“I’ve got two daughters, 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” — Barack Obama, 2008
I could make Disney World sound terrible. Especially if you had never been and were relying on my say-so for your impression of the place, I could form your opinion of it based on only the negatives: It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s wildly expensive. You spend interminable hours standing in enormous lines for rides where you’ll watch herky-jerky robots sing brain-grindingly tedious songs that you’ll spend the rest of the day trying to get out of your head. The food’s not that great (and wildly expensive). There’s a non-zero chance that you might be eaten by a local alligator.
But the evil geniuses in the Disney marketing department don’t talk about any of that. They talk about magic. Wonder! Joy! Spectacle! It’s all upside, no downside. It’s why people ignore all the problems I mentioned in the previous paragraph, because the culture has burrowed deep in their brains and planted the notion that Disney World is the Happiest Place on Earth(™).
The culture does not have such a high opinion of children. Conventional wisdom about children is mostly downside, and it’s very easy to find people who are almost evangelistic about expressing it loudly in public. It’s an article of faith among girlboss influencers that children are just a drag on your career. Every year a new study comes out telling us how much more it costs to raise them. Everybody says you won’t be able to travel with them; you can’t even go out to dinner. They’re destroying the environment. They’re demanding, unreasonable, and they just grow up to hate you anyway. The zeitgeist is so anti-child that a former President felt perfectly comfortable referring to babies (his potential grandchildren, by the way) as a mistake and a punishment in the middle of his election campaign.
And this is the zeitgeist in which pro-lifers find themselves fighting against abortion. They argue on behalf of children in a world where people live in constant fear of having that terrible burden dropped on them. It’s no wonder that the fight feels like such an uphill push. You might as well be arguing for a federal requirement to serve eighteen straight years of jury duty.
This attitude has so saturated the culture that many pro-lifers subconsciously buy into it. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many reactions were sheepish, almost apologetic. What I thought would be weeks of celebration of this great victory for life turned almost immediately into somber declarations of how Christians have to help women through this difficult time. We were glad we won, but kind of sorry for all the people who were going to have to go through the ordeal of, you know, having living children.
Pro-life activists are usually strong on the fundamentals–that the child in utero is a human being, made in the image of God, and like all human beings has a right to life that isn’t dependent on the opinion of the mother or anybody else. But after that, when it comes time to talk about all the benefits of honoring that right, the rhetoric kind of peters out. Life for life’s sake is a noble argument, and worth making. But that argument alone is not enough to counter the constant bombardment of anti-kid sentiment that permeates every part of the culture. And it’s less and less effective as pro-abortion ghouls become more and more brazen. Remember, Bill Maher said out loud that, yes, he thinks abortion is murder… and he’s ok with it.
So am I actually saying that we have to have a marketing pitch for basic human decency? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. In a culture of death, life needs big billboards and a couple of those car dealership inflatable tube men. We have to take every opportunity to point out all the great things that come along with having children.
Children make everything new. They transform how you look at the world and how you look at yourself. All the wonders of life that have gotten grimy and dull over time get burnished to a high shine again through a child’s eyes. In teaching them stories about truth or courage or faith, you re-teach those same stories to yourself.
People travel the world looking for fulfilling experiences and life-changing memories. Kids bring those experiences and memories into your kitchen. If you’re trying to be a better person, having children opens up levels of generosity and patience within you that you wouldn’t have thought possible. And not because kids are raving maniacs who test your limits all the time. You want to be generous with them. And in so doing, you realize how much more generosity is possible.
Children even neutralize the pro-abortion side’s own arguments about children being a strain on the environment and natural resources. For all our worrying about resources, the only resource that matters is human ingenuity. That is the resource that governs all the others, that makes them even worth having. And if you want more human ingenuity, the first thing you need is more humans.
Of course there are lots of difficult, challenging things about having children. But that’s true of anything that’s worthwhile: getting in shape, owning a home, earning a college degree, even going to Disney World. When we talk about those things, we focus way more on the benefits than on the drawbacks. I don’t want any parent to feel bad about struggling with parenthood during the hard times. That is completely normal, and we should be ready to support parents who need it. There’s more to it than hard times, though, so let’s talk about that more. If you want to do something with your life that ripples out through history, where the good parts outweigh the bad parts by a lot, then have children. Because children are wonderful.
