The Price of Motherhood and the Choice of Childlessness
Reverend Holly Horn
First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA
May 12, 2002
In Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, there are but three brief occasions of dialogue between G-d and a woman. The first follows the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by Adam and Eve.
The second takes place after Hagar, the Egyptian slave, becomes pregnant by Sarah's husband, Abraham, and runs away into the wilderness. The third dialogue takes place between G-d and Sarah, after the announcement that Sarah will bear a child.
G-d initiates these conversations in response to a transgression by the woman. Eve has eaten the forbidden fruit and given it to Adam. Hagar is a slave who has run away from her owner, Sarah. Sarah, despite the history of faulty translations, has shown no interest whatsoever in carrying out G-d's plan for her to have a child, and upon hearing the promise of one does not exult in the prospect of motherhood, but she exclaims, "Shall I have sexual pleasure with such an old man!"
In each case, the woman is admonished by G-d for her transgression. And for each, the consequences include some degree of coercion in child-bearing.
"To. . . [Eve] G-d said, 'I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."
G-d's words to Hagar: "Return to your mistress, and suffer under her hand," sentenced her to child-bearing in slavery.
And G-d rebukes Sarah for her laughter, her anticipation of sex rather than pregnancy.
In each instance female transgression is a product of desire. Eve desires the knowledge of good and evil. Hagar desires freedom from oppression. Sarah desires sexual pleasure. Female desire for knowledge, freedom, and pleasure are given voice, and they are denied within the structures of dominance and submission (marriage, slavery, cosmos) whose common thread is the gendered oppression of coerced childbearing and whose ultimate authority is a male god. A male god who lies - to each of these women.
So, that's how it was in Genesis, bereshit, in the Beginning - of our civilization.
Preparing for this sermon has been an unusual experience. In addition to my conversation with Worship Associates Leslie Abend and Janet Scannell, the topic has popped up in other meetings, and in casual conversation. One woman came up to me after the service last week, telling me about her decision to bear a child, and about her friend's infertility. I've heard from people as far away as Wisconsin, who read our newsletter and had something to say about this.
And the more I talked with people and the more I read, the more opaque the concept of "choice" became; and more faint the authentic voice of female desire, the wellspring of our spirituality.
In her book The Price of Motherhood, Ann Crittenden. quotes Lawrence H. Summers, "a distinguished economist who subsequently became the secretary of the treasury: 'Raising children . . . is the most important job in the world.'
For "[i]n the modern economy, two-thirds of all wealth is created by human skills, creativity, and enterprise - what is known as 'human capital.' And that means parents who are conscientiously and effectively rearing children are literally . . . 'the major wealth producers in our economy.'"
But, Crittenden continues, ". . . [T]he lack of respect and tangible recognition is still part of every mother's experience. Most people, like infants in a crib, take female caregiving utterly for granted.
The job of making a home for a child and developing his or her capacities is often equated with 'doing nothing.'" Crittenden writes: "I'll never forget a dinner at the end of a day in which I had gotten my son dressed and fed and off to nursery school, dealt with a plumber about a leaky shower, paid the bills, finished an op-ed piece, picked up and escorted my son to a reading group at the library, run several miscellaneous errands, and put in an hour on a future book project. Over drinks that evening, a childless female friend commented that 'of all the couples we know, you're the only wife who doesn't work.'"
"The idea that time spent with one's child is time wasted is embedded in traditional economic thinking. . . The policies of American business, government, and the law do not reflect Americans' stated values. Across the board, individuals who assume the role of nurturer are punished and discouraged from performing the very tasks that everyone agrees are essential."
And the vast majority of these individuals who raise the vast majority of children are mothers.
"Inflexible workplaces guarantee that many women will have to cut back on, if not quit, their employment once they have children. The result is a loss of income that produces a bigger wage gap between mothers and childless women than the wage gap between young men and women. This foregone income, the equivalent of a huge 'mommy tax', is typically more than $1 million for a college-educated American woman."
One reason for this is the failure of employers to provide paid maternity leaves. "This country is one of only six nations in the world that does not require a paid leave. (The others are Australia, New Zealand, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea.)" Another is a tax structure that unfairly taxes the lower wage earner in a family at a higher rate. And the lack of subsidized quality childcare makes it all but impossible for many women to work.
And consider that, legally, ". . . marriage is still not an equal financial partnership. Mothers in forty-seven of the fifty states . . . do not have an unequivocal legal right to half of the family's assets. . . Family income belongs solely to 'he who earns it'. . . A married mother is [legally] a 'dependent', and a divorced mother is 'given' what a judge decides she and the children 'need' of the father's future income. As a result, the spouse who principally cares for the children - and the children - are almost invariably worse off financially after divorce than the spouse who devotes all his energies to a career."
And since government social policies don't even define unpaid care of family dependents as work, a primary caregiver is not eligible in her own right for Social Security, disability insurance, unemployment or workman's compensation.
"For all these reasons, motherhood is the single biggest risk factor for poverty in old age. American mothers have smaller pensions than either men or childless women, and American women over sixty-five are more than twice as likely to be poor as men of the same age."
"The other result of mothers' exclusion from social insurance programs is, of course, child poverty. Almost one-fifth of all American children under age eighteen lived in poverty in 2000. . . The incidence of child poverty in the United States is more than twice as great as in Canada, nearly three times as great as in the United Kingdom, and roughly eight times as great as in Germany. In the Nordic countries, there is no child poverty, thanks to generous family supports."
"Changing the status of mothers," Crittenden concludes, "by gaining real recognition for their work, is the great unfinished business of the women's movement."
Yet, as if from another universe, Madelyn Cain in her book The Childless Revolution, writes: ". . . [A]s the number of childless women grows, a new political force will be felt. The inequalities the childless have endured will be less tolerated and demands will be made for corrections. . . The first place that requires change is the workplace. It is there that the childless face a daily barrage of unfair practices. . . The childless worker is abused. The conflict in the workplace . . . is no longer men versus women; it is the childless worker versus the parent worker."
Childless employees are shortchanged", she continues, "when it comes to medical benefits. They're tired of working longer hours, traveling more, or otherwise picking up the slack for colleagues with family obligations. Cain writes: "Many childless workers are tired of being . . . uncompensated for the extra work, and viewed as second-class citizen despite extra efforts. . . Regrettably the needs of the working mother are considered noble whereas the needs of the childless are viewed as unimportant or even frivolous."
Cain goes on to cite the tax credit parents receive for dependent children as an example of mistreatment; and the Fair Housing Act, which restricts childless women younger than 55 to living side-by-side with children - whether they wish to or not.
Still, it seems like a parallel universe, the one from which Cain writes. Where Crittenden exposes stereotypes about do-nothing stay-at-home mothers, Cain describes the negative misconceptions about childless women: that we're selfish, unfeminine, child-hating, workaholic, in either denial or anguish.
Both address taboo subjects: Crittenden discusses the marital tensions and sense of loss that often lie beneath the surface of mothers' lives. Cain takes on childlessness itself.
And both authors write about choice, about women's reproductive choices, lifestyle choices, and the lack thereof.
In the last 20 years, the number of women between the ages of 40 and 44 without children has doubled to a ratio of 1 in 5. And the numbers of single women and couples without children continue to rise.
Cain distinguishes between the childless and the childfree: the childless being those whose desire for motherhood is savaged by infertility, the death of a child, medical conditions, the absence of a desired partner, or the staggering complexities of lesbian parenting.
The childfree, on the other hand, are those who do not wish to have children, for any number of reasons - a more pressing desire for a successful career, self-assessment of their own potential as mothers. What Cain doesn't mention is that, for some, the choice to be childfree must reflect an unwillingness to risk dependence, abuse, or poverty.
And then there are those whose lives unfolded in such a way that children simply did not become a part of it, neither fully by choice or chance, but by happenstance; women who might have become mothers if the circumstances had been different; who may wonder if they regret not having children because we're supposed to regret it, yet have made peace with their lives.
Of course, the same can be said for some mothers, those who bear or raise children out of no compelling desire of their own, but because circumstances - the desire of a beloved spouse or partner, the presence of step-children - cast them in a role with which they, too, have made peace.
But, Ann Crittenden writes: "The big problem with the rhetoric of choice is that it leaves out power. . . To most women choice is all about bad options and difficult decisions: your child or your profession; taking on the domestic chores or marital strife; a good night's sleep or time with your child; food on the table or your baby's safety."
And Cain asserts that women have been sold a bill of goods with regard to infertility - that few of us know the real statistics on how fertility drops precipitously with each decade of our childbearing years; or the increasing numbers of men who are infertile - or that the miracles of modern science help a scant few to conceive.
Desire and choice. These are not the same. For some of us, desire - to be a mother, a teacher, a minister, a life-partner with another - is so compelling that we, in fact do not choose so much as we are chosen. It's a deep-seated sense of personal identity; a calling, if you will. We may struggle with them. We may not realize all of them, but we ignore our desires at our peril.
Our hearts' desires are an expression of the divine within us; much as the desires for knowledge, for freedom, and for sexual pleasure brought Eve, Hagar, and Sarah into conversation with G-d.
What G-d revealed to them was the injustice and corruption inherent in the divine, patriarchal order. That G-d lied to Eve, telling her she'd die if she ate fruit from the tree of knowledge. That G-d lied to Hagar about naming her son after he was born. That G-d lied to Sarah, putting false words into her mouth. And that G-d's lies exposed the power of female desire as well as the mechanisms of control.
Our choices in the real world are conditioned by these mechanisms of control, and by lies. It is a lie that two women estranged by virtue of race and class, Hagar and Sarah, must leave a legacy of mutual destruction between Jews and Muslims. There is more to the story than this, a story of personal regard as well as betrayal, of moral compromise, of shared history and shared oppression.
Likewise it is a lie that mothers and other women do not share the same interests in workplace equity or in the conscientious and effective rearing of the next generation. Every single one of us has a stake in the future.
Our choices are limited by our ignorance, our lack of information as well as the prejudices that divide us. And we all pay the price.
It's not for lack of imagination. Consider that in Sweden, for a year after the birth of a child, mothers receive a check from the government each month amounting to 75% of her former salary. And then she may return to her job on an 80% schedule, a statutory right of every parent with a child under the age of eight.
All over the world, men have been withdrawing from the institution of the family and reducing their financial support of children. Sweden countered this trend by giving fathers ten days of paid leave after the birth of a child, twelve months of paid leave that can be used by either parent, and - most recently - a month that is forfeited unless the father takes it. Not a single man called to complain when this month was set aside for men only.
For health care, look at France.
And as for subsidized quality childcare, we need only look to our military for an excellent model. It is, unfortunately, available only to the families of those who serve in the armed forces.
Whatever the cost, the recognition of unpaid labor however much it be a labor of love, the restoration of independence and dignity to American mothers is the real cost - and the fair price - of raising the next generation. And since researchers are in unanimous agreement that strong, independent mothers, mothers with economic power, produce the most skilled, creative, and entrepreneurial children - we will all be repaid, if only by the taxes which will finance our own Social Security.
Crittenden observes that mothers themselves, for the most part exhausted, tend to view these issues as personal, as private problems, and somehow their fault. And while we Americans are way behind many other industrialized countries in sending women to the legislative bodies which frame our choices, all of us are called to make common cause. May it be so. AMEN.
Previous page: Sermons
Next page: Sermon Archive