A seven-month pregnant woman -- her belly vast -- was at a supper with a friend. He, being of the family type, told her she was very lucky to be expecting a baby. He was the first person who had said such a thing, she told him.
It's a jarring anecdote because it so sharply puts into focus how pregnancy has become the occasion not for congratulations, but for anxious questions about childcare, leave and work. Watch how the announcement of a pregnancy among women is followed within minutes by the "What are you going to do?" question. We've replaced the age-old anxiety around life-threatening childbirth with a new -- and sometimes it appears just as vast -- cargo of anxiety around who is going to care.
This anxiety is the backdrop to the UK's 90,000 baby gap -- the number of additional babies that women would like to have had -- identified by a recent Institute of Public Policy Research report on how the birth rate is falling below replenishment levels. How is it that in cultures all over the world pregnancies prompt congratulations rather than anxious questions about childcare? How is it that in a culture equipped, materially and medically, to ease child-rearing, we are so reluctant to enjoy new life?
The answer, I would argue, is that a bias against having babies has permeated British culture. This phenomenon needs a new word -- anti-natalism -- and it is this that prompts a good part of that pregnancy trepidation. The only consolation to my mind is the spectacular everyday acts of rebellion by which thousands of babies still manage to get born in the UK.
These are bold claims -- so let me explain. The anti-natalist bias is implicit in many of the influences that shape our sense of self and purpose, our identity, our aspirations and our understanding of success and the good life. That bias is evident in our consumer culture and our work culture. The problem about motherhood (and, to a lesser extent, fatherhood) is that it comes at the cost of failure -- or at least compromise -- as consumer or worker, or both.
Hence you are a good mother in direct proportion to how useless a consumer you are. As Shirley Conran put it in her days at the UK's Work-Life Balance Trust, you can always tell the mum in the office because she's wearing last season's coat. (A more familiar problem is finding I've worn the same outfit three days in a row because the multiple demands of three kids rule out thinking about what to wear.) The increasing impatience of consumer cycles means that anyone who is not devoting inordinate amounts of their weekend to shopping and browsing magazines is just not cutting it.
Not cutting it -- that's pretty much the gist at work too. The entire debate on women's work is about mothers failing in the labor market: they don't earn much; they're in dead-end jobs; they don't make it to the top; they take the easy option and duck responsibility; they're less productive than men. This was the refrain of the Women and Work Commission last week; it reminded me of a summit on women's productivity at the official London home of the UK finance minister Gordon Brown just over a year ago. Women had to get into better jobs and work harder, a selection of highly productive women and Gordon Brown declared. You could hear the lashing of whips from these well-meaning slave drivers.
But the whole debate about women's place in work is lopsided. They are not failures but astonishing successes. What gets missed out of the equation is that mothers' productivity is staggeringly high: the Office for National Statistics did a valuation of women's homemaking and care, and came up with a figure of ?929 billion (US$1.6 trillion), or 104 percent of GDP. Combine that with the value of women's paid work, and they are easily outperforming the shockingly low productivity of men.
The point is that parenthood is against the grain of all the aspirations of our culture. Go back to the point where I started -- the pregnancy anxiety around care. That anxiety is provoked by more than just the logistics of childcare availability, despite what the nursery campaigners argue. It's there because pregnancy sabotages three characteristics highly valued by our culture.
First, independence: pregnancy heralds at least one relationship of dependence and there is often greater dependence on partners, mothers and, eventually, childminders and the like. But you've spent much of the previous 10 years attempting to eradicate any hint of dependence, either of your own or of others on you. Secondly, pregnancy is about a long-term commitment, and having avoided all such (including probably to your partner), you are, at the very least, uneasy about it. Finally, the big bump in your stomach spells out one thing for sure -- a huge constraint on many choices, and choice has been integral to your sense of a life worth living.
In other words, the self we are encouraged to develop through much of our education system and early adulthood is of no use whatsoever to a new parent. What use is that sassy, independent, self-assertive, knowing-what-you-want-and-how-to-get-it type when you fast forward five years to the emotional labor of helping a child develop self-confidence? Once there's a baby in the cot, you need steadiness, loyalty, endurance, patience, sensitivity and even self-denial -- all the characteristics that you've spent the previous decade trashing as dull or, even worse, for losers. Forget trying to work out your own feelings -- you'll be too busy trying to work out those of your children; ditto self-confidence and self-expression.
Motherhood hits most women like a car crash: they have absolutely no idea of what is coming. Nothing in our culture recognizes, let alone encourages, the characteristics you will need once a bawling infant has been tenderly placed in your arms. So the debate about the baby gap is about far more than tweaking parental leave; it's about what a culture values and promotes. And it matters not just because of that falling birthrate, but because of how women stumble towards their own private insights into the importance of mothering -- to which they cling in the face of not just zero endorsement from wider society but active contempt.
The painful paradox is that while women have liberated themselves from being defined by their biology -- the fate of the girl in many African and Asian societies who is not truly a woman until she has given birth -- mothers have ended up relegated to the status of constant abject failure in a culture driven by consumerism and workaholism. There is no kudos in being a mum, only in being other things -- such as thin, or the boss -- despite being a mum. Motherhood is a form of handicap.
The fact that we still have as many births in the UK as we do is extraordinary. Some cynics would say it's the triumph of biology over culture -- we are programmed to reproduce regardless. I prefer a more romantic notion: that it's a form of popular rebellion by which the prevailing anti-natalist mores of a manipulative consumer capitalism are trumped by the innate understanding of millions of women (and men) of what really constitutes love and fulfilment -- dependence, commitment, the pleasure of guiding enthusiasm and, above all, the privilege of nurturing innocence.
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