One teeny tiny quibble. I’d love to see people use the phrase “sexually reckless” instead of “promiscuous’. I hate ‘promiscuous’, almost as much as I hate ’slut’, ‘whore’, etc. Does that make sense?

That’s certainly something that’s pushed at you when you don’t have children, though, and particularly when you’re so “selfish” as to announce that you don’t intend to. But then, it seems like you need *both* the man AND the child to be considered an adult. Having one without the other makes people very uncomfortable, as does having neither.

During the whole Terri Schiavo mess, I often thought that her parents might have backed the fuck off if she had had children. Because they were treating Michael not as her husband, not as the person Terri had an adult relationship with, not as her legal guardian, but as the guy who was fucking their daughter, who they still considered a child (not to mention a possession). It seemed like it wasn’t enough for her to marry in order for possession to pass from the parents to the husband, they didn’t consider her an adult in her own right because she didn’t have a “family of her own.” Never mind that Michael was her family.

I don’t think it’s correct for children to be fetishized as “the thing that will make you grow up”. Why should that be their job?

I don’t know that the argument is as simple as children being a tonic for the wild and irresponsible youth of the parent(s). What I got out of it is that it seems more like Lauren’s saying that not only is it not always a disaster to have a child young and unwed, but it can be an actively positive experience. It’s not so much that the child is some fetish, or totem, that magically transforms the young mother from hellion to saint, or whatever, but that to have a kid you have to decide to have that kid. The belief that voluntarily taking on an enormous responsibility can be an opportunity for equally enormous personal growth isn’t an especially controversial one in the abstract, I don’t think, so why wouldn’t it apply in this case as well?

I don’t see it as a very different philosophy from the idea of a child as an accessory that we “have” to have to be complete or fit in or whatever.

I guess a lot depends on what it is you think parents owe children.

Well, inasmuch as a lot of the pro-choice argument rests on the backs of poor women and young women. When we’re trying to justify abortion, we often do it by holding up women like Lauren–”of course she’s not ready to have a baby yet!” The end result of that is that you get “pro-choice” people making some shitty arguments about how X group of women “should” have had abortions, that after all, they have the “choice” not to have had children, and that the fact that they had a kid or kids under adverse circumstances shows their poor judgment.

The real issue in my mind is that pregnancy happens, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not a moral issue: it’s just reality. Abortion, also, happens. Women who do not want to bear that child are going to do whatever the hell they can not to, and their reasons for it are irrelevant to anyone but themselves.

don’t see how you could possibly blame someone (feminist or otherwise) who suggested that single motherhood is, on balance, a thing to be avoided if possible at this point.

Depends how they go about doing it. If the point is, being a single mother is fucking difficult, *not* because of any inadequacy on your part but because society is so fucking mean to single moms, and no that’s not fair but it’s reality so you know, think about it–then fine. But usually that’s not the argument. Usually it’s just “Are you crazy?” or “how irresponsible,” or “you’re more likely to be poor, you know” (as if the poverty were the result of children, rather than of discrimination). Which, not fine.

Anyhoo. Lauren, thanks for the response. I should probably say that my own friendships with a lot of single moms are a big part of my feminism as a parent.

Sure, but why?

If one day my boys are successful and contribute to society, it will be “in spite” of their upbringing. And, if they go the wrong way in life, there will be much tongue-clucking and “see, we knew that would happen”. Damned either way. But, my success will be my own and my failure will be my own and I am okay with that.

“But once he left the picture, the baby was something that wasn’t even acknowledged with an announcement. He became a source of shame, it seemed.”

How true. My second was conceived “out of wedlock”. The family members who had sent gifts for the first with much fanfare sort of just forgot the second. The brother that had agreed to be guardian in my will suddenly could not do it. There was even great relief when I said I was going to have him baptized as his brother had been (I guess single parent = heathen). I was 36 and self-sustaining and happy about the pregnancy. But oh the shame! When the dad and I got married, which hadn’t been my first thought when we found out I was pregnant, suddenly everyone could speak of the pregnancy in the open. Sheesh.

Actually, I should amend that: she has the middle-class trappings of job, savings, money, etc. What she doesn’t have is the man, and that’s what makes the difference.

Now, even though she literally lived right around the corner from me, I didn’t see her much anymore, and for a variety of reasons (many of which had to do with the way she treated me once she had a MAYUN! in her life), our relationship had become strained. I ran into her one night last summer, when she was newly-pregnant and engaged and immersed in wedding plans, and never heard from or saw her again until a month or two ago, when she called me up to tell me that she was moving out of her apartment and she had some things of mine that she needed to give back.

When she’d told me she was pregnant, she was joyful, looking forward to it, she and her fiance had been trying for some time, blah, blah. But once he left the picture, the baby was something that wasn’t even acknowledged with an announcement. He became a source of shame, it seemed.

I didn’t really get a chance to talk to her about what had happened because her mother was buzzing around, helping her pack. And, boy, was it ever clear that she didn’t think much of Lisa having a baby with no man and no wedding in the picture. And this is no teenager who was facing a life on welfare — this is a 39-year-old woman who planned for and wanted this child, who has substantial retirement savings and assets and a good job that gives her generous paid maternity leave. But without the middle-class trappings and the marriage, Lisa’s mother and Lisa herself made it very plain that she had suffered a very big loss of status and the birth was nothing to be celebrated.