinds of considerations of incorporating children into my life earlier as opposed to experiencing it as a complete and utter shock to the way I’m used to living my life. 

One person said, “I think I was transformed, but I wasn’t transformed when I gave birth, and I wasn’t transformed at the end of one year; I was transformed over a lifetime. I was transformed because I entered into one of the most intimate and significant relationships a person can enter with someone else, and maybe with multiple people, and my responsibilities changed. I changed with that.” And I thought, yeah, that makes sense to me. I was writing some of the book when my child was younger, and she’s now four. I’m beginning to see that point, and I’m sure I’ll see that much more going forward. 

So, yeah, there’s transformation; we just have to think about what it exactly means. And then I thought, everyone is transformed over the span of twenty years. The person you are at twenty is not the person you are at forty, whether or not you had children. The life you’ll have as somebody without children is going to have profound effects on you. And the life you’ll have as somebody with children is going to have profound effects on you. So there’s an overcoming of a thesis of transformation that also takes seriously all the full meaningfulness of the experience or practice of raising children. 

When you said, Anastasia, that it’s one of the most intimate and significant things and that you get transformed over the lifetime of raising them and interacting with them, I have found it beautiful and true. Early on when we had the twins, I thought love was a scarce resource, and I thought, if I have a bunch of kids, how can I love them? But then Elias, our firstborn, came out, and I was hit with a tidal wave of love. I honestly don’t know how to explain it. It was sub-rational; it was existential. And I thought, it’s going to be like a drug. The next hit’s going to be good, but not as good. And then Micah came out sixteen minutes later, and it was the same. It was that way with each of my children. I was hit with the same irresistible and unexpected tidal wave of love. The same thing is true as they grow older—there has been a sort of depth of love. There is a transformation there too. 

So you’re writing from a completely secular point of view, which I respect and admire and I think is very helpful culturally. But when I read you, and particularly when I was reading your work on feminism and Simone de Beauvoir and others, I found a fascinating sort of new wave. Not a new wave—I don’t know the discourse as well as you guys do, so I’m not going to pretend to. But there does seem to be something afoot. There’s this sort of emerging school of feminism, where women philosophers like yourselves don’t see the fullness of femininity or the fullness of womanhood to be what some might describe as unattached and autonomous; rather, they are cognizant of the fact that a certain amount of dependence or interdependence is actually core to personhood. Some of these are secular, like Louise Perry, and some are religious, like Abigail Favale, who wrote The Genesis of Gender and who talks about some of the ambivalence that you guys describe but from a Catholic point of view. Can you help me and our readers understand this trend? 

Now, we have a lot to say about feminism in particular, but I would like to sort of rescue the question of children from its feminist context, because I think it has a really important feminist consequence: when this question is understood as just a women’s question, it creates a situation where women on all sorts of registers are left alone with it. 

In secular circles, there’s an interpretation of what it means to respect women’s autonomy, their aspirations and ambitions and their desires to lead fulfilling lives. That means that men, as we say, are left off the hook when it comes to children. They feel that the ally thing to do is not to address themselves to the question at all. To be supportive, they understand, is to defer to women. But you don’t want to hear the answer “Whatever you want, honey” to the question “What should we watch tonight?” or “What should we order for food?” You certainly don’t want that as an answer to the question “Do you want to have a child with me?” “Whatever you want, honey.” 

So there’s this practical and kind of women-forward significance to recognizing this isn’t just a women’s question. The challenge is, How do we outline a way of being supportive that involves taking the question of children very seriously, making room for that conversation without it becoming oppressive, where it’s done within the context of mutual negotiation? 

The first one is a point Rachel made for the first time that I thought was just brilliant. She grew up in an American context, and I didn’t, and she said, “I took sex ed and we spent all our time learning how not to get pregnant, but we spent no time learning anything about how to get pregnant.” By which she meant we spent no time thinking about what I would call the material limitations on our freedom to choose whichever way at any point in our lives. As I said before, one of the things we found to be driving the current trend is not just people deciding to not have children or to have fewer children. It’s also people who start late, and then the choice of how many children to have is made for them. Sometimes it’s zero, and sometimes it’s just fewer children than they would’ve wanted. And part of what’s enabling that kind of resignation to this logic of postponement is the fact that there is a taboo in liberal-progressive society on talking about fertility and limitations to fertility because that’s perceived as reactionary. 

Now, again, it’s a similar challenge to before. We have to be able to navigate a way of talking about facts openly without the choice to have children immediately being understood as, but also experienced as, oppressive. One way I try to make room for that is by saying, “Look, if feminism is about empowering women and knowledge is power, we want people to have that knowledge so that they can make choices in light of it.” But that’s a huge ask because depoliticizing any issue now looks nearly impossible. And so it’s not that I can say I’m just optimistic about being able to depoliticize women’s fertility. 

The reason I feel so passionate about this is that we’ve spoken to women who felt hoodwinked by the prospects that they had when they went and froze their eggs, because they believed that if they postponed the decision to have children, they could just have them later.  

I think all our solutions, maybe not accidentally, have much more to do with how we can help people just think better about these questions. I can’t tell you that it’ll make more people have children. I do think that it can genuinely help them make decisions that they feel they have made as opposed to those that have been made for them. 

My second point is not the question of fertility but has to do with what we elaborate on in the fourth chapter of our book. When we come to the anti-natalist challenges, we notice that our ethical, civic, and philosophical education addresses various things, but it doesn’t address itself to the question of the value of a human future. 

And so one of the things that we do is diagnose a kind of cultural suspicion toward the value of human life. For example, we read climate fiction—or eco lit, as it’s called—an incredibly popular genre whose premise is that everything that’s happening is our fault and we neither deserve better nor are capable of bringing it about. So unlike old apocalyptic novels, these are novels where there is no hope for human beings. If there is, it’s for a planet without us. 

So I ask myself, What kind of program would give young people the tools to resist that kind of pessimism and nihilism? Because I think it ultimately does underlie what Rachel said before: How are all the sacrifices, challenges, and risks of having children worth it? You mentioned the difference between us and religious thinkers. I think one of the best reviews of the book was by Jennifer Frey, a Catholic, for the Wall Street Journal. She read our book alongside Catherine Pakaluk’s. And what Catherine brings up—and Jenn sees something really similar about what’s going on with our book—is that a lot of secular people think that the way religious people think about having children is, “I’m religious, so that’s what religious people do. So I’m going to have a bunch of kids. Or I’m not allowed not to, or I have to, or there’s social pressure.” It’s a caricature of how religion features in the decision-making process of religious people vis-à-vis family planning. But Jenn says, “That’s not how it features. What’s happening is that religion is giving people a framework through which they can embrace the value of human life.” She’s finding these women—educated women, successful women—who make the choice to have five, six, seven children, and they express an affirmation of the value of human life, not a religious duty or some desire to belong in a particular community. And then she says that is the message of our book. 

So the question is, Is there a secular perspective from which we can still have an affirmative stance on human life? It’s clear why that’s possible from a religious perspective. But is there still a secular one? That is something I think we have very much in common with the more serious kind of theistic thought about family and the value of human life. 

Now, we’re not interested in elevating birth rates. What we’re interested in is helping people think clearly about this choice and to make it authentically for themselves. But I do think that, going back to your question about how these intimate choices relate to these political phenomena, if you support federal support for families, if you support a child tax credit, if you support universal child care, as I do—that is all premised on an understanding that children are good and we should support parents in raising them. 

So I think that’s something that, even if you don’t have a religious grounding, is really important to be able to do from a progressive perspective, because otherwise it’s very hard to justify the kinds of investments it would take. 

I think that’s important to understand. It’s like the rarer the “disease,” the less publicly inclined we are to support it.