Berg and Wiseman deserve praise for unveiling the breakdown of the dialectic of motherhood and for attempting to salvage motherhood’s reputation. But their focus on de Beauvoir and the feminist tradition does not shed light on our emergency’s deepest roots. To do that, we must go further than Berg and Wiseman and look beyond the feminism question: If the dialectic of motherhood has collapsed, shouldn’t we also expect that there exists a “dialectic of fatherhood,” and that it too has imploded? And, consequently, that there is a keystone “dialectic of parenthood” between fathers and mothers that has been destroyed? 

Two beings are now only one, and it is when they are one that they become three.” So wrote Maurice Blondel on the topic of love and procreation. The formulation expresses a faith in and desire for fecundity that was once a given. Today, however, the response to this mysterious arithmetic among many Millennials is, essentially, That doesn’t add up. Hence, the much-discussed fertility crisis.

This crisis is well-documented. The American fertility rate in 2023 was the lowest it’s ever been, and our replacement rate, 1.6, is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. Clearly, the kids are not all right—otherwise, they’d be having kids. Most of these Millennials are not averse to childbearing; they are ambivalent toward it. All trends indicate that the arguments conceived to shake them out of this ambivalence have been insufficient. 

Even more worryingly, as Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman point out in What Are Children For?, merely bringing up the topic “comes across at best as gauche” to these adults, who generally consider the issue to be right-wing coded and therefore noxious. Berg and Wiseman are certainly not right-wingers. But they are fellow-traveling natalists who have written a book intended to convince their progressive peers of the value of children. The unstated challenge they set for themselves is to do so while avoiding any language that could be construed as conservative or religiously inflected.

Instead, they seek an alternative language in feminist theory, literature, philosophy, and personal narrative to affirmatively answer the question, “Is human life still worth the trouble?” This effort designed to sway minds otherwise out of reach is a noble one enabled by the parameters the authors set themselves. But the limitations are apparent.

Childless Millennials typically put forward material-rational explanations for their decision, citing economic constraints and inadequate state support. Berg and Wiseman begin by exposing such responses as smoke screens. The problem is not chiefly economic: Millennials are, in fact, basically as well-positioned financially to start a family as any prior generation. And, if the Nordic countries are any proof, there’s little evidence that greater social-welfare infrastructure leads to increased birth rates. The root of the ambivalence must therefore be philosophical.

Berg and Wiseman spend most of their time diagnosing and responding to this philosophical woe. Declining birth rates, they argue, are merely a casualty of a larger “reconfiguration of values that touches on every part of our lives.”

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