Whose Opportunity Cost?: Why Shaming Motherhood Is A Bad Idea
There are poetic moments when happenstance seems to speak. This occurred to me when I was reading The Wall Street Journal of all things—a newspaper not known for poetry. Recently two headlines stared at each other across the fold, and they seemed to argue with each other. But I couldn’t help wondering if I was the only one privy to the argument.
The headlines were in the Review section of the Weekend Edition, dated March 9-10, 2024. The one on the left read: The Wasted Potential of Egypt’s Women (with the subtitle—’The country’s resistance to women entering the workforce kept it from reaping the economic benefits of globalization’). That’s a mouthful—or a page full. But not to be outdone, there was this on the right page: The Nuclear Option (also subtitled, but as follows—Young men and women are delaying or avoiding marriage, pouring their energies into ‘self-care’ and pets. What is causing this epochal shift away from the family?).
Yes, what is causing it indeed?
Perhaps an answer is to be found in the question begged in the first title. It isn’t hard to see a judgment of value there, after all, potential is being “wasted.” But what does that suppose? Are these Egyptian women sleeping all day, or watching Egyptian soap-operas? No, I suspect that even the authors of the article assume they’re raising children. I’ve noticed that globalists don’t seem to see value in that sort of thing.
Socrates observed, “What is honored in a country is practiced there.” Families, especially the old-fashioned kind with fathers who provide, and mothers who invest time and energy in raising them, aren’t valued like they used to be. If anything, they’re blamed for the world’s woes: global warming, racism, the oppression of (fill in the blank), ‘heteronormativity’—those things. The ‘families’ we celebrate today are all ‘alternative.’ And when it comes to children—if they’re present at all—they’re only celebrated if they’re ‘planned’ (just don’t plan on too many of them). And how better to know they’ve been planned than conceiving them in a lab?
When it comes to value, here's a line you don’t hear much these days, “The best things in life are free.” That phrase never meant that the best things don’t come with a cost; it just meant that you can’t buy them on Amazon. They tend to be costly in other ways though, for example, in terms of ‘opportunity costs.’ Take a very real example which I’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds of times. A woman has children (let’s not be too ambitious, let’s say three) and not uncoincidentally she has them in the window of her highest fertility (her late teens and twenties). Considering the time demands she will experience, won’t our globalist friends think she’s paid a high cost for those children? Really, think of the wasted potential!
Why are fewer women failing to make the most valuable contribution they can make to not just the global economy (think of how children spur spending, if nothing else), but even to their own futures?
I think we know, and it has something to do with the first headline: we simply do not honor mothers like we used to. Some women defy authority figures, and even their own parents, to become mothers. Why? Because those authorities believe they’d ‘waste their potential’ if they did. I wish I could say this doesn’t happen in churches or at Christian colleges—but it does. When was the last time you read something from a Christian college that featured a graduate who was a stay-at-home mom?
Some techno-utopians see a market opportunity here, promising a world without opportunity costs. They claim tough either/or choices aren’t necessary any longer. You can freeze your eggs, or resort to surrogacy. And who knows, perhaps someday we’ll not only conceive children in a lab—wonder of wonders—we’ll grow them in plastic wombs. Think of the profit—ahem, I mean freedom.
Of course, doing things the old-fashioned way is less expensive. But that’s an opportunity cost that techno-utopians and globalists are unwilling to pay. They’re profit driven people who know the cost of everything, and the value of nothing. They’re also liars. There’s no nice way to put it. I’ve known too many depressed , childless, lonely older women who’ve “had it all” - but it cost them children and happiness. Don’t become one of them.