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Recent books on the CF
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Lenona
May 11, 2023, 10:56:43 AM5/11/23
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It's about the books “Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth” by Jennifer Banks, and Peggy O’Donnell Heffington's “Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother.”
(Heffington wrote a long opinion piece last Sunday for the New York Times.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/04/27/natality-jennifer-banks-without-children-peggy-odonnell-heffington/
https://dailyprogress.com/new-works-in-defense-of-the-childless/article_64aaa986-e519-11ed-b7b9-eb230885074e.html
(same article)
April 27, 2023
It's by Becca Rothfeld.
What caught my eye was this, at the end:
"...For an apologia for women without children, Heffington’s book is surprisingly silent when it comes to the question of agency. There is a chapter on women who choose not to have children, but it is by far the thinnest in the book, and Heffington’s entertaining foray into the history of contraception is less about women’s rationales for averting pregnancy than about the technologies that enabled them to do so.
"Then again, her point is that the vast majority of women do not feel they have any choice: a staggering statistic that the (Ross) Douthats of the world routinely neglect to cite is that only 7% of American women are 'voluntarily childless,' per a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rest either have children already, plan to have children in the future or do not feel they could, even if they wanted to.
"Both Banks and Heffington make plain that what we need is not more babies, more breathless calls for more babies or more calcifying cliches about anomie. Instead, give us more resources and more social support for would-be parents, more expansive conceptions of what motherhood might entail, more sophisticated thinking about the significance of birth and, not least, more books as fresh and reflective as these."
(end)
The trouble with that 7% figure, of course, is that the CDC clearly was focusing on women who still have TIME to reproduce or adopt. (Adoption agencies don't care much for clients over 40, and only 1 in 50 children, btw, has adoptive parents.) Had they focused instead on women currently in their 50s, maybe we'd get that precious, elusive statistic that would only be split three ways - those who never wanted children, those who are infertile and didn't want to adopt, and those who wanted children but couldn't afford them - or couldn't find a good mate and didn't want to be single mothers.
(Heffington wrote a long opinion piece last Sunday for the New York Times.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/04/27/natality-jennifer-banks-without-children-peggy-odonnell-heffington/
https://dailyprogress.com/new-works-in-defense-of-the-childless/article_64aaa986-e519-11ed-b7b9-eb230885074e.html
(same article)
April 27, 2023
It's by Becca Rothfeld.
What caught my eye was this, at the end:
"...For an apologia for women without children, Heffington’s book is surprisingly silent when it comes to the question of agency. There is a chapter on women who choose not to have children, but it is by far the thinnest in the book, and Heffington’s entertaining foray into the history of contraception is less about women’s rationales for averting pregnancy than about the technologies that enabled them to do so.
"Then again, her point is that the vast majority of women do not feel they have any choice: a staggering statistic that the (Ross) Douthats of the world routinely neglect to cite is that only 7% of American women are 'voluntarily childless,' per a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rest either have children already, plan to have children in the future or do not feel they could, even if they wanted to.
"Both Banks and Heffington make plain that what we need is not more babies, more breathless calls for more babies or more calcifying cliches about anomie. Instead, give us more resources and more social support for would-be parents, more expansive conceptions of what motherhood might entail, more sophisticated thinking about the significance of birth and, not least, more books as fresh and reflective as these."
(end)
The trouble with that 7% figure, of course, is that the CDC clearly was focusing on women who still have TIME to reproduce or adopt. (Adoption agencies don't care much for clients over 40, and only 1 in 50 children, btw, has adoptive parents.) Had they focused instead on women currently in their 50s, maybe we'd get that precious, elusive statistic that would only be split three ways - those who never wanted children, those who are infertile and didn't want to adopt, and those who wanted children but couldn't afford them - or couldn't find a good mate and didn't want to be single mothers.
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