conservatives often hate children, feminists often value them: some famous examples

there is a distinction between merely wanting children to exist and valuing them as people

If someone wants people to have kids, that does not guarantee that she or he likes children or views them as full humans. People have written about this issue before, but—to sound very Protestant, when I tend to sound either Catholic or Mormon, despite being Jewish—it has been on my heart, so I decided to write something about it quickly.

In the recent explosion of arguments against child-hatred, which forms a backlash against a certain viral post by a progressive celebrity, I often see a binary vaguely tossed around: leftists, progressives, and especially feminists are the child-haters, and pronatalists, including or especially conservatives, are the child-valuers. This binary is rarely stated outright, but it lurks in the background. And it is flatly wrong. People on both sides of the aisle often hate children, mistreat them, and view them as subhuman, especially as means to an end. Child-hatred is a classic form of bigotry and can emerge in any political movement. Any contrast along political lines is not absolute. I want to take right-wing child-hatred seriously, too.

The following will be a short (for me), straightforward (for me), post, because again, I am not the first to write on this topic. I’m also not going to slam, so to speak, any one person, so take this as a response to a vibe. It’ll just be some concrete, famous examples: some of the most famous feminists ever, who argued for the full personhood of children, including boys, and some famous right-wingers who dehumanise children.

Before anyone feels like leaving the typical “WHY AREN’T YOU DISCUSSING LEFTOID CHILD-HATRED???” comment, that issue has already been addressed ad nauseam, I already acknowledged it exists a few sentences ago, and it’s often implicitly held up as an absolute or as somehow the only ideological source of child-hatred, which is what I’m nudging against here. If one can read, one won’t leave those comments.

I want to talk about the flip side because I rarely read about it. Feminists have often been hardline supporters of children’s humanity; conservatives, including Christians, have often dehumanised children. This is true and it is not mutually exclusive with the notion that progressives can also hate children.

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Hanna Steinmüller, centre-left Greens party member of the Bundestag, making a historic point about children’s belonging. I don’t want to derail my main argument by discussing this moment at length, but my stance is that it rocks.

Feminists used to—and often, but not always, still—focus on the oppression of children as a severe social injustice, advocating for children’s liberation alongside, and as part of, women’s liberation.

Betty Friedan, initiator of the second wave of Anglophone feminism, made this connection way back in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique, arguing that the push for women to return to the home ended up hurting their children. Mothers who “give up their own dreams, and even their own education,” writes Friedan, become likely to try “to live through their children.” This fraught relation leads to arrested development for both mothers and children, and ultimately, to a vicious cycle that erodes social wellbeing. The Feminine Mystique is one of the most famous feminist books of all time.

In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, radical feminist Shulamith Firestone argued that the subjugation of women and children “is intertwined and mutually reinforcing in such complex ways that we will be unable to speak of the liberation of women without also discussing the liberation of children, and vice-versa.” Firestone may have held some other weird ideas, but she is clear on this: children should be viewed as full humans, and the effort to liberate them from oppressive dehumanisation is core to the feminist project. The Dialectic of Sex is one of the most famous feminist books of all time.

Widely-read, intersectional feminist bell hooks writes vigorously against the oppression of boys in her 2004 book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. “Boys are not seen as lovable in patriarchal culture,” hooks begins her chapter on the issue. She continues: “Even though sexism has always decreed that boy children have more status than girls, status and even the rewards of privilege are not the same as being loved.” One may disagree with hooks’s formulation of patriarchy; one cannot argue that she does not view children, especially boys in this book, as deserving of love and dignity. hooks is one of the most famous feminist writers of all time, having written several of the most famous feminist books of all time.

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The pronatalist right can instrumentalise children, along with women, as means by which to obtain better statistics and protect economic interests. I’ll refer to this kind of children-as-statistics pronatalism as “bare pronatalism,” because it has no goal, with regards to children, other than creating more of them, no matter the ethical costs. Emily Frase argues succinctly, from a Catholic perspective, that what I term bare pronatalism “continues the objectification of the person valued solely on what they contribute to others or the state that those entities deem valuable, the very bedrock of the culture of death.” I could make little Kant blush with how vehemently I oppose the idea of devaluing human lives as means and statistics. Bare pronatalism, which takes women as spawn incubators and children as useful numbers, adopts the same inhuman philosophy as antinatalism and merely revalues it.

Elon Musk wants his number of offspring to “reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” to combat the low birthrate, and allegedly to make sure to produce more high-IQ people. Musk is happy to rely on women he doesn’t know to make this happen, including surrogates. He’s an ideal bare natalist.

Consider, too, the mega-rich Chinese men who, “inspired by Elon Musk’s 14 known children,” “are going outside of China, where domestic surrogacy is illegal, to quietly have large numbers of U.S.-born babies.” According to his company, one of these Chinese elites, “a vocal critic of feminism,” apparently “has more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S.” Bare pronatalists should have no objection.

Bare pronatalists should also not object to the Catholic woman whose bizarrely intense quest to have as many children as possible led her to resort to illegal extremes and to breach her own faith’s principles, in a situation so grotesque that it merited a New York Times writeup. Almost everyone except a bare pronatalist has had a valid gut or philosophical objection to that woman’s actions, I’d think. But Musk and his bare pronatalist cohort on the Right don’t care about religious law or ethical debates and happily discuss children as statistics.

Let’s not kid ourselves: bare pronatalist right-wingers who want babies to exist for their numerical value do not value children as full persons. Many pronatalists do, obviously, but these ones do not, and they are on the Right.

Too often, we unjustly leave out horrific parenting methods in discussions of child-hatred. A few months ago, Kathryn Paige Harden wrote a heartbreaking and disturbing essay about the legacy of James Dobson, a giant in the world of conservative Christian family—especially childrearing—advice. Dobson, she recounts, advised parents to spank their children, and if a spanked child cries for too long afterward (over 5 minutes), parents should spank them until they stop. Dobson’s dehumanising perspective on children played out in many more ways than in his philosophy on spanking, of course.

In her conclusion, Harden writes that one of the best ways to counter Dobson’s influence lies in “[s]eeing every single last person as deserving of goodness, and embracing our wild, mouthy children. I am off to do just that with my three.” Dobson viewed childhood as a sin, in Harden’s account. Dobson’s brand of conservative Christian ideology is not progressive child-hatred, but it is, indubitably, child-hatred. Having children, even a “quiverfull” of them, does not equate to loving them, or viewing them as full humans, nor does advising people to have kids equate to having humane beliefs about the dignity and humanity of children.

Again, many pronatalists are not bare pronatalists, and many have likely never encountered or endorsed Dobson’s ideas, at least not knowingly. But we need to shun the hazy and lazy assumption that pronatalists are always the ones who love children, and that progressives, especially feminists, always or usually hate them. Bigotry against children is not a partisan issue, it is a heart issue.

I am, unabashedly, a pronatalist. I believe promoting the wellbeing of children and mothers is an obvious good, along with the honouring and fostering of fatherhood. I am not a pronatalist in the sense that reduces people to numbers.