The Women Who Were Told They Owed the Species
Lisa Sibbett’s recent piece in The Auntie Bulletin asks whether women have a moral responsibility to have babies. She’s doing something careful there — separating the reasonable philosophical question from the right-wing pronatalist version that’s really just a demand for female compliance dressed in demographic anxiety.
She’s right to make that distinction. But there’s a category of women her framing doesn’t quite reach.
Not childfree women. Not women who chose the auntie path.
Women who were told, from before they could articulate an opinion about it, that having children wasn’t a choice at all. That it was the point. That their bodies were on loan from a God who had plans for them, and those plans involved a specific number of children and a specific kind of mothering, and any deviation from that wasn’t a lifestyle preference. It was spiritual failure.
I raised six children inside a high-control religion. My worth was not subtly tied to motherhood. It was explicitly, theologically, structurally tied to it (as stated in the Family Proclamation that hangs on the walls of most of my family’s homes). The question of whether I wanted to have children was not a question that existed. Wanting was beside the point. Obedience was the point.
So when Lisa frames the natalism debate as women having to weigh their own interests against some abstract societal obligation, I read it and think: that framing assumes a woman who got to have interests first.
A lot of us didn’t.
