“Like a Trap You Can’t Escape” begins the title of a recent BBC article. Can you guess what the piece might be about? What might one of the foremost English-language news outlets describe in this horrific way? Might it be gambling? An addiction? Perhaps a disease? Extreme poverty? Or maybe just a really terrible job with a nightmare boss but really excellent health benefits, so you feel trapped but can’t quit?
None of the above, as it happens. The answer is: motherhood.
Profiling the phenomenon of women who regret having children, the author of the piece suggests that this regret is remarkably widespread. Women she interviewed—some of them also participants in anonymous online forums where they first made their regret known—admitted that if they could start over, they would never have had children. Understandably so, the author suggests. To have children is to surrender one’s autonomy, to allow another person to take over one’s free moments, finances, hopes, and dreams. No more impromptu vacations. No more sleeping in. No more joy. No more savings in the bank, either.
This conversation is nothing new. The genre of essays attacking motherhood—painting it as a path to nothing but misery, regret, and economic disaster—is now quite worn. This doesn’t mean we should simply ignore this conversation. Nor should we ignore the problems this type of essay reveals about the modern world’s attitude to not only mothers and children, but also people more broadly—a category to which mothers and children, of course, belong.
When I came across another piece in this genre in 2022, it prompted me to write a book in response: Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity. My argument in a nutshell? How we talk about motherhood matters. Our society is moving in a post-Christian direction, and the inability to treasure children and mothers reflects a larger problem—the growing inability on the part of many people to see the image of God in every person. The post-Christian devaluing of persons is, I argued, disturbingly similar to the pre-Christian view, in which the value of every person was conditional.
Throughout the ancient world, some lives—and some people—were simply more valuable than others, and no one saw any problem with this view. Every society in antiquity was structured as a pyramid, with only those towards the top of the pyramid considered valuable—the kings, top rung of aristocrats, military commanders (and, of course, these categories overlapped). Those at the bottom of the pyramid—slaves, the poor without patronage—were considered disposable, their lives in some cases measured in cash. Of course, someone at the top rung of a pyramid in one society could find himself abruptly flung to the bottom, should his nation be conquered. So no one’s life was truly safe and treasured. And then Christianity arrived on the scene with an utterly revolutionary and previously unfathomable idea that a slave and an emperor alike were made in the image of a loving God, and therefore all human lives—from the lowest of the lowly to the highest of the high—were priceless.
But now, we seem to be reverting to the pre-Christian view. Some lives, the repeated takedowns of motherhood declare, whether implicitly or explicitly, are less valuable than others. The result of such declarations is not only a greater-than-ever tolerance of abortion (now at least implicitly supported by both major parties in the U.S.), but also a rising support for euthanasia of the sick and the elderly. And so, the screeds against motherhood not only reveal a regret on the part of mothers in having children—sufficiently chilling in and of itself—but they also show a general loss of delight in life in our society, paired with the pursuit of unfettered individual happiness as the highest goal. To be clear, as the BBC article notes, most women who regret motherhood continue to soldier on as if they don’t. They also admit that they love their children. But such feelings of regret, even if largely buried by the women who feel them, matter.
These feelings are part and parcel of the anti-human culture in which we find ourselves without quite realizing just how greatly (and negatively) it affects us. Put simply, we live in a society that treasures technology and promotes AI friends and romances even while denigrating people—even our own flesh-and-blood.
But there is an obvious question to ask in response, and the writer Wendell Berry once asked it best: What Are People For? When deciding on whether to get a new car or a couch or coffeemaker, it is appropriate to consider the cost of the object and why we need it. It is also appropriate to read myriad reviews. To use a real example, if multiple reviewers suggest that a particular dishwasher simply doesn’t dry cutlery, then I will skip it in favor of a slightly more expensive one that does not have the same problem.
But people are not objects, so evaluating people on the kinds of metrics we use for selecting a dishwasher or lawnmower is an affront to human dignity. Do other people exist only for our pleasure, and only for our own convenience? If one were to answer this question in the affirmative, then the BBC profile’s attitude to children is the logical result. But Berry’s argument is that the modern progress-oriented vision distracts us from this key truth—that people are for joy; they are for joyful communities whose members commit to each other, delight in each other, and support each other, ideally over the course of generations lived out in the same place, where they plant deep roots. All of this adds up to human flourishing.
And so, there is a related question to consider as well: For what (or for whom) are we living? The critiques of motherhood as the end of self-determination invariably suggest an answer: We are living for ourselves, self-creators that we are. For someone who accepts this view, the pursuit of wealth through climbing the corporate ladder, the love of vacations and luxury, and a general idolization of freedom in one’s life makes sense. But in addition to teaching about the priceless value of every single person, the Judeo-Christian view of life also emphasizes that we do not live for ourselves—nor do we belong to ourselves. More so, it is through dying to self (to use a Christian phrase) that we find true delight not only in other people, including our children, but ourselves too.
Motherhood is exhausting—it is a grueling marathon some days. And yet, if we do not talk about the incredible delight that it brings, we are shortchanging young women who are only beginning to think about children.
We should also encourage mothers who feel regret over having children to consider what may be the root issue. Postpartum depression is a phenomenon that is still not perfectly understood but requires significant support. Furthermore, mothers who live far away from family and friends and those who are unchurched may also feel isolated. Indeed, isolation seems a factor in the BBC story: None of the women mentioned in the article seem to have a genuine community to support them in their parenting—and no, anonymous online forums don’t really count.
So many phenomena in the modern world are not black and white and require nuancing. But in the case of how we speak about motherhood and more generally other people, I would encourage us to see the only correct answer: a delight in every person and a confirmation of the unconditional preciousness of each and every human being we encounter.
