Choosing Communal Reaction to Childlessness

Harley at Jewbiquitous is annoyed at the pronatalist policies in the U.S. generally and the Jewish world specifically. Harley’s observations of the effects of a pronatalist society on women generally appear both astute and correct. I found Harley’s mapping of pronatalist assumptions useful and helpful, and it did make me rethink my position.

After thinking about what Harley wrote in “Making Jewish Babies� I would now agree with Harley that indeed the current pronatalist positions of both the U.S. and the Jewish community are flawed, and would even argue that they need to be changed. Where we might disagree is in which direction.

The U.S. should strengthen its pronatalist position in the professional world, and in the Jewish world, it should be dramatically increased, and aggressively demote the status of childless Jewish women.

But let’s back up, and first understand where Harley is correct, and why.

Harley wrote,

This process of un-gendering women based on their procreation choices has two effects: (1) you must have children to be considered a “real woman� in this society and (2) to become successful professionally, women must become non-gendered. Either you are a successful woman, meaning you have children or you are successful professionally, meaning you are not a mother and therefore not a woman. (Disclaimer: I am not saying this argument holds true to this extreme, but that the original article logically leads to this conclusion.)

I do not seek to deny that women bare the burden of our society’s pronatalist position. I would only ask you to consider that:

1) Men also bare a burden for this, and always have, just not as heavily, of course.

2) The cost to a society for abandoning a pronatalist position is high. Over a long-term abandonment of a firmly pronatalist position, you risk losing your culture, and perhaps eventually, to some degree, even your country, to those groups, including immigrant and indegenous groups, who retain a pronatalist position. We can talk about the joys of multi-culturalism til we’ve knitted the largest quilt ever, but most of us don’t really want that. And even if you think it’s great, most Jews in Israel don’t want that.

It is, therefore, not in any civilization’s interest in the long-term to completely abandon a pronatalist position unless everyone abandons a pronatalist position, and Jews are not the exception. At least not to the extent that they will end up being overrun by a different civilization, which does seem to be a possibility in certain countries, at least to some degree, but rather, as in the case of Sweden, accommodates women’s other needs, and make the cost of pronatalism as low as possible.

But to ask a civilization — particularly a painfully small one like the Jews — to abandon or even just further weaken a pronatalist position seems like you are advocating a policy of self-destruction. Fine for a far-Left site like JVoices, but an untenable position for a moderate Left site like Jewbiquitous.

I will concede that Harley’s points serve to suggest that the Jewish community needs to always strive to accommodate women’s professional needs better once there, even if not to encourage this — but like in Sweden, this is only in order to more effectively promote a pronatalist position. This was Harley’s second point.

But what I learned from the first point, that “you must have children to be considered a ‘real woman’ in this society” — well, I would say perhaps this isn’t overt enough. It seems it would benefit the Jewish community to employ harsher and more effective ways to stigmatize Jewish women who stay single or choose not to have children.

Harley continues,

Nancy Rome’s piece in The Washington Post inspired me to reflect on women who were childless by choice (or not) in the Jewish world. For a psychological perspective on the effects of not choosing children in a pronatalist society, I read Larissa Remennick study on childless Jewish Israeli women, who also have the double-pressure of a country that privileges progeny and a religion that promotes procreation as a primary mitzvah. Remennick’s research echoed Rome’s article (and confirmed some of my fears): Infertility became a “master status” for these women, undermining any other merits and achievements they might have.

Harley is not happy with this, because she wants the individual’s needs to be placed higher than the communal needs. But is the Jewish community in a position to value anything else more than continuity? Isn’t that our single greatest concern? Are we lacking lawyers, writers, or even Nobel Prize laureates? Israel needs more Jews, and Israel needs more water. There may be a few women who can help with the second problem. Many more can help with the first. It is not in Israel’s interest to alleviate any stigma that remains, but rather, to increase the stigma of childlessness earlier in their lives.

Not that such a path is moral, and not that barren women (or barren because of their sterile husbands) wouldn’t end up being stigmatized as well, but from a communal position, it is clearly too acceptable for female Jewish communal members to remain childless.

So theologically, I would have to say that the most responsible thing the non-Orthodox Jewish community could do through halachic “evolutionâ€? and “processâ€? they are willing to employ is to create rituals that reward mothers and penalize women who aren’t mothers, as we did with men when they were considered the ones who needed the communal pressure.

Perhaps all new rituals seeking to give women a greater or equal role in the synagogue should be restricted to those who are mothers. And women who aren’t mothers would not be considered full communal female members, like men in the Orthodox world prior to marriage.

In the organizational Jewish world, childless women could be excluded from the top positions as bad examples to young people, and quietly declared unfit for leadership.

The fact that a non-radical like Harley has personal antipathy towards motherhood is absolutely understandable. What Dr. Wertheimer and others might call “the cult of individualismâ€? is a quite understandable and reasonable way to view the world and one’s place in it. But what’s good for an individual can be devastating on a communal level. There is good reason for the Jewish community to take a contemptous position against these women who decide to remain childless, just as it does against intermarriage, even though most of us aren’t really sure we see anything wrong with that either.

They may be producing. But not in the way we most need them to.