Babies, Houses, and Babies

On Saturday I went to a fringe theater on the last day of the run of DOB, a play by John Kaufmann about birthing. Yes, he went down to California just as his sister was having a baby, and the whole thing turned into a play.

Most of the play takes place in the hospital operating room during his sister’s labor.

The play was a delight, and a real shock.

Here were your young starving actors and your avant-garde types dressed in artistical black and they were putting on a light-hearted, nicely crafted play about having babies. Whatever will they come up with next?

This matter of babies is important, particularly as the voters of the United States are dividing up between the party of babies and the party of, er, fetuses.

In Britain, columnist Minette Marrin is also thinking about babies, or rather the British baby problem.

[T]here is a shortage of babies in respectable, middle-class, middle-income families. The rich and the poor are having plenty of babies. In upper-middle-class circles it is now a status symbol to have four or more children. Among the poor it is perfectly possible to have babies with or without a man or a job; the state will pay. Although it won’t pay much, it will offer as good a life as any other that seems available.


The women who are not having children are what would have been called in the 19th century the deserving mothers; they are hard working, competent and responsible but have come to recognise that they cannot, as feminism once promised, have it all. They either need to work or want to work, or both, but for those on middling incomes it is not possible to have lots of babies as well. It is too expensive and too risky — expensive in childcare and risky in job prospects.

And what with modern divorce, a woman can’t get too far away from the job market. The problem is that houses are so expensive in Britain that it is hard for a middle-class family to afford both a house and a baby.

In the United States, an interesting trend is developing. Although divorce is dropping a little, it is much lower than normal among college-educated women. Their divorce rate is 25 percent. That makes it much easier to afford children. There’s nothing like divorce to take that last child out of a woman’s life.

Is there something happening here, fellow trend-spotters? Should we be advising up-and-coming young men that babies is the coming thing?

By the way, a word to Minette Marrin. The best thing for you Brits to do about the baby problem is to forget “what everyone knows:” that there is no space left in Britain to build houses. Anyone who has sat in a Boeing 747 early in the morning looking blearily down at England’s green and pleasant land as the airplane circled in a holding pattern waiting to land at Heathrow will know that Britain has plenty of open space for houses.

Those new houses would get the price down, and then those middle-class women could fill the houses with babies. Beautiful bouncing babies.