by 
Children are our legacy, and the key to our future. They are assets, with a potential rate of return that cannot be measured– but our culture views them as just the opposite.
To our culture, they’re a drain on our resources, they prevent their parents’ ability to live their best life, and they’re something that you seriously need to figure out if you can afford before you have them.
This isn’t a natural reaction, but the reaction of a generation of selfish people who never got everything they thought they needed in life, and have decided that they won’t leave anything for their children as well– and yet we’re listening to them, chasing after their dreams and finding them as empty.
How do you read that and not jump back to that line I put in boldface above: “Gender equality and female empowerment demand that women’s self-advancement not be sacrificed on the altar of motherhood.” Of course, children are extremely important, but — watch out — it will be too late if you release one into your life and it doesn’t “express [your] values” or fit the “shape [you] really want [your life] to take.” You will have “sacrificed” your “self-advancement… on the altar of motherhood.”How do you get out of that bind without drinking the “phony, intrusive,” right-wing toxin? I thought of the answer: You fall in love….
Althouse: “For progressives, waiting to have children has also become a kind of ethical imperative.”
I don’t totally blame women for feminism and gender equality– much like everything else, men pushed them there.
Humanity has been on a long slog away from life in the garden and the way God intended it to be. A quick reading through Genesis shows a group of families that did life together– larger families formed tribes, and family identity meant something. Also, you cannot come away from the Old Testament believing that families believed strongly in children, with many barren women wanting them gravely enough to have their husbands father them with a servant!
When the Industrial Revolution came around and took the husband to the factory, this was the seed of our current problem. It was easy to convince people that work is what happens in the factory or in an office, and not in the home. And work must be what matters. Who can fault the women who used to be part of what their husbands did? For now, having what everyone started telling her was the lesser vocation– even though it is/was the most important!
Discontent will do that to anyone, and it did it to a generation to the point that everything is backward! The husband, whose temptation was to neglect his family for work and the office, is not corrected but joined in the error by his wife. The couple has again followed the Serpent’s pattern away from the Creation mandate with promises of freedom, knowledge, money, and an easy life.
Our only hope is the natural tendency towards love and coupling– but the culture is hard at work to stop that from having its intended effect too, isn’t it?
