America celebrates mothers but does little to inspire young women to become mothers.
The biggest news this Mother’s Day is how few new moms there are. The U.S. fertility rate hit another record low, according to CDC data released last month. There were 53.1 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. That was a 1 percent drop from 2024 and a 23 percent decline since 2007.
There is much debate about why this is happening, especially because it’s a worldwide phenomenon. While there are lots of factors at play, consider this question.
What is the good life?
For millennia, the answer of most women would have centered around or included being a mother. In the Bible, children are both an answer to prayer and a reward. Barrenness, however, was a source of deep distress and shame. This emphasis on motherhood isn’t unique to Christianity. Isis in Egyptian mythology and Aphrodite in Greek mythology are two of the many examples of ancient fertility goddesses.
Having children was an aspirational goal that gave women meaning and purpose. It also had major societal benefits; most obviously it allowed them to grow and survive.
What a contrast to the message pushed by modern feminism. It teaches girls and young women that motherhood is “the heart of woman’s oppression,” as feminist Shulamith Firestone wrote in her 1970 book “The Dialectic of Sex.” She also claimed, “It was woman’s reproductive biology that accounted for her original and continued oppression.”
Feminists tell women that their highest purpose is competing with men in the corporate world. That’s hard to do when you’re pregnant and caring for a newborn, let alone multiple young children. In this narrative, children are an anchor that detracts from women’s highest meaning and purpose — earning money and power.
There’s no doubt that this “girlboss” mindset is the dominant message girls receive in today’s culture.
Look around and see the results. Many of the women who’ve spent decades climbing the corporate ladder now look around and find they’re alone.
A 2014 cover of Bloomberg Businessweek featured Brigitte Adams with the headline “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She enjoyed her work in tech marketing and believed this procedure would help her “in the quest to have it all,” as the magazine wrote.
Years later, she sought to get pregnant, but none of the eggs or embryos resulted in a successful pregnancy. She screamed “like ‘a wild animal,’ throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground,” The Washington Post reported. She described it as “one of the worst days of my life.”
What a tragedy. And she’s not alone.
“At midlife, between a third and a half of all successful career women in the United States do not have children,” Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2002. She continued, “The vast majority, in fact, yearn for children.”
But “in the words of one senior manager, the typical high-achieving woman childless at midlife has not made a choice but a ‘creeping nonchoice.’ ”
Evidence shows that still holds true today. Think about what this reveals. Women who achieve great career success without children don’t find themselves free of oppression but with a longing unfulfilled.
Now, the answer isn’t for society to tell women that the only interest they should ever pursue is having children. But what a cruelty to hide the reality that, for most women, motherhood is a source of meaning and joy that a corporate career could never match.
Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.
