In an age of rising infertility, being mother to five beautiful daughters feels like winning the lottery of life. Contrary to much of the public commentary today, motherhood is not a burden the world forces on women – it is a privilege.
For years, our culture has been quietly dismantling fatherhood, reducing fathers to optional accessories rather than essential pillars in a child’s life. Now motherhood is being subjected to the same attack. Any woman who chooses anything resembling a traditional homemaking, child-rearing life is framed as someone who has bought into an oppressive scheme designed to entrap her. The role that literally raises the next generation is treated as an optional side hobby – or worse an inconvenience. Children are increasingly cast as accessories that have the potential to disrupt lifestyles, careers, and travel plans, rather than the priorities they ought to be.
Motherhood, we are told, is dispensable – until someone with means wants a baby, at which point its biological reality suddenly becomes a service to be purchased. Nowhere is this contradiction starker than in the rising support for commercial surrogacy. In ordinary circumstances, the mother of a baby plays three roles. She is the biological mother, with whom the child shares a genetic bond and heritage. She is the birth mother – the first person a baby ever bonds with on its journey from conception to birth. And she is the social mother, who nurtures and raises that child into adulthood. The loss of any one of these is, in any other context, recognised as a tragedy. In commercial surrogacy, that loss is engineered – deliberately imposed on a child by adults who can afford to commission it. Eggs are sold. Wombs are rented. The social mother is optional, contingent on the makeup of the paying parent or parents.
Meanwhile, the women who want to raise their own children are largely invisible. I know hundreds of families making enormous economic sacrifices so that one parent, usually the mother can be home – not because they are wealthy, but because they are convicted. It is tough, and it shouldn’t be. Working mothers, juggling mortgages and school runs also deserve childcare options they feel safe and comfortable leaving their children in, not the one-size-fits-all childcare centres on offer.
But let’s be honest: in today’s economic climate, staying home to raise children feels like a luxury. Rather than demonising the men who work hard to make that choice possible for their wives and children – branding them as agents of control – we should be supporting that decision and backing it up through family-friendly tax policy.
Our culture peddles the ‘boss girl’ dream to young women and quietly demotes motherhood as an optional extra during or after corporate success. The result is a generation of women who feel bitter and betrayed by the ticking of their own biological clocks as the dream of even one child slips away.
I can tell you this: no number of cocktail parties, business-class flights, and overseas holidays will ever rival the warmth of tiny bodies snuggled against mine.
In a world that prizes self-satisfaction over self-sacrifice, is it any wonder depression and discontentment continue to rise? Our culture has forgotten an old truth – that self-indulgence does not deliver the contentment that giving does. That, in essence, is the joy of motherhood. It is not all snuggles and trips to the playground. It is hard work and sleep deprivation, often at a great personal cost. But there is no joy on earth like the unconditional love of a child and the comfort of a happy family.
Motherhood is not the trap our culture insists it is. It is the greatest gift for women who feel called to it.
Stephanie Bastiaan is the Head of Advocacy at Women’s Forum Australia.
