[Image by StockSnap from Pixabay]

One of the things we talk about at the Minimise Project is how we want to create a pro-life culture. Such a culture means different things for different people, but Ben outlined what a pro-life culture means in one of our very first posts. There is one point I’d like to focus on in this post:

In a pro-life culture, pregnancy would not be viewed as putting your entire life on hold for nine months. Pregnant women would not be pressured into putting up with all sorts of unscientific restrictions, motivated primarily by convenience for healthcare providers and institutions and/or fear of litigation.

I’m pretty sure I’m the person who drafted that point. This is because I’m strongly motivated by the fact that pregnancy and parenting are, generally, far harder than they need to be. This is starting to be acknowledged more generally, particularly by the building pro-natalist movement, who are alarmed at falling birth rates worldwide, but particularly in rich, Western countries. This is good! I’m glad that we are finally starting to come around to the idea that parenting needn’t be the most crushing of burdens.

I do think, though, that we still have a long way to go. It’s hard to explain this unless you’re fairly deep into the data, but the short version is that so, so many of the “studies” that show that such and such harms children (whether during or after pregnancy), or is incredibly important for children, turn out to be based on observational data, which is just not very reliable when it comes to making causal claims like “such and such will harm your child”. Furthermore, many of the observational studies that try to adjust for these limitations, and almost all the natural or real experimental studies that really can find causal links, tend to show that actually, such and such makes no difference. Screen time as toddlers, introducing solid food at four months vs six months, potty training early or late, eating fish during pregnancy, exercising during pregnancy, not exercising during pregnancy, working outside the home while your kids are young, staying at home with your kids while they are young, all these things and more just seem to make little to no actual difference to anything when we use good quality studies and data to examine them.

This does not stop people from making all sorts of pronouncements about how incredibly important all the above and more are to the health, wellbeing and development of children. I understand why! There are lots of downsides for a third party (i.e., someone who’s not a parent themselves) failing to warn parents about something that might affect their kids, and basically no downsides for a third party warning parents about stuff that actually makes no difference at all, so it makes total sense for third parties (healthcare professionals, educational professionals, members of the clergy, websites, blogs, relatives, friends, total strangers on the internet and elsewhere) to row in behind more and more and more “advice”, recommendations and restrictions that have zero evidence behind them. After all, what could be the harm in advising people to err on the side of caution “just in case”?

Well if you’re pro-life, there is a huge potential harm: whenever we make pregnancy and parenting harder than it needs to be, we make someone else who is not categorically opposed to abortion more likely to abort their own baby. Think about it: if you can’t reach the standards of acceptable parenting, far better to not become a parent.

The sad part is that many pro-life people see pregnancy restrictions as being a good, pro-life move, because they “acknowledge the humanity of the unborn”, and encourage women to care for their children from before birth. I think this is a very understandable mistake to make, but it is indeed a mistake. Many pro-choice people are the most enthusiastic proponents of prenatal restrictions, no matter what the evidence! However, this does not always, or even ever, mean that they think the foetus is deserving of rights or care. It could just as easily – and in many cases does – mean that the pro-choice person in question thinks the foetus becomes a person, and that the person can be at a disadvantage if the foetus is not properly cared for. The concern is not for the unborn baby as they are right now – the concern is for the person they think the unborn baby will eventually become.

Pro-choice people would do well to stop and ask whether these restrictions are really, actually necessary. It’s very easy, when you’re pro-choice, to say that the downside to high pregnancy and parenting standards really isn’t that high, as one can opt out of pregnancy and parenting via family planning which includes abortion. However, this in fact others pregnancy and parenting, and therefore others pregnant women and parents. Women and parents deserve autonomy just as much as people who are not pregnant and/or do not have kids, and unnecessarily high standards undermine and remove that autonomy.

Pro-life people too would do well to consider the standards they impose on parents. Far too often, I hear pro-life people describe someone else’s parenting approach, using a phrase such as “Why did they even bother to have kids?” This is a really dangerous question for a pro-life person to ask! The answer, from a pro-life person’s point of view, really should be no more than, “Because they had sex!” Sex makes babies, and babies can’t be killed, on the pro-life view, and therefore most people who have sex may have a kid. If you think your parenting standards are way too important to relax, then fine, go and advocate for them by all means, but please remember that in doing so, you are not a friend to the pro-life movement – in fact, you’re making our job a good bit harder than it needs to be.

Please, can everyone relax about pregnancy and parenting! Keeping up with the bare minimum required to keep your kids safe and happy is hard enough as it is without adding even more requirements and restrictions. If in doubt, check out Emily Oster – she’s truly fabulous at cutting through the data and finding out what really matters.

Muireann