When I was younger and living in Brooklyn, I had a friend who had a t-shirt that said “FUCK BREEDERS.” She was a cool goth chick and everything she owned was black, even her toothbrush. She had an axe and a framed tarantula hanging over her bed. I adored her.
It’s somewhat common in artistic or alternative circles to express a penchant for the morbid, to signal to others that one is against the imperatives of normal life in all its messiness and forward motion. After all, as Coco Chanel said (in one of many quotes that are perhaps erroneously attributed to her), “elegance is refusal.”
Sometime in the spring of 2018, a trend arose in America that is still raging today: suddenly everyone was interested in true crime podcasts, TV shows, and writing. The kind of people who liked to broadcast that they were into true crime seemed to want to be seen as edgy, cool, or subversive. It was during this cultural moment that a tweet caught my eye, from the writer Audrey Wollen.
“Yeah,” I wrote snotty agreement as I posted the screenshot to my own Instagram, “or instead of being obsessed with polyamory/open relationships be obsessed with MARRIAGE lol.” Weirdly, some of the most punk people I knew responded with resounding affirmative emojis.
Perhaps the vibe shift everyone keeps talking about started much earlier than we collectively realize. In a widely read Atlantic article, Jonathan Haidt talks about the period from 2011 to 2015 as a time when something changed in America, and many people began to feel that the country was going off the rails. For some, the harbinger was the killing of Trayvon Martin. For others, it was Occupy Wall Street. For me, I started to notice that many of my girlfriends — even those who had no intention of conceiving a child — were going off birth control.
“Aren’t you worried about pregnancy?” I remember asking a friend, who one day described her pills as “archaic” and told me she had simply thrown them away. “Of course,” she answered, but added that she knew how to naturally track her cycle. Her holistic approach was strangely inconsistent. She had also advised me once to take a Plan B in a moment of peril, and when I explained to her that in my mind such an act was akin to abortion, she balked and hung up the phone.
Women are frequently inflamed by other women’s attitudes toward fertility: look at the online feminist uproar that followed Elizabeth Bruenig’s Mother’s Day essay in 2021. For many ambitious, countercultural, or creatively inclined women, to resist one’s potential for maternity is a mark of strength or badge of honor. My feeling, however, is that this posture is as defunct as Roe vs. Wade might be by the end of June.
The procreative woman has long been seen as at odds with the woman of the avant-garde. The most famous female artist in the world, Marina Abramovic, told a publication she had “three abortions for the sake of her career.” But I would wager that most women, even the most boastfully chic or outwardly transgressive, harbor a desire for the creation of life that is deeper than any anti-birth stance.
In a defense of Katie Roiphe’s 2009 essay “My Newborn Is Like a Narcotic,” Conor Friedersdorf lauded the subtlety of the feminist author’s descriptions of maternal bliss in contrast to the shrieks of outrage her piece elicited from other female writers. An offending passage? One in which Roiphe asserts that producing a great novel pales in comparison to the joy of producing a living being.
I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.) My friend looked down at her newborn and her tiny eyelashes. She could entertain this conversation in an academic way, but as she adjusted the baby’s hat I could see how far removed it was from anything that mattered to her. Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth? You would not.
Of course, Roiphe herself has produced loads of wonderful writing as well as two beautiful children. Women’s capacity as cultural creators is often synced to their fertility, not at odds with it. A post from the Institute for Family Studies on “the symbiosis of motherhood and creativity” talks about how giving birth and “creative work are not fundamentally in conflict, but rather, two different expressions of a common goal.” Like artistic activity, motherhood is often denigrated as having no clear productive or capitalistic aim — neither garners much admiration on a LinkedIn profile — but most women would rather have a baby than a job.
Why do proposals like Blake Masters’ (that Americans should have the possibility of supporting a family on one income) or confessions like Roiphe’s cause such an uproar? Is it because we know on some level that they represent the truth?
There is indeed a shift taking place, as legions of former BDSM-clad Bernie bitches transition to cottagecore neotrad SAHMs. People have realized that there is nothing inherently cool about the childless life, and that family is all that really matters. “Salvation,” not hell, “is other people,” as the author Jay McInerney said in a college commencement address.
So where is the political party for people who are pro-life in every facet of the political imagination? For those who are pro-child, pro-family, pro-fucking, pro-marriage for faggots, anti-death penalty and anti-politically correct?
The American Solidarity Party is similar to Christian Democratic parties that already exist in Europe and bills itself as being against a “throw-away culture” that “devalues life” and “human connection.” Its proposals are similar to Elizabeth Bruenig’s leftist case for life, which posits that a hospitable economic culture must exist if genuine support for procreation is to take hold. A study she cites reveals that “financial reasons [are] frequently at the core” of why women seek abortions, including concerns about “a lack of insurance, a lack of adequate housing, and a lack of stable living conditions.”
Such an acknowledgement is perhaps genuinely conservative, or representative of a new conservatism that is forming. But these new ideas are old, and come from a time before unhinged libertarian economics seized our country in a chokehold. In his essay “Cultural Conservatism,” Roger Scruton mentions that 19th century Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge “advocated government intervention in the economy in order to relieve poverty, to provide education and to give a share of the collective prosperity to those who have, through no fault of their own, been deprived of it. In this way he set the agenda for those subsequent cultural conservatives who opposed unbridled free market economics.”
Today, there are many fashionable women who are both mothers and creatively generative. A culture of life is not just about policy, money, or spirituality, but aesthetics. This is the domain through which I feel most comfortable stating my pro-life position. Life wins on every aesthetic ground; it will always be inherently more beautiful than non-life. I refute the protestations of Bristol Palin, who in 2009 gave an interview about abstinence and young motherhood and said that having a child is “not glamorous at all.” It clearly is.
Furthermore, the argument that because a child at conception is already a genetically distinct individual, it deserves to live makes little sense to me. Even if that materialized soul were not completely distinct from the mother, would it not deserve to live? Why must someone be an individual in order to deserve to live? Why do we not see completely dependent or enmeshed beings as deserving of existence? It speaks ill of American culture that this is what an argument for life is predicated on. Carl Jung said that individuation — the process by which one becomes oneself — “is only possible with people, through people.” So why are we consumed with the opposite poles of poisonous individualism at all costs or communitarian strangulation? Why isn’t interdependence seen as beautiful?
The critic Maggie Nelson, also a mother, invokes the concept of “sodomitical maternity” in her masterpiece “The Argonauts.” An idea originally from feminist theorist Susan Fraiman, the “sodomitical mother” is one whose “sexuality [is] in excess of the procreative capacity” — a woman whose erotic life has succeeded in creating a new being, but also exists on a plane that is aesthetic, abstract, and expressive.
The online magazine Fashionista was correct when it pointed out in Fall 2017 that although celebration of pregnancy had long existed in Hollywood, its embrace by the worlds of high design and contemporary art was something new. There are many ways in which fashion does not matter, but this is one way in which it does. Anyone who was watching the runways should have understood what was clear five years ago: that even in the most anti-conservative bastions, amongst people who would swear fervently unto death that they are pro-choice, a pro-life post-Roe culture was already taking hold and mysteriously convening with attitudes that have existed forever in the heartland. What people can first see as beautiful, they can then envision as possible.