A family larger than four (mom, dad, two kids) is virtually unheard of in my circles. All the lawyers I know have a pair of children, almost as if they order a stair-stepped "Zach and Molly" set from the American Girl catalog. Families with three or more kids seem to have suffered some unexpected accident (an older lawyer, whose second pregnancy led to twin daughters, told me that women lawyers tend to have more twins "because we're OLD.") Obviously, busy city people like us have limited time, money and real estate -- as well as goals for career, travel and personal achievement to pursue when our children are grown. But the logistical considerations aren't enough to describe the small-family epidemic among professionals. It makes me wonder what we've convinced ourselves of, and what we might be missing.
Why not have children? It’s such a refreshing question. My parents had four children because they didn't want five. Yet I've always had to ask myself all the hard questions: Why have children? How many? When? I understand all too well the burdens of adding more people to the family. And it's our responsibility to decide to have children (right?) Yet no matter how I put my mind to it, my intellectual and intuitive capacities have failed to guide me.
How do I know I'm ready to have a child? I think that women of my generation, along with our powerful right to control our own reproductive destinies, feel an acute responsibility to determine, rationally, when to have each child. If our careers or finances are not in order, we are to use artificial contraception until we are ready. This is true even of women who are fully capable supporting whatever children they have. When women expose their fertility to chance, they're perceived as sloppy, even negligent -- Britney Spears being a recent example of this.
The concept of "birth control" promises more than it can deliver. Having babies is both mundane and mystical. It's not a simple matter of ordering up Zach or Molly for a scheduled delivery date. These little people, running around your house yelling about bananas and tipping over the dog's water, are an obvious yet enigmatic result of our biological and social sex lives. Conception is a curious alchemy of physiology and intimacy. It can happen in an accidental instant, or it can evade months of concerted effort. Yet I'm asked, and ask myself -- How did we decide to have this baby? When will we have more?
In other times and places in global history, parents have had far less luxury and leisure time to dedicate to their families. But here, in our relatively wealthy culture, it's socially acceptable to have children only at an appropriate time: Planned Parenthood, for example, supports individuals "to have children when and if they are ready." The idea of "reproductive self-determination" (intended to describe our fundamental privacy rights) can pressure us to "determine" each and every choice we make. Each day, each month. And who decides when we’re "ready" to have a child? I just reviewed Planned Parenthood’s "readiness" checklist and learned that I've got a ways to go before I'm ready (I still need to "come to terms with my own childhood experience," and "cope with tighter budgets"). And my son turns two next month.
This dilemma isn't just for pregnant teens who suffer problems of domestic violence and drug abuse. There's no "them" and "us." More mothers than I can count – women I admire and consider mentors if not role models – originally became parents in difficult or accidental circumstances. And many of us -– financially stable, established, deliberate parents –- jump confidently into the cold water of motherhood only to flounder, overwhelmed, in its cold, black depths. We're a continuum of women, from young to old, conflicted by our desires, our means, and cultural messages about what is expected of us. How much of successful parenting is maturity and preparation, and how much is inherent to our character? How much is luck?
Of course, this implicates religion, too. Yesterday Pope Benedict XVI exhorted Catholic families to be missionaries of love and life (which I like). Protestant fundamentalists, while less doctrinal about contraception, often describe themselves as "quiverfull" (from Psalm 127) in giving their family planning over to God. It's easy for the secular mainstream to dismiss these kind of "open to life" attitudes as irresponsible or even oppressive. But it's not that family is a religious issue – it's that family is important. In any paradigm, our fertility is a critical – even sacred – part of who we are as people, both individually and in relationships. If faith deals with anything relevant to our human experience, it must speak to families and the mystery of new life. And maybe the underlying value of fertility, if not the exact paradigm, is an important one for our culture to keep hold of.
When faced with the question of having children, I haven't found any analytical framework much more useful than religious doctrine. No matter how I calculate the months, the hours, the dollars and the square footage that would be required by another child, I'm left feeling less capable than when I began. With all due respect to Planned Parenthood, maybe there is no "ready" to have a child (although there is surely a category of "not ready," perhaps that's less obvious than we think).
So I wonder if a pregnancy is something I can "decide" on at all. I don't believe in fate or think my family size is preordainted. But I still don't understand how much control I have over it all. And even if I have another "well-timed" pregnancy, the entire process is a cascade of growth and change over which I have little direct control. When our modern reliance on technical management of gestation and birth has resulted in so much risk and pain, it makes me wonder. What would happen if we just let go? What if our "reproductive self-determination" is a determination to set down the calculators and calendars, and live our lives as they come to us?
Why not?
How can you have too many children? That's like having too many flowers -- Mother Theresa
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