Now Is as Good a Time as Any to Start a Family

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-pregnancy.html

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I had a carefully laid out plan. On June 26, we would get married. Then we would begin trying to have a baby. If we were lucky, I would get pregnant sometime before we took up our new jobs in the fall, my husband in Jerusalem and me in Philadelphia, on a one-year academic fellowship. I would visit him for Christmas, and he would come for the final months of my pregnancy and the birth. I would use this time to write my book and I would join him in Jerusalem a year later, when I would begin a philosophy professorship, baby in tow.

You know what happened next. In early March, we postponed the wedding indefinitely. In early April, with the future of international travel looking uncertain and the next academic school year up in the air, I gave up my planned year of research and resolved to start teaching (hopefully) at Hebrew University in the fall. No wedding, no fellowship, but a silver lining, at least: no more waiting to start trying for a baby, either. For the past three years, living in academic exile from my partner, it had been clear to me that as soon as we both managed to live in the same place, we’d start to try. As soon as the wedding postponement notices were sent out, I announced the good news to my partner. He didn’t share my excitement: “Do you think now is really a good time?”

He’s not alone in asking whether it’s advisable to have a child during the plague year. In mid-March, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommended the suspension of all new fertility treatments during the pandemic, both to reduce the spread of the coronavirus and to preserve health care resources, as well as because of the “paucity of data surrounding the impact and potential risk of Covid-19 on pregnancy, the fetus and child well-being.” In popular media outlets like The Washington Post and BuzzFeed News and Good Housekeeping, articles about the coronavirus and pregnancy somberly list the possible virus-related complications.

All of these warnings are presented as sensible notes of caution in an environment of profound uncertainty: We simply don’t know enough about the virus’s effects for there to be clear guidelines at this stage. On CNN’s website I watch a short video of women in their third trimesters: One laughs nervously as she recounts the contradictory advice she has been receiving on whether it is safer to deliver at home or at the hospital; a pregnant nurse recalls how she held her first child after her partner’s C-section, lamenting that her partner will not be able to hold their second; another woman details her plans to let family see her newborn son through the sliding glass doors of her living room. The biggest and most frightening risk is isolation: “I am already just assuming that I will labor alone,” one woman says. “The biggest reason you have a support network that comes to the hospital is so that someone’s watching over you often and speaking up for you and communicating what your needs are, and now I’m going to have to do that for myself.” I find myself tearing up. People are fond of saying, “There’s never a perfect time to have a baby,” but are some times worse than others?

Having children, of course, has always been a gamble. It’s often noted that our ancestors had children, intentionally or not, under far worse conditions than those we face today and that historically speaking, giving birth in the midst of a crisis is technically the norm, not the exception. This is all true, but it has little persuasive power: Merely contemplating the suffering of others, whether our contemporaries or not, will not help us figure out what we want for our own lives.

Coming up with reasons to wait is easy. I know this from experience, having let countless considerations and obstacles deter me from having children earlier. It seemed obvious to me that I had to accept a three-year postdoctoral position in Britain, even though it meant spending those years an ocean away from my partner. Before we got together, it seemed self-evident that I should choose my romantic partners based on intellectual compatibility and emotional satisfaction, rather than whether we had matching timetables for starting a family, or whether I had any reason to think they’d be any good at it. Until only very recently, I’d planned to delay getting pregnant for another six months so that I could fit into my laboriously chosen wedding dress and drink at the reception. That I am now facing the choice, at 33, whether to start trying to get pregnant in a pandemic isn’t just bad luck; the decision to have children can be deferred, but not endlessly. And the longer we put other things first, the less flexibility we will have when it comes time to make it.

The coronavirus pandemic is not the first persuasive reason given to my generation to hold off on having kids, nor will it be the last. Even in plague-free times, across the country and around the world, young people in staggering numbers are choosing to delay starting families, or forgo it altogether: In a 2018 New York Times survey of Americans aged 20 to 45, only 42 percent of respondents who didn’t already have children said they wanted to become parents. Among the reasons cited are climate catastrophe and rising barriers to economic well-being, as well as the opportunity costs of missing out on career dreams and the desire to have leisure time. None of these concerns seem alien or superficial to me; I have, at times, felt their pull myself.

And yet it strikes me that there is something missing from discussions of why we’re not having kids. What’s missing is not an adequate accounting of the risks — a familiar list to which the coronavirus can now be added — but rather a recognition that there is something special about the decision to raise a child, something that makes it very different from picking up a new hobby or making a career choice. We sense that there would be something perverse about drawing up a list of benefits and downsides. To decide to have children is, after all, to take a stance on one of the most fundamental questions a person can ask: Is human life, despite all the suffering and uncertainty it entails, worth living?

Choosing to have children is anxiety-provoking even to those to whom this decision comes with ease. Whatever one’s material circumstances, the question of how to affirm life in the face of suffering, sacrifice and uncertainty is as profound as it is unavoidable. It is therefore easy to forget that affirming life is something that we do every day, with every breath we take. However difficult the going gets, however much we complain and protest, we treat our lives not only as valuable but also as precious. The answer to the question whether life is good does not await our decision to have children; we answer it already every day, with every genuine commitment that we make.

When we returned from America to Cambridge in March, to begin our quarantine in earnest, my partner and I, with plenty of time on our hands in the evenings, decided to watch Abbas Kiarostami’s “Koker Trilogy.” In the second film, “And Life Goes On,” a film director visits an Iranian village pummeled by a recent devastating earthquake. Loitering about, observing the slow, minute efforts to recover whatever possible from the rubble, the director encounters a young bridegroom who got married the day after the earthquake. You can’t have lost much family if you got married the next day, the director says. We lost lots, the young man replies — aunts, uncles, cousins, all told, about 65 relatives. The director is perplexed. How could he go through with it? They decided “to just get it done with,” the young man says and smashes his hands together like cymbals. Their wedding suite is a plastic covering in a field, their wedding banquet a few roasted tomatoes. “We wanted to get on with starting a family,” he says. “Those who died didn’t know what was coming. We decided to enjoy life while we could. The next earthquake might kill us too. Am I wrong?”

He isn’t, I think. The only way to eliminate danger and uncertainty from the prospect of having children is to forgo it altogether. Now is a good time, as good as any.

Anastasia Berg is a postdoctoral junior research fellow in philosophy at Cambridge University and an editor at The Point magazine.

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