The Choice Plot: Why are so many novels reckoning with whether to have children?

Abstract

The Choice PlotWhy are so many novels reckoning with whether to have children? Sanjena Sathian (bio) Imagined children loom over my life of late. They haunt nearly every conversation as my circle collectively wonders whether, when, and how to procreate. There is the friend weighing climate pessimism and a meager paycheck against his love of kids. The friend who watches graphic birthing videos as a form of contraception. The doctor friend, once eager for babies, who sees ectopic pregnancies and septic miscarriages and deems [End Page 132] gestation too risky after Dobbs. The friend who worries he won't be able to adopt as an unpartnered gay man. The child-free queer friends feeling betrayed by other queers' baby fever. The friend who joins a "committee," complete with Zoom calls and pitch decks, to help a single woman pick a sperm donor. The friend who keeps her abortion secret; it is a season of babies, not terminations. The friend whose miscarriage is so physically excruciating it makes her reconsider "trying" again. The friend freezing embryos as truce in a long battle with her husband: he is ready for children now; she may never want them. The friend freezing eggs who absconds to the bathroom at a wedding to administer her hormone shots. Millennials did not invent waffling about reproduction, but we have put our generational spin on a familiar story. Twenty-first-century social norms and fertility technologies let us postpone childbearing; our equivocation is still further protracted because our reproductive years have been marked by recessions and environmental catastrophes, in light of which having kids can seem impossible or immoral. All this is to say nothing of the wild swings in our rights. I began my twenties in an age of procreative optimism, forty years after Roe v. Wade, when commercial egg freezing and gay marriage alike were new. I turned thirty months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe; threatened contraception, fertility treatments, and miscarriage care; and began to erode queer rights. The contemporary American paradox: we live in an age of medically expanded but legally diminished choice. Inevitably, in the United States and beyond, novelists are taking up the dilemmas of twenty-first-century procreation. There has been a slew of recent novels about pregnancy and reproductive choice. Among the newest are Louisa Hall's Reproduction (2023), about a Frankenstein-obsessed novelist's pregnancy, and Ashley Wurzbacher's How to Care for a Human Girl (2023), about two sisters who get pregnant simultaneously. Fiction is particularly suited to addressing the quandaries of choice. Interiority and free indirect discourse allow readers to gain intimacy with characters' ambivalent worldviews, while scene and plot let writers dramatize [End Page 133] multiple perspectives and eschew polemic. An ability to represent paradox may in fact be the novel's greatest ethical power. Of course, these contemporary books have ancestors. "The novel has long been a vessel for intense but paradoxical feelings about the question of creating new life," writes critic Aaron Matz in The Novel and the Problem of New Life (2021), which examines literary representations of skepticism around reproduction. Such representations, Matz points out, appear in the nineteenth-century work of Gustave Flaubert and D. H. Lawrence and extend into the twentieth century in the novels of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing, among others. In 2018, a new kind of book about choice arrived, heralding what we might call "the choice plot." Sheila Heti's Motherhood is a diaristic chronicle of a woman torn about whether to have a baby; seeking help with her decision, she turns to the I Ching and flips coins. (She decides against.) In Motherhood, the long-standing "procreative-skeptical strain" Matz identifies as a hallmark of fiction became a stand-alone subject. Motherhood split critics. Some saw it as navel-gazing, others as revelatory. Matz called Motherhood's focus on one woman's interior vacillation "airless," and wondered, "Can an entire novel subsist on the basis of this theme?" The choice plot replies with a hearty yes. Because of course it can. In my friends' discussions about childbearing lie the universal, fundamental questions of fiction: of how to arrange a life, and how to make...