Madeleine Bunting makes a couple of good points today, so let's party; it doesn't happen that often. She's writing about the demands of motherhood ('and, to a lesser extent, fatherhood'), and one of the good points she's making is that they're tough. As she puts it, 'you need steadiness, loyalty, endurance, patience, sensitivity and even self-denial'. You better believe it. Having young children is one of the joys of the human condition, but it's also hard and sometimes relentless work. And other things clash with it, like the demands, and the culture, of paid employment. Bunting:
[T]he whole debate about women's place in work is lopsided. They are not failures but astonishing successes. What gets missed out of the equation is that mothers' productivity is staggeringly high: the Office for National Statistics did a valuation of women's homemaking and care, and came up with a figure of £929bn, or 104% of GDP. Combine that with the value of women's paid work, and they are easily outperforming the shockingly low productivity of men.All that said, there are other elements of the article that strike me as standard Madeleine of the Sorrows fare. It begins with her opening anecdote:
A seven-month pregnant woman - her belly vast - was at a supper with a friend. He, being of the family type, told her she was very lucky to be expecting a baby. He was the first person who had said such a thing, she told him.Bunting goes on to call this 'a jarring anecdote', showing as it's supposed to that pregnancy is no longer an occasion for congratulation, but rather for anxious questions. Well, you can colour me sceptical. There are practical questions, of course; but that there is not also a sharing of pleasure, or celebration, at the good news strikes me as claptrap. I'd also take some persuading that there's an 'anti-natalism', a general 'bias against having babies', in our culture. Bunting lays part of the blame at the door of consumerism:
The increasing impatience of consumer cycles means that anyone who is not devoting inordinate amounts of their weekend to shopping and browsing magazines is just not cutting it.I think she may need to get about more. Finally, notwithstanding the statistics about the changing age profile of the population, one of the problems of today's world - if indeed it is one - that I personally am not going to be worrying about is a 'falling birthrate'. Anybody who shows up on the planet is equally welcome, but if one leaves aside the possible occurrence of a catastrophe, I don't think there's much danger of a shortage of us.