Anastasia Berg: What Are Children For?

About The Book

A modern argument, grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism, about childbearing ambivalence and how to overcome it.

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, Millennials and Zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor.

With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a women’s issue but a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction, Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in the present but, in choosing to have children, in the future.

Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. She is a senior editor of The Point, a magazine of philosophical writing on politics, contemporary life, and culture, and co-founder of the Point Program for Public Thinking, a collaboration of the magazine with the University of Chicago to promote a more thoughtful public discourse. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, the University of Cambridge. She holds a BA from Harvard and an MA and joint degree PhD from the Committee on Social Thought and the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Cut, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Chronicle Review.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, an editor at the Point, and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. Winner of the 2021 Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, finalist for a National Magazine Award, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Reviewing Prize, Rothfeld has written for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. She lives in Washington, DC.

Samuel Kimbriel is a political philosopher, author, and founding director of Aspen’s Philosophy & Society Initiative. The Initiative seeks to reignite a national tradition of public philosophy, enabling us to grapple with our largest and most haunting issues of societal purpose—What is justice? What is a good life? What is society for?

He is part of an emerging generation of philosophers rethinking basic questions of individuality, identity, and community. Author of Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation (Oxford University Press), he is also Contributing Editor at Wisdom of Crowds and writes widely on topics of solidarity, ideology, democracy, power, and trust for outlets including the Washington Post and BBC. He lives in Washington, D.C. and holds MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge.

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