A recent analysis in The Free Press about a book documenting medical malpractice against pregnant women explores the tension experienced by progressives who see having children as “absurd” yet want to acknowledge the positive aspects of childbearing.
Irin Carmon, a New York Magazine journalist, recently released the book Unbearable, which tells the stories of five expectant women, two of whom die during childbirth due to medical malpractice.
“The book exposes real cruelty, from the small humiliations inflicted by hospitals that treat women as potential lawsuits, to preventable deaths,” Kara Kennedy wrote in the Nov. 6 Free Press article.
However, Carmon wrote in a separate article for The New York Times that she wonders sometimes if “talking honestly about what’s messy and painful and unfair about pregnancy and parenting can make choosing it seem almost absurd.”
Kennedy argued that that sentence Carmon wrote “captures what is, right now, one of the left’s fundamental challenges.”
“We live in a country where birth rates are plunging, even though the majority of young Americans still say they want children,” Kennedy continued. “Yet Democrats seem incapable of presenting a positive vision of pregnancy, childbirth, or parenting.”
Democrats often blame the right for this difficulty, according to Kennedy.
She noted that Carmon said, “It is hard to tell a nuanced story of pregnancy and parenting at this moment, when the most powerful people in the country talk paternalistically about whether women are having enough children.”
Kennedy added, “And it’s true that it’s hard to make motherhood sound liberating when powerful men such as Elon Musk and J.D. Vance keep turning birth rates into culture-war talking points, or making jabs at ‘childless cat ladies. But the liberal reaction to the right’s often ham-fisted approach to pronatalism borders on the extreme.”
According to Kennedy, many people on the left who are committed to spotlighting the real difficulties of pregnancy and calling for maternal healthcare reform struggle with articulating the positives of childbearing; the dangers of giving birth and leftist perceptions of autonomy also pose significant challenges to reconciling these tensions.
“There’s a sense on the left that the act of giving birth is an insane, traumatic thing to do, an infringement on all women’s bodily autonomy,” she wrote. “Maybe that’s one reason why birth rates are falling particularly precipitously among Democrats.”
Kennedy also wrote that there is risk of “extreme progressives” shaming women who voice normal desires about family. Additionally, according to Kennedy, many progressive women who desire to have children experience a sense of embarrassment and betrayal of their “tribe” because motherhood often has conservative associations.
“My most progressive friends talk in hushed tones about wanting kids, as if confessing a vice,” Kennedy wrote. “One of them, after a few glasses of wine, told me she dreams of being a stay-at-home mother. She couldn’t tell her boyfriend. She couldn’t even tell her closest friend. To say it aloud would feel like a betrayal of everything she is supposed to believe.”
On social media, there is a tendency for liberal mothers to mainly underscore the difficulties of parenthood, as anything otherwise “is to suggest your allegiance to all the old social constructs,” Kennedy observed.
Reconciling that birth is both good and dangerous appears to be a central challenge for progressives, according to Kennedy.
While Carmon holds “that the U.S. is a uniquely traumatic place to give birth,” Kennedy argued that even the best medical systems could not remedy every difficulty in childbearing because giving birth “is a fundamentally uncontrollable experience,” posing unpredictability, exhaustion, and risks.
“But in the relentless insistence on telling the truth about pain, the idea that childbirth could also be good is in danger of falling out of the frame,” Kennedy warned.
Obsessively focusing on autonomy warps the good reality that mother and child “are connected forever,” according to Kennedy, who added that birth is “unbelievable” but not impossible.
“Unbearable captures this, almost despite itself,” Kennedy concluded. “Every woman in it is doing her best to hold her life together. To pass the tests, to breathe through the contractions. They are heroic, and a genuine left-wing politics of reproduction, if such a thing could exist, would recognize this. It would see the act of bearing not as submission but courage. It would insist that wanting children is not ‘absurd,’ but a declaration of faith in the human future.”
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