IF YOU’RE IN POSSESSION of a uterus, at some point in your life you’ve likely gotten the message that having children isn’t a choice—it’s your duty.
The number of children a woman of preroductive age bears has been declining globally yet childbearing expectations in some parts of the continent still remain very high.
But For well over a century, doctors, psychologists, and politicians have engaged in intense public campaigns to persuade women to bear children, publicly exalting motherhood and warning of personal, and societal, peril if they don’t comply.
The word for this is pronatalism, the promotion of baby-making for a nation’s social, political, and economic purposes.