In the week leading up to Mother’s Day weekend, The Atlantic thought it would be the perfect time to run a piece on pro-natalism policies arguing that being raised by “a group of friends” “might be even better” than being raised by a mother and father.
Perhaps this should be unsurprising considering The Atlantic’s atrocious track record of hoax-peddling and left-wing bias. It should be even less of a shock in light of the fact that the author, Faith Hill, has touted the virtue of skipping family holiday gatherings, argued for spouses maintaining a stranglehold on their individual autonomy, and advised readers to “take yourself on a date” “to honor [your] aloneness.” After the reversal of Roe v. Wade, she lamented that “the gap between dystopian plots and actual life feels like it’s shrinking” — because, apparently, a world in which there are some limits on the legality of parents paying an abortionist to kill their unborn child is a very dark place.
Admittedly, Hill’s cautious openness to the possibility that there might be a problem with America’s basement-level birth rate is an improvement on the media’s years of collaborating with scientists, researchers, and so-called experts to demonize parents who have more than 1.8 children and strike fear in the hearts of young people who entertain the idea of having children. At the same time, it isn’t committing a genetic fallacy to pause and consider whether a member of the legacy media is the person most qualified to dictate pro-natalist policy prescriptions. In fact, news outlets with a robust, decades-long track record of promoting no-holds-barred promiscuity, self-enforced sterility (as the magical highway to adult utopian-theme-park experience), abortion-on-demand, and climate change paranoia seem unlikely to have a reasonable perspective on the issue.
Hill does acknowledge the breakdown in the traditional family since the 1970s but (unsurprisingly) fails to ponder whether this decline might be linked to the collapse in birth rates that took place over the same period. She decries Project 2025 for stating that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure,” claiming that “a pronatalist policy that defines family so narrowly” is a “moral” and “strategic” error because it “acknowledge[es] only a type of household that most Americans don’t fit into.” (Married couples still account for nearly 50 percent of U.S. households, but Hill is deftly obscuring a deeper reality here. Every child has a mother and a father — not just 50 percent — and those three make up a natural family, regardless of whether the child ends up being raised by a same-sex couple or “group of friends.”)
To support her argument, Hill turns to Cambridge psychologist Susan Golombok, whose research was cited in briefs supporting what would be the final outcomes in Obergefell and Bostock. Golombok, Hill writes, has purportedly discovered that “parents in nonconventional family structures tend to be more involved than straight, married parents on average,” and “what counts more for kids is … the quality of their relationships with family members, and whether they’re accepted by the outside world.” Hill doesn’t delve into the details of Golombok’s research in the article but concludes that “at least half a century of research supports the idea that a household arrangement itself isn’t what makes a kid happy and healthy.”
Marriage isn’t a “magical fix-all,” Hill observes, noting that one could be “raised by two miserably married, constantly arguing parents.” She quotes Harvard sociologist Christina Cross, who downplays the benefits of marriage because it doesn’t automatically make poor families affluent (as if marriage were some sort of get-rich scheme). “The benefits of the two-parent structure, [Cross] said, ‘are just not universal.’”
In other words, it really doesn’t matter whether one gets married or spends life on a relationship carousel (or rollercoaster); the kids will be fine. And it doesn’t matter whether children have a mom and a dad, or two dads, or 20 dads, or a managing partner and a flock of interns. A child could be raised by Bill Belichick, his girlfriend, and the North Carolina football team, and still get good grades and go to college, so clearly the traditional family is outdated. Government should subsidize the creation of motherless and fatherless kids so anyone who wants to can go pick one up from the local artificial-womb warehouse or order one on Amazon.
But even if a “half century of research” really did say that, millennia of human experience would still say otherwise. In reality, one doesn’t need a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to know that children need a mother and a father, not an artificial womb and a group of drinking buddies — despite Hill’s promotion of “the many kinds of families that already exist” as equal to or superior to a married mom and dad. The fact that children need a mother and a father is self-evident, like the reality that sight is better than blindness and life is better than death; and the left’s refusal to acknowledge this reality says more about the moral blindness of its adherents than the availability of data confirming this reality.
But, according to Golombok, “so far” “the data suggest” children of “platonic co-parents” “are just fine,” which leads Hill to conclude that “if pooling incomes is good for kids — well, a group of pals combining finances, skills, and sets of hands might be even better.” Reality reveals, however, that the child benefits from the specific love of his parents, from their intense and instinctive loyalty. Anyone who personally knows good mothers and fathers realizes that their love and loyalty are tenacious and even ferocious, superior to the amorphous care of any number of persons who lack the deep ties that exist between a mother and father and their children. If parenting were just about “combining finances, skills, and sets of hands” and “pooling incomes,” then an orphanage would be just as good as a home, and the U.S. government would be the ideal parent.
Yet Hill, The Atlantic, and the media will continue to bludgeon the American people with “experts” from elite universities and flawed studies that place little or no value on a child’s devotion to God, duty to his country, and love for his fellow man when “scientifically investigating” which family structures are most conducive to human flourishing. The media as a whole exist in large part to wage a constant propaganda campaign promoting the supposed benefits and virtues of “free love,” abortion, definitionally infertile sexual relationships, and the genital mutilation of children, while demonizing politicians and organizations who beg to differ. Now, casting aside the traditional family like a worn-out shoe, they propose piecing together little humans and raising them in polycules to help remedy the falling birth rate their propaganda campaign has exacerbated.
But as you celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend, it’s worth remembering that mothers are the strongest argument against all of the studies, “data,” and propaganda anti-human activists use to push for their extinction: Mothers flush with joy at the first moment they realize they’ve conceived a new life. Mothers suffering through long hours of labor to bring tiny babies into the world. Mothers waking again and again in the middle of the night to provide comfort and nourishment to little ones. Mothers changing diapers and wiping noses and cleaning up various bodily fluids that would cost a small fortune in Airbnb fees.
Mothers telling teens not to talk back, and mothers sending sons off to war. Mothers weeping over the graves of children taken too soon. Mothers waiting anxiously for prodigals to come home. Mothers rejoicing at the weddings of sons and daughters, and mothers snuggling their children’s children. Mothers enriching the lives of everyone around them. Mothers whose work is done and who live now in heaven and in the memories of those whose lives they changed infinitely for the better.
Joshua Monnington is an assistant editor at The Federalist. He was previously an editor at Regnery Publishing and is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
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