Over the last 3 weeks, there has been a buzz about the newly termed “fecundophobia” or fear of children and fertile women. It is argued that this fear is the problem with our society. Really?  That’s our great problem? I’m not buying it. While I’ll admit there seems to be an aversion to fertility, children, and any woman or man who has more than 2 children, the aversion to children is not the real problem.
Fecundophobia is not the real problem just like anger is not the problem in an argument. No one will argue that anger is a problem and someone should work to control their passion of anger. However, anger is usually a mask to something else. Perhaps someone has been hurt, insulted, or felt used and instead of being open and honest with the offender about their real problem, they react with anger, lashing out and attacking the offender verbally. Why do they (we all) do this? Perhaps they don’t want to make themselves vulnerable again by sharing something so intimate, but perhaps they honestly have no clue themselves how they are really feeling.
Getting back to the issue at hand: sure, there might be a growing fecundophobia in society as can be seen in the blatant aversion to all things glorifying woman’s fertility. However, that is not the real problem. So, let’s get real. Let’s unpack this.
The surface issue is, ­of course, a verbal lashing out against pregnant women and big families. Name-calling, accusing, attempting to marginalize – all these actions are reactions to what those with fecundophobia see as threat. Fertility then is a threat to what? Ah, here is the big ticket question. What does fertility threaten that creates such aversion or fear?

Be afraid, be very afraid...


What does having children usually do to a person? Short answer: it makes that person become an adult. I don’t mean just get older. Everyone ages every second of every day.  I mean having children makes someone really and truly grow up. It forces a person to be concerned with someone other than her or himself. It forces a person to set aside their own personal desires to put someone else’s needs above their own. Putting another’s desires and needs above your own is the meaning of real love.
For the past couple of generations, our society has been sold a bill of goods. They have been told to self-help themselves to success; that success is equivalent with career, money and social/ political achievement of power. They have been told that freedom means being free from any dependence on anyone and free from anyone being dependent on them. “No strings attached” is the ideal of any relationship because you can still be “free” to do what is best for you. The sacrifice of this so-called freedom is ridiculous, absurd. Anyone who would seek to counter these truths is a simpleton.
There is a very simple test as part of an IQ test for children that goes like this: You place a marshmallow in front of the child (making sure that the child does indeed like marshmallows). You tell the child you can either have one marshmallow now or if you give me the marshmallow, you can have three marshmallows at the end of our game. The child who hands the marshmallow to the teacher has the higher IQ.
Our society is frantically holding onto what they think is the greater good. Anyone or any thing (like the praising of fertility or the presence of large families) that questions their philosophy is a threat. They see the sacrifices that parents of many children make and they don’t like it. They see the lack of career advancement that some parents choose (men and women alike) to spend more time with family and they are mortified.
They are stuck in a selfish mode. They may have fecundophobia, but the real problem is neoteny, which is defined as the retention of juvenile features in the adult animal. Selfishness and seeking one’s own goals, aspirations and wants above anything else is a childish trait. When we are forced to give that up, we discover something amazing.
It is in the giving of ourselves that we truly find ourselves. It is in the laying down of our own wills, our own desires that we realize a profound meaning of life we have never seen before. Children stretch you, pull you, and even break you physically, mentally, emotionally – but it is when we allow ourselves to be broken out of love for another that the whole world changes. We find peace. We find true joy. We find adulthood.
There may be a fear of fertility and children in our society, but it’s not the children themselves that they fear.  Rather, it is what having children means – it means that they will have to grow up. They will have to set down their one marshmallow and see it disappear before them, and for a while it will seem they set it down for nothing. Yet, in the end, there will be an abundance of joy, they will wonder how they could have ever clung to that one thing for so long, and they will regret waiting to set it down – and for some, they wait too long and what they wouldn’t give to have those years of fecundity back again…
 
Theresa Martin is a blogger and author, check out her book “Woman, How Great Thou Art.”