I’ve been enjoying this back and forth over Bryan Caplan’s assertion that he’d rather his hypothetical daughter give birth at 16 than never give birth at all. I’m perplexed, though, by Bryan’s statement that “most people are hyper-aware of the important arguments against” raising kids, but ignorant of the good reasons. Bryan also implies that celebrity culture denigrates childbearing, which suggests that he really needs a Suri and Shiloh-filled subscription to… basically any tabloid.
Perhaps he has better data than I do, but last I checked the percentage of ever-married women who reported being voluntary childless was something like 6 percent. The 6 percent tend to be disproportionately educated, which suggests that they’re not forced into the decision by financial constraints and are at least as able as other women to weigh the drawbacks and benefits. And they endure a stigma; at least one study I’ve seen found that childless women were stereotyped in a manner identical to that of powerful women–they’re deemed competent, but not at all warm. (Housewives are deemed warm but incompetent).
The ‘childless by choice’ movement, as far as I can tell, is a paltry shadow of what it was in the 70’s. Pick up a copy of Redbook; today, we’re all about “work/life balance.” (Tim Cavanaugh, whose literary powers endure despite his ever-growing passel of offspring, had a great piece in the LA Times about the moribund childlessness movement.) The only significant social debates that involve childlessness center on how to eradicate it; as in, legalizing gay adoption and expanding access to fertility treatment. Despite the significant toll pregnancy takes on a woman’s lifetime earnings, forgoing pregnancy altogether remains a radically nonconformist thing to do. I’m not sure what is to be gained from further marginalizing a tiny, already unpopular outgroup.
I’m curious what the data is to support your contention that pregancy has a “significant toll” on a woman’s lifetime earnings. If the 6 percent of women who voluntarily forgo children are highly educated, wouldn’t that throw off the comparison between these two groups. I assume that whatever studies have been done are controlling for education, etc., but it’s a confounding variable that might be difficult to completely disentangle.
This is another indicator that children are more a resume point for parents than actual valued offspring.
Apparently it is considered a requirement that a woman put her career on hold to have a child. Any woman that willingly declines is viewed as somehow defective.
It also furthers the social belief that all women are nothing more than baby machines regardless of their careers and lifestyle.
As to the highly educated women being pointed at, nobody ever points at the single, childless male that chose career over starting a family. Apparently it is OK for the male of the species to forego procreation while the female is expected to produce children.
All that is gained from this study is further justification for the professional woman who uses her child as a trophy to be shown at the office come promotion time.