The Price Of Denying Choice
Ann Crittenden
June 13, 2005
A former economics reporter for the New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize nominee, Ann Crittenden has also been a reporter for Fortune, a financial writer and foreign correspondent for Newsweek, and an occasional commentator for CBS News. She is the author of, most recently, The Price of Motherhood.
I waited a very long time to have a baby—in fact, I narrowly escaped being that woman on the T-shirt who looks at her watch and cries, "Oh, I forgot to have a baby." But luckily I didn’t forget, and I did have a wonderful, healthy child well after my 40th birthday.
I had waited so long to become a mother because I took motherhood seriously. I wanted to be sure I was ready to put that child first in my life. And this is what reproductive freedom is ultimately all about: responsible parenting. Reproductive freedom is not just about women’s choices. It’s about society’s willingness and ability to raise healthy, happy children who grow up to become the productive citizens of tomorrow.
You don’t usually hear this, but the truth is that you cannot have well-nurtured, well-educated children or a modern, dynamic economy without reproductive freedom. Put another way, denying reproductive freedom is a perfect formula for economic backwardness.
The Costs Of Child-Rearing
Let me explain. Two things have happened to human reproduction in the modern world—by which I mean the last 200 years. First, the costs of raising a child have steadily risen—in terms of the time, energy and resources it takes to prepare a child for adulthood. In a peasant economy, it doesn’t matter whether you leave a child on a swaddling board all day, because a lack of attention won’t jeopardize its future as a subsistence farmer. And even privileged children can be relatively neglected because they are going to inherit their class status anyway, no matter how they turn out.
But in a more dynamic capitalist economy, children have to be well-trained and fast on their feet. They have to go to school and learn how to read and write. They have to learn how to tell time and to be on time; how to work all day without slacking; how to be frugal and defer gratification, how to obey increasingly complex rules of the workplace. Above all, they have to have the desire to get ahead. All this means a much bigger job for parents. Children like this don’t just pop up like mushrooms, without any cultivation. With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, child-rearing started to become what is today: arguably the hardest and most time-consuming job in the world. In a complex world, parents have to stop having babies and start raising children.
I found a wonderful quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that sums up this change: "In dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails."
And 70 years later, Teddy Roosevelt said "I can be president, or I can raise Alice, but I can’t do both."
But we all know that Emerson and Roosevelt really didn’t do the lion’s share of the work. Increasingly, as the 19th century progressed, men were leaving the household to work in factories, businesses and offices, leaving mothers in charge of educating the children, previously the father’s responsibility. Extended families slowly gave way to the nuclear family, and now we have the single-parent family—usually a single mother struggling to raise her children by herself. In other words, as child-rearing has become more and more demanding, it has become, more and more, the work of women. And women have responded very intelligently: by having fewer children and putting a greater investment of time and energy and resources into the precious few they have.
A Nation’s Most Precious Resource
This is an historic shift. Demographers call it the shift from quantity to quality in child-rearing—and it is happening now all over the world. Obviously, this shift can only occur when you have reproductive freedom. Only when women are free to have just the number of children they want to have, and can adequately care for, can they produce the kind of children who are equipped to succeed in the modern world.
In recent years, economists have started to quantify how important skilled human beings are in creating wealth. It has been estimated by the World Bank that almost 60 percent of all wealth in developed countries is created by human beings, known by economists as "human capital." People are the basic raw material of the post-industrial economy. It has been said that today, running out of highly educated workers is like running out of iron ore in the Industrial Revolution.
Because the earliest years are the most important in terms of developing human capabilities, this all means that mothers and other early teachers are the most important wealth producers. Women produce the major source of wealth in the economy. And they couldn’t do this without choice.
As a former financial reporter, I like to look at it this way:
Just as free enterprise is a requirement for economic growth and development, freedom of choice is a prerequisite of economic development. Just as there is no debate over who is in the best position to decide whether a man or woman should start a new business, by the same token, there should be no debate over who is in the best position to decide whether to start the most important business of life—a family.
Should the woman make this awesome decision, which will call upon everything she has—her heart, her intelligence, her time, her energy, her very being, not just for three or five years, or for 20 years, but for a lifetime? Or should the government decide?
Should the parents decide? Or some self-appointed morals police?
The world saw the consequences of denying reproductive freedom at the end of the Cold War, when they opened the appalling orphanages of Romania. The Communist dictatorship had denied Romanian women the right to decide for themselves whether they were equipped to be good mothers. Thousands of women were forced to have children they didn’t want or couldn’t care for. Many of those children were abandoned to state orphanages and to permanently damaged lives. And now we find ourselves in a struggle against those who want the government and courts here in the United States to do to American women and children what a Communist dictatorship did to the women and children of Romania.
The Threat Of Compulsory Motherhood
If the Bush administration succeeds in its efforts to pack the federal courts with judges who oppose reproductive freedom, there is a real chance that responsible motherhood will be replaced with compulsory motherhood, to the detriment of women, children and the entire country.
It’s time for the advocates of freedom to fight back with a vengeance, and start talking about real life. It’s time to take back this debate and start talking about what is truly moral. Women’s free agency is a moral issue. Children’s well-being is a moral issue. Who is the moral actor— the person who takes on the responsibility for another’s growth and development, or the person who would force that responsibility on others without accepting the consequences? Motherhood is so challenging a commitment, and so important to our future, that to coerce anyone into it is utterly immoral.
We should also welcome a discussion of choice in terms of government intervention. We need to take back the rhetoric about "big government," and make clear that the advocates of reproductive freedom are the ones who favor small government. We are the ones who want to keep the government out of our bedrooms and hospital rooms. We are the ones who favor individual decision-making in the family. We are the true followers of Adam Smith, the great laissez-faire economist, because we proclaim that women, like other wealth creators, if left unfettered will be guided as if by an invisible hand to produce children with the best possible chance to live happy, productive lives.
Advocates of reproductive freedom have to stop being on the defensive and stop giving ground to the home-grown mullahs in our midst. The battle in the United States over reproductive rights needs to be seen for what it is: part of a global battle against fundamentalism. It is just one part of a global attack on women’s hard-won freedoms, including the freedom to decide how to fulfill our family responsibilities.
The real choice facing Americans is the same choice facing the Saudis, the Iraqis and everyone else caught in a struggle between modernism and the forces of fundamentalism. It’s perennially puzzling to me why that struggle seems to center, everywhere, on women’s freedom—including the freedom to create a world of more cherished children.
June 13, 2005
A former economics reporter for the New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize nominee, Ann Crittenden has also been a reporter for Fortune, a financial writer and foreign correspondent for Newsweek, and an occasional commentator for CBS News. She is the author of, most recently, The Price of Motherhood.
I waited a very long time to have a baby—in fact, I narrowly escaped being that woman on the T-shirt who looks at her watch and cries, "Oh, I forgot to have a baby." But luckily I didn’t forget, and I did have a wonderful, healthy child well after my 40th birthday.
I had waited so long to become a mother because I took motherhood seriously. I wanted to be sure I was ready to put that child first in my life. And this is what reproductive freedom is ultimately all about: responsible parenting. Reproductive freedom is not just about women’s choices. It’s about society’s willingness and ability to raise healthy, happy children who grow up to become the productive citizens of tomorrow.
You don’t usually hear this, but the truth is that you cannot have well-nurtured, well-educated children or a modern, dynamic economy without reproductive freedom. Put another way, denying reproductive freedom is a perfect formula for economic backwardness.
The Costs Of Child-Rearing
Let me explain. Two things have happened to human reproduction in the modern world—by which I mean the last 200 years. First, the costs of raising a child have steadily risen—in terms of the time, energy and resources it takes to prepare a child for adulthood. In a peasant economy, it doesn’t matter whether you leave a child on a swaddling board all day, because a lack of attention won’t jeopardize its future as a subsistence farmer. And even privileged children can be relatively neglected because they are going to inherit their class status anyway, no matter how they turn out.
But in a more dynamic capitalist economy, children have to be well-trained and fast on their feet. They have to go to school and learn how to read and write. They have to learn how to tell time and to be on time; how to work all day without slacking; how to be frugal and defer gratification, how to obey increasingly complex rules of the workplace. Above all, they have to have the desire to get ahead. All this means a much bigger job for parents. Children like this don’t just pop up like mushrooms, without any cultivation. With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, child-rearing started to become what is today: arguably the hardest and most time-consuming job in the world. In a complex world, parents have to stop having babies and start raising children.
I found a wonderful quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that sums up this change: "In dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails."
And 70 years later, Teddy Roosevelt said "I can be president, or I can raise Alice, but I can’t do both."
But we all know that Emerson and Roosevelt really didn’t do the lion’s share of the work. Increasingly, as the 19th century progressed, men were leaving the household to work in factories, businesses and offices, leaving mothers in charge of educating the children, previously the father’s responsibility. Extended families slowly gave way to the nuclear family, and now we have the single-parent family—usually a single mother struggling to raise her children by herself. In other words, as child-rearing has become more and more demanding, it has become, more and more, the work of women. And women have responded very intelligently: by having fewer children and putting a greater investment of time and energy and resources into the precious few they have.
A Nation’s Most Precious Resource
This is an historic shift. Demographers call it the shift from quantity to quality in child-rearing—and it is happening now all over the world. Obviously, this shift can only occur when you have reproductive freedom. Only when women are free to have just the number of children they want to have, and can adequately care for, can they produce the kind of children who are equipped to succeed in the modern world.
In recent years, economists have started to quantify how important skilled human beings are in creating wealth. It has been estimated by the World Bank that almost 60 percent of all wealth in developed countries is created by human beings, known by economists as "human capital." People are the basic raw material of the post-industrial economy. It has been said that today, running out of highly educated workers is like running out of iron ore in the Industrial Revolution.
Because the earliest years are the most important in terms of developing human capabilities, this all means that mothers and other early teachers are the most important wealth producers. Women produce the major source of wealth in the economy. And they couldn’t do this without choice.
As a former financial reporter, I like to look at it this way:
Just as free enterprise is a requirement for economic growth and development, freedom of choice is a prerequisite of economic development. Just as there is no debate over who is in the best position to decide whether a man or woman should start a new business, by the same token, there should be no debate over who is in the best position to decide whether to start the most important business of life—a family.
Should the woman make this awesome decision, which will call upon everything she has—her heart, her intelligence, her time, her energy, her very being, not just for three or five years, or for 20 years, but for a lifetime? Or should the government decide?
Should the parents decide? Or some self-appointed morals police?
The world saw the consequences of denying reproductive freedom at the end of the Cold War, when they opened the appalling orphanages of Romania. The Communist dictatorship had denied Romanian women the right to decide for themselves whether they were equipped to be good mothers. Thousands of women were forced to have children they didn’t want or couldn’t care for. Many of those children were abandoned to state orphanages and to permanently damaged lives. And now we find ourselves in a struggle against those who want the government and courts here in the United States to do to American women and children what a Communist dictatorship did to the women and children of Romania.
The Threat Of Compulsory Motherhood
If the Bush administration succeeds in its efforts to pack the federal courts with judges who oppose reproductive freedom, there is a real chance that responsible motherhood will be replaced with compulsory motherhood, to the detriment of women, children and the entire country.
It’s time for the advocates of freedom to fight back with a vengeance, and start talking about real life. It’s time to take back this debate and start talking about what is truly moral. Women’s free agency is a moral issue. Children’s well-being is a moral issue. Who is the moral actor— the person who takes on the responsibility for another’s growth and development, or the person who would force that responsibility on others without accepting the consequences? Motherhood is so challenging a commitment, and so important to our future, that to coerce anyone into it is utterly immoral.
We should also welcome a discussion of choice in terms of government intervention. We need to take back the rhetoric about "big government," and make clear that the advocates of reproductive freedom are the ones who favor small government. We are the ones who want to keep the government out of our bedrooms and hospital rooms. We are the ones who favor individual decision-making in the family. We are the true followers of Adam Smith, the great laissez-faire economist, because we proclaim that women, like other wealth creators, if left unfettered will be guided as if by an invisible hand to produce children with the best possible chance to live happy, productive lives.
Advocates of reproductive freedom have to stop being on the defensive and stop giving ground to the home-grown mullahs in our midst. The battle in the United States over reproductive rights needs to be seen for what it is: part of a global battle against fundamentalism. It is just one part of a global attack on women’s hard-won freedoms, including the freedom to decide how to fulfill our family responsibilities.
The real choice facing Americans is the same choice facing the Saudis, the Iraqis and everyone else caught in a struggle between modernism and the forces of fundamentalism. It’s perennially puzzling to me why that struggle seems to center, everywhere, on women’s freedom—including the freedom to create a world of more cherished children.
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 8:54 AM
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