Oh, Baby, Baby! Part I

Time was, you settled down, got married, had kids. Many women were told that that was the natural order of things, with mothers staying in the home to raise their children.

The only problem was that some women, if given the choice, may have made other decisions. Some women didn’t want to be mothers, they wanted to work at an outside job. Some wanted to be mothers, but they also wanted to work.

During World War II, women’s work in factories and in typing pools helped the war effort. Once the war was won and Rosie the Riveter was put out to pasture, women were told to shuffle back to the kitchen. Thanks for your service, resume your previously proscribed roles.

The time was not yet right for a rebellion against gender norms, so most women did as they were told, but how I wish they hadn’t. It only postponed the inevitable.

And the inevitable is that women want a say in the direction of their lives, and the exercise of such has made our lives richer. Not everyone agrees with this assessment, of course.

Some see the freedom of women as the downfall of American civilization. If only women had stayed at home, they say, our country would be intact, like it was in 1950.

Underneath that supposition, though, is the assumption that women would be having babies every few years, and our national birth rate would not be in its dismal state. Here’s a news flash: Birth rates in most industrialized countries are also in a dismal state.

There are a number of sociological, cultural, and environmental reasons for this, and ours is not the only government wringing its hands, but when given a choice, many women choose to wait to have children if they have them at all, and they choose to have fewer children when they do.

Society used to tell child-hesitant couples that they were selfish if they didn’t procreate, but in my 20s, when I was decidedly indecisive about having kids, that attempt to shame me felt false. It was like being a non-drinker at a beer party you didn’t choose to attend only to be accosted by all the partygoers to drink, drink, drink.

I had to be sure that I wanted children and not that I was going to knuckle under society’s expectations. My own children have done the same. If they had chosen not to have children, I would be no less proud of them.

This is but one hallmark of what it means to live in a free society: You should be free to choose the course of your adult life.

The current powers that be, however, find this notion of procreative choice threatening. 45/47 said in Green Bay, Wisconsin in October 2024 that he was going to protect women, whether they “like it or not,” and now we are getting a clearer picture of what he meant by that.

The New York Times recently reported that the White House is entertaining ideas about how to increase the birth rate. If anyone read Project 2025, the seeds were already there.

In the Foreword, the writers summarize “consensus recommendations,” the first point of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”

This seems an innocuous statement, except let’s ask this: What is the current centerpiece of American life that the family is meant to restore? According to Project 2025, centralized political power. The writers claim that this power “subvert[s] the family.”

In other words, anything that issues from Washington’s bureaucratic largesse, AKA our social safety net, is subversive. So, SNAP benefits, then? They subvert the family? Gee, I thought they helped to feed a family that might otherwise go hungry.

Medicaid benefits, are they family-subversive? According to Project 2025, home health or hospice services undermine this country.

Honestly, the American family can use all the help it can get, but I look at the American family as all of us, not some mythical never-was, plasticized, white bread conception of a pipe-smoking dad and a pearl-wearing mom and blankly obedient children playing tiddlywinks by the fireplace while Mitch Miller asks us to sing along on the telly.*

And just how many children sit on the living room floor? One child? That’s the count of Karoline Leavitt’s offspring, current press secretary, whose husband is old enough to be her father.

Two, like the vice-president, good Catholic that he is? Five, like the re-president? Oh, wait, that won’t work. There are too many wives in that scenario.

Ditto for his head of DOGE, who wants to broadcast his seed until he has a legion of little Musk melonheads in his own image. At last count, there were 14.

The White House has thoughts about how to reverse our inadequate birth rate, and in my next column, I’ll explore that in more detail.

*Sing Along with Mitch was a popular family TV show from 1961-1964, encouraging families to sing along with the televised words to popular standards. These were the years when the Beatles came to America. To say, Sing Along with Mitch was not a hit with youth is an understatement and Joan Zwagerman is old enough to remember it.