The Progressive Pronatalist Book that Broke My Wife ( "What Are Children For?")

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dissect the new pronatalist book "What Are Children For?" by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. This in-depth discussion explores the challenges of promoting childbearing within a progressive framework and the broader implications for demographic trends.

Key points covered:

* Overview of "What Are Children For?" and its reception

* The difficulty of justifying childbearing in a progressive worldview

* Analysis of the book's central themes and claims

* The impact of soft cultures on attitudes towards parenthood

* The importance of having an objective function in life decisions

* Critique of progressive arguments against having children

* The unintended consequences of fertility strikes

* The role of overthinking in modern parenting anxieties

* How pronatalist arguments can reach progressive audiences

Whether you're interested in demographics, cultural trends, or the intersection of politics and family planning, this video offers a thought-provoking analysis of the challenges facing pronatalism in progressive circles.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody. It's Simone Collins here. And I'm so glad to see you here today. I am taking over this podcast. Oh no! It's been taken

Malcolm Collins: over!

Simone Collins: Yeah, because I am going to lead the discussion today. I've decided not to phone it in. And we are going to talk today about a new Pronatalist book that came out called What Are Children For?

Which is basically the left's attempt to At pronatalism it is a book that we were just told about by a friend at a conference and she basically explained it as this is the pronatalist argument. But from the perspective of a, an educated Brooklyn elite, who's highly progressive.

Yeah, but they got like

Malcolm Collins: an opinion piece in the New York Times, for example. Yeah, it got

Simone Collins: an opinion piece in the New York Times. It got a write up in the New Yorker. Obviously and they would never even consider giving us a platform. We

Malcolm Collins: have done we've reached out to them before. They don't,

Simone Collins: No. They don't talk to us, but they do talk to them. Because this was co written by two of their people. [00:01:00] Yeah. And so obviously we're super excited to read this book because, oh my gosh, maybe. Because we cannot apparently speak to pronatalism in a way that gets progressives excited. Maybe two progressive pronatalists could speak to progressives in a way that gets them excited.

And so they did, and so I read the book. Um, and okay, let me just start off by giving you the book's description, Malcolm, and I want to get your impression because I've read the book, Malcolm has not. Let's see what you think. So this is What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman.

It came out on June 11th. So right now only three Three reviews have been written about it. It's very new. Here's the description becoming a parent. Once the expected outcome of adulthood is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life, we seek self fulfillment, we want to liberate women to find meaning and self worth outside the home, and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change.

Weighing on the [00:02:00] pros and cons of having children, Millennials and Zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in favor. With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a woman's issue, but a basic human one.

And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction, Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life, not only in the present, but in choosing to have children in the future.

So what do you think of this description?

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: What's your impression here?

Malcolm Collins: I mean that it is what you said it is. It is pronatalism. And progressives are screwed. If they can't figure out a prenatalist cultural subfaction, their entire value system is going to go extinct. Yeah. And a lot [00:03:00] of people look at us and they think that we're like, secretly trying to save the progressives or something like that.

I would like some aspect of their culture to survive, but I don't want them to have the cultural dominance they have now. I think that's, they've shown that they basically become Nazis whenever they gain cultural power and they start dividing humans by ethnic group. I'm going to

Simone Collins: say a lot of the things that progressives fight for that they, they say they want pluralism.

Freedom of lifestyle, et cetera, are things that we very much support. It's just that in terms of what they actually allow for and support, progressives don't tend to do that in practice today.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, in a way that aligns with our values.

Simone Collins: And that's what you're talking about. We actually do care about progressive values, but the progressive movement now does not actually support those values.

That's what you're saying.

Malcolm Collins: It is it's wild that this has become the case. I think the parties have flipped basically with Trump. But anyway, so the interesting thing as a person like me is hearing you read this [00:04:00] and seeing your reaction to this and you guys haven't had to live with Simone while she was reading this.

Oh

Simone Collins: No. We're going to go over. All these things. And you're going to react to all my little bits. I have all these little things I can share with you about the book, but we're just, I'm just getting your impression on the description as provided by the publishers.

Malcolm Collins: I feel like I've just been read like Miranda rights.

This is about to like, that was a trigger warning for conservatives. That entire intro was a trigger.

Simone Collins: Okay. All right. I'll give you my TLDR because you say you should never bury the lead in these videos. I read this book. It included things like literary analysis, because that's apparently a necessary part of discussion of prenatalism, which this is clearly why we're not convincing any progressives.

We forgot the literary analysis

Malcolm Collins: in this context. What do you mean? Huh? Explain literary analysis. I, as a listener, don't know what you mean by they did. Okay. They, the

Simone Collins: authors literally talk about a series of books. There's one chapter where they just talk about books on motherhood they were written by various highfalutin fiction authors, and then there's another chapter where they talk about books [00:05:00] that are about climate, changing climate disasters.

In fact, one of the reviews of this book complains about the fact that there were spoilers in the literary analysis. That was one of her primary complaints because she cared enough to actually, go and read these books, which is, I think also interesting, reading all this literary analysis, it actually took me back to my high school days.

And it, I realized that the reaction I had at the end of this book was very similar to the reaction I had after finishing The Grapes of Wrath. Where you read that scene with the weird