Chrystia Freeland: Exhaustion

Exhaustion Dept: Should we be concerned? Lots of people think so. Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is worried that a new age of American impotence is at hand. Fertility decline, he argues, means national decline. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe, he wrote last Saturday under the headline More Babies, Please. It s a spirit that embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place, according to Globe and Mail. Here s the part where I m required to insert the obligatory personal information. When I was young, I liked working, making money and being independent. Marriage and family were the last thing on my mind. I didn t have children. Am I sorry? No. Have I shrugged off basic sacrifices? No question. What circumstances could possibly have induced me to have three kids by age 26, as my mother did? I can t imagine and anonymous telephone bidder This isn t a new lament among conservatives. Naturally, a number of women are not pleased at being described as the collective vessels of national destiny by men who ve probably never changed a diaper. As Chrystia Freeland argued in The , it s not the cultural exhaustion, stupid. It s the personal exhaustion. Women s concerns are rational, practical and immediate. The reason they have fewer kids is because they can, because they have to work to maintain their family s middle-class lifestyle and because they lack extended networks of child support. Women are voting with their wombs, she wrote. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.