Once a month or so, my body attempts to become a parent, producing hormones that motivate connection and increase attraction. (There is science that suggests female body odor is perceived as more appealing around ovulation.) My body is pulling out all the stops to put me into the path of someone who will procreate with me - whether I want that this month or not, next month or never.
I’m drawn to behavioural explanations from evolutionary biology because they make sense to me didactically. There’s a simplicity about them, centered on physicality and on the modes of reproduction as a distillate for meaning. Our biology is in dialogue with our surroundings. We experience the world and each other through the prism of our animal bodies, through the sensations that we take in and the stories that we attach to those sensations. Feelings are situated knowledge: about safety, pleasure, and aliveness.1
If we accept our existence as a fundamentally physical one, it releases the moral pressure valve that stops up so much of our behaviour and experience. I often hear the rationale for childlessness as being one of selflessness. There’s a list of arguments why it’s considered by some as immoral to have children: overpopulation, climate change, a world in detriment.
There are also social constructs on that list. In many cultures, it’s decided that the immorality of having children is counteracted as long as certain prerequisites are fulfilled, like economic stability or a dual-parent, heteronormative nuclear household. As long as you’re wealthy, monogamously partnered, and don’t have too many children already, you can procreate without society’s full censure. If you’re missing any of those conditions and have any forces of privilege working against you, like race, gender, or sexuality, childlessness is a socially imposed imperative.
Feelings are situated knowledge: about safety, pleasure, and aliveness.
I recently read Mieko Kawakami’s novel, Breasts and Eggs, which has been released in an English translation. She deals with ideas of femininity, parenthood, selfishness and selflessness, and the relationship to the body, particularly using lenses of class and gender. Kawakami’s main character, Natsuko, wants to have a child but is facing an onslaught of obstacles: her psychological inability to have sex and therefore to procreate without medical intervention, her shame around the idea of donor conception, her fear about the morality of her desire to be a mother. Those lenses of class and gender swirl together with forces of culture and society; a biological urge turns into a statement of morality and virtue.
Kawakami focuses on the question of moral responsibility from that list of arguments against parenthood. Her character Yuriko believes that creating human life and bringing it into the world amounts to a wager: that the person will ultimately be glad that they were born. There is no guarantee that a baby will grow up to feel glad about their existence. For Yuriko, to take the risk of having a child, in the knowledge that they may not find any meaning or joy in the project of being alive, is to play Russian roulette with another person’s happiness and pain.
Yuriko says:
Whatever it is I’ve had to live through, it’s nothing compared to being born. [...] Why is it that people think this is ok? Why do people see no harm in having children? They do it with smiles on their faces, as if it’s not an act of violence. You force this other being into the world, this being that never asked to be born.
When Yuriko lays out her anti-procreation philosophy, her speech reads as heartfelt; in the context of the novel, it’s a razor-sharp moment of devil’s advocacy for one end of the moral binary that anchors the book: is it wrong or right to have children?
Meanwhile, Natsuko is positioned as a morality detective, neutrally gathering viewpoints from along the spectrum of this question. Now and again, though, we get a hint about where Natsu might locate her own ideas about the responsibility of parenthood:
At the end of the day, it’s pointless speculation what a kid might think. There’s no way to know ahead of time. I’ll do everything I can so that my kid is happy they were born. What more can you do?
Some of Kawakami’s characters, like Yuriko, stop up that moral pressure valve that creates strain on our behaviour and experience. Personally, I see the whole thing with a fatalist bent. I think every human interaction that we have contains that same wager, betting on or against each other’s happiness. We’re doomed to get it wrong sometimes - and the keyword is sometimes. Sometimes, we get it right. Either way, we can’t avoid the wager.
Is it morally wrong or right to have children? Is it selfish? Does that matter? I wonder if it’s as fraught as Breasts and Eggs makes it out to be. I’m more interested in considering these questions than I am in answering them.
But, if you’ve been paying attention, you can probably already guess my answer to the other question.
Why do people want to become parents? Because our bodies tell us to.
Unsolicited Recommendations
A trio of YouTube videos:
This tour of Olivia Laing’s home, from the ‘My Place’ series by NOWNESS.
Sheet-Pan Bibimbap with Eric Kim, who seems impossibly cute and nice and makes me want to cook bibimbap like this from now on.
Disclaimer: this one might be niche. I’m obsessed with watching clips from Bake-Off and I love Derry Girls and thankfully, actors from Derry Girls did a Bake-Off special.
Questions to Ask of your body.