Not too long ago, I watched an episode on one of the many true-murder channels that chronicled the case of a “beautiful young woman” who was brutally murdered by a young man. Because there are so many episodes on so many channels of so many “beautiful young women” killed by men, I can’t remember the woman’s name - just that she was White and blond. I don’t remember the man’s name, either. He was also White and, I think, blond. Or maybe strawberry-blond.
The story itself, up until the last five minutes of the program, wasn’t different from the others - just the standard coverage of the young woman’s life and the role the man played in her life until he killed her. (Again, there are so many of these, and the male killers are either obsessed strangers or controlling boyfriends or, occasionally, psychopaths striking from out of nowhere… He, I believe, knew her. Was probably her boyfriend.)
In the last five minutes, though, for the first time in any of these programs I’ve been watching for far too long, a narrator’s voiceover playing over images of a courtroom offered background on the killer: he had been abused throughout childhood, the narrator said, and probably didn’t know how to respond to whatever the girl had done (she’d broken up with him, if I remember correctly, or in some other way “defied” him).
After that mention of horrific and constant abuse throughout the boy’s childhood, there was a cut to the victim’s family expressing their happiness that he was off the streets/behind bars for good.
There was no further exploration of the man’s childhood, of how his parents’ treatment of him almost surely contributed to his becoming the kind of person who would kill someone else’s child, the torment he must have endured before becoming that kind of person.
They (the show’s writers/producers/creators) didn’t care about any of that any more than the rest of our society seems to care about the maltreatment of children - unless it’s really exciting, like if kids are kept locked in a closet and forced to eat feces. Those stories make the news. We don’t hear about the everyday abuse of small, vulnerable, trusting, helpless, defenseless kids - 600,000 (estimated) of them in the US in 2021. If that number seems high, don’t worry. Of children identified as victims of abuse, that’s the lowest the number has been since 2016. So, yay?
But that’s “pronatalism” for you. The encouragement to manufacture citizens has nothing to do with having concern for those citizens. (And that is what we’re being tasked with after all, isn’t it - manufacturing citizens at the request of a religion or a skin color demographic or a government?)
We treat the act of birthing and shaping people - that is, being responsible for their emotional and psychological well-beings, their physical health, their safety - as both a civic duty (having sex and producing a child is called “making a contribution to society”) and the most beautiful, rewarding job in the world (“You’ll never know true love/fulfillment/real happiness until you have a child”).
It’s also called “the most important job in the world.” Of all of the characterizations of the job of parenting, that’s the only one that’s not debatable. It is an important task to create a new human being from nothing, and to add that human being to an existing population of human beings where it will either create or destroy, be loved or be tortured.
We know from personal experience - every single one of us - how crucial the role of a parent is. We know how deeply something as simple as a sentence uttered by a parent or guardian can embed itself in our child-minds. At 80, we’ll still remember that sentence that, along with other single sentences, words, or actions, helped shape how we saw ourselves for most of those 80 years, for better or for worse.
I have parent friends. They’ve agonized over whether they might have accidentally uttered some off-hand negative remark when their child was young that burrowed permanently into their child’s sense of self.
If for no reason other than that you’d think the parents of the country would be the loudest voices discouraging people to have children unless they really want to, unless they’ve given it a lot of thought, unless they’re prepared. You would think they’d form something like the Million Moms, but bigger and, obviously, better, and write and publish pamphlets and books with bullet-point warnings about the difficulties and dangers of unprepared parenthood on both the parents and the children.
But pronatalism doesn’t see the “importance” of parenthood that way.
The pronatalist agenda, for whom “important” is parent-focused - “YOU will be recognized for your contribution” or “YOU are a good citizen for doing this” or “YOU get a child and YOU get a child and YOU get a child!” - would have anyone and everyone stumbling drunkenly or backed forcibly into it.
And we, the individuals who are the targets of the propaganda, agree, somehow, even while knowing the death and destruction parents inflict on children on a daily basis, that everyone should have children. That if WE don’t have them, WE are not good citizens, WE will not be recognized, WE will not fit in, WE will not have what everyone else has, WE will be failures, and WE will be weird, miserable, and ultimately eaten by our, or someone else’s, cats when we die alone. Of loneliness.
The child - which, for those who’ve forgotten, is the being that emerges from (usually) the vagina as an infant (some might better recognize it as a former zygote / embryo / fetus / “unborn”) - is a secondary consideration beyond Something That Should Be Had.
Pronatalism’s emphasis on what WE SHOULD HAVE, rather than on the life a child will or does live, has made it so that a confession such as this, from a woman who wrote about her difficult struggle to accept infertility and embrace a life of not being a parent, doesn’t make us blink:
“In my day job as a reporter, court cases involving child neglect hit me harder than ever. How were these monsters having babies when I couldn’t?”
What’s wrong with that? you might wonder.
Read it this way:
“In my day job as a reporter, court cases involving abused women hit me harder than ever. How were these monsters getting wives when I couldn’t?”
I don’t blame the writer for thinking what she thought when covering child neglect cases. I don’t think she’s a bad person, and I have sympathy for her situation. I blame pronatalism, which not only makes infertility harder than it has to be but also makes babies and children objects of desire, envy, status, etc. It directs our focus toward having/possessing children rather than being, first and foremost (as we should be), concerned for their welfare.
So when we watch these true crime shows as we fall asleep at night, we don’t typically wonder what happened in the childhoods of people who commit the crimes. Who cares? They killed “beautiful young women.” That’s where the ratings are.
But what would happen, do you think, if every true-crime murder episode spent at least ten minutes documenting the offender’s parents’ treatment of the offenders when they were children? They wouldn’t all be bad, for sure - Scott Peterson supposedly had an ideal childhood, and he still killed his wife, according to the jury - but shouldn’t we at least be curious, all the same, about how people are formed?
Would that excuse the offenders?
Or would it humanize them, and maybe force us to think about where the importance of parenthood really lies?
What would happen if instead of documenting “sexy” murders, true crime channels turned their cameras on abusive parents?
Factoids:
In “a study of 36 murderers, most of whom were serial killers…the subjects displayed similar patterns of severe childhood neglect, patterns developed from birth through adolescence. Most of the killers had poor relationships with their mothers and consequently never learned appropriate ways to relate to other human beings.” DOJ
“Whether or not children grow up in a home where there is domestic violence is the single best predictor of whether children eventually become either perpetrators or victims of domestic violence themselves.” Children’s Legal Rights Journal
“…data point to both a co-occurrence and a cycle of abuse, with childhood trauma leading to violence against women and further child maltreatment, which in turn increases the risk of experience or perpetration of violence during adulthood.” Science Direct
If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my novel The Age of the Child, in which an overturn of Roe v. Wade forces a woman who never wanted children to continue with an unwanted pregnancy.
“Something interesting and endlessly thought-provoking that The Age of the Child captures are the multiple sides of pregnancy — wanting to be pregnant, not wanting to be pregnant, and what right the government has in controlling pregnancy. This isn’t the first piece of dystopian fiction to consider these questions. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, to name a couple, have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however, The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Goodreads Review
“Scathing social commentary.” — Goodreads Review