May 9, 2023
by Micol Collins
Note to the reader: in this post the term “anti-society” is intended to mean any practice and philosophy that undermines the existence and development of a healthy society.
There I was. Changing another diaper. Exhausted beyond imagination and in the bitter galls of post-partum depression. I was feeling absolutely nothing but confused, and I lacked any sense of meaning about my experience. Not only that, but my husband was gone on yet another deployment, I was a brand-new member of our local community, barely spoke enough English to matter to anyone, and neither side of my family or of my husband’s family was closer than a day’s travel. This had been an unplanned pregnancy. Furthermore, I felt exhausted by the sleepless nights or my complete lack of ability to understand and meet the needs of my firstborn. Back to the diapers. In my mind I uttered a complaint toward the ceiling, the “man upstairs” if you will, saying “If I at least knew this child were to become someone important, then my efforts would make sense! But I don’t know that, so what’s all this for? What am I giving myself up for?”. In hindsight, this thought, and its companion conclusion, that children are always an enemy, even a disease, to women’s financial, physical, or emotional well-being, echoes the premises of many 21st Century feminists. Call it insight, a spiritual conversation, or what you will, but I heard these words in my mind, “Don’t you know that this boy, like all other boys and girls, like all of you, including YOU, have the same exact potential to become like the greatest that ever lived?”. This was not my own thought. I was hoping to be told I was right. I wanted to be affirmed in my reasoning. However, mine was a faulty reasoning, a conclusion inspired by my own lack of vision, hope, and skills in myself and in my child. I was wrong. Instead of what I wanted, I was given what I needed, a reminder about my own and others’ enormous potential. That counterintuitive insight renewed trust in myself and in what each one of us can become. To believe otherwise would have meant that I had no potential either, and that I wasn’t worth “continuing” in my child.
Terminating the life of a developing child in the womb is the ultimate statement of disregard for and hopelessness in human potential. Of course, nature at times does that without our consent; I experienced that. When we say that developing children are a disease, a hindrance to personal development, a mistake, a bother, an inconvenience, an unplanned problem, and all such, we are basically making immoral statements. Why? Because we wouldn’t want to live by those ideas. Allow me to explain: if those ideas are true, then they must apply to all of us as well. If those are the social ideas that we want to embrace to inspire our laws and our behaviors in life, then they must apply to each one of us as a matter of fairness. This would mean that you should embrace the fact, even rewrite your childhood narrative to accept that you were all those issues for your own mother, and that would entail the notion that there isn’t such a motive as love. By that philosophy we should further say that you were a hindrance to your mother’s development, therefore she did you a favor by allowing you to live. I hope you are feeling cringy from my sole attempt at embracing this conclusion about all humans. If you did cringe, then something natural in you found the idea of such motives to be repulsive and wholly anti-human, even anti-society.
Society cannot happen without people, therefore ideas that inspire deliberate termination of a developing child in the womb are an anti-society practice inspired by an equally anti-society belief about people. Motherhood is the bedrock of society because it makes it happen.
Experiencing childbearing and childrearing makes women, fathers, children, and those touched by these experiences a most powerful pro-society force. How? Because they place fathers and mothers in situations uniquely predisposed to the cultivation of the best civic or societal virtues: changing diapers becomes healthcare and simple loving care for another, sleepless nights turn into sacrifice and vigilance, temporary separation from your partner translates into better preparedness, learning safety, and embracing greater autonomy. Raising a child confronts us with the need to develop ever better codes of behavior, which heavily depend on the size of our moral compass. Raising a child transforms parents, siblings, families, and communities into better citizens for the sake of a better society for all.
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Micol Collins is currently in her senior year at BYU-Idaho. She plans to graduate in the Fall of 2023 with a degree in Marriage and Family Studies, and then obtain a Master’s in Public Administration. She enjoys writing music, hiking, fishing, playing basketball and just staying active with her children and husband. She and her husband are the parents of three children.