When Science Became a Weapon Against Mothers

For the past half century or more, psychology and social science have supplied the authority for a distortion of reality at a cultural level when it comes to the daily lives of women. Motherhood is most often cast as a mental health hazard, while careerism is marketed as a crucial act of self-care. This view of child-rearing vs. work for pay rests on selective readings of research and a diagnostic double standard. That double standard blames distress with children on motherhood itself, yet it assigns the cause of distress for those without children to arbitrary contemporary factors, such as how gender inequities in the workplace cause “burnout.” Media and online activists then weaponize this borrowed authority, wielding supposed science as a moral club to batter dissenters into stunned silence.

What was once simple common sense—that infants need a maternal presence in their earliest years, and that women who defer having a family will pay a psychological price—has been recast as heresy. Even cautious voices such as the psychoanalyst and self-described “parent coach” Erica Komisar, who tries to ground every claim about the importance of child-rearing in the necessity of women’s autonomy and the mental health benefits of motherhood, are accused of wanting to shackle women to the kitchen. The media caricature domesticity as oppression, and online mobs swarm anyone suggesting women might suffer when they are childless. Popular culture—in films like Nightbitch with Amy Adams and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You with Rose Byrne—offers portraits of motherhood that use the metaphors of horror movies to convey a sense of brutality, depersonalization, and destruction.

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