Each to her own. You can be a 45-year-old mother of five expecting her first grandchild and serving as Governor of Alaska. Or you can be a 45-year-old single “career woman” hosting a satellite radio show called “Whatever” and spending a third of a million dollars a year on intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection in hopes of becoming pregnant. What was it the feminists used to say? “You can have it all”?
Alexis Stewart is probably wise to skip the genius bank. Her mom is genius enough—who else would have figured out there were millions of dollars in things like “coxcomb topiary”? Nevertheless, there is something almost too eerily symbolic about the fact that America’s “domestic diva” is a divorcee with an only child unable to conceive. The happy homemaker has no one to make a home for. You look at the pictures accompanying
A fortysomething single woman’s $27,000-per-month fertility treatments are the flip side of the Muslim baby boom in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere. Just as Europeans preserve old churches and farms as heritage sites, so our homemaking industry has amputated the family from family life, leaving its rituals and traditions as freestanding lifestyle accessories. Today many of the western world’s women have in effect doubled the generational span, opting not for three children in their twenties but one designer yuppie baby in their late thirties.
Demographers talk about “late family formation” as if it has no real consequences for the child. But I wonder. The abortion lobby supposedly believes in a world where every child is “wanted.” If you get pregnant at seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, you most likely didn’t really “want” a child: it just kinda happened, as it has throughout most of human history. But, if you conceive at forty-six after half-a-million bucks’ worth of fertility treatment, you
Hence, the so-called “helicopter parents”—always hovering. When you contemplate society’s changing attitudes to childhood—the “war against boys”107 that Christina Hoff Summers has noted, and a more general tendency to keep children on an ever tighter chain—I wonder how much of that derives from the fact that “young moms” are increasingly middle-aged. Martha Stewart’s daughter seems a sad emblem of a world that insists one should retain time-honored traditions when decorating the house for Thanksgiving but thinks nothing of dismantling the most basic building blocks of society.
As always, conservatives fight these battles by playing catch-up: “gay marriage” is seen as a threat to “traditional marriage.” But, after the societal remaking of the last half-century, marriage is near kaput in most of the developed world, and hardly worth finishing off even in America. Rather, “gay marriage” offers a far more enticing target: today, a “family” is any living arrangement you happen to dig at that particular moment; a “marriage”
is whatever tickles a California judge’s fancy; and along with these innovations proceeds the de facto and de jure abolition of “the sexes.” In his decision striking down California’s Proposition 8, the most significant of Judge Walker’s so-called “findings of fact” are about the elimination of sex, of male and female. After all, if a man can marry a man and raise a child, then the division of marital roles into “husband” and “wife” no longer applies, and the parental categories of “father” and “mother” are obsolete—“Parent One” and “Parent Two,” as the new U.S. passport form now puts it, or, in the friskier designations of Spanish birth certificates, “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B.” And in that case in what sense do we still have “men” or “women”?
