Should Bearing the Child Mean Bearing All the Cost? A Catholic Perspective on the Sacrifice of Motherhood and the Common Good

Abstract

Should Bearing the Child Mean Bearing All the Cost?A Catholic Perspective on the Sacrifice of Motherhood and the Common Good Elizabeth R. Schiltz (bio) The single most common sacrifice that the majority of us will make in our lifetimes is the sacrifice of raising children. It is, of course, indisputable that the spiritual and psychic rewards of raising a child are real, concrete, and incalculable. But it is equally indisputable that child raising also entails sacrifice. On a practical level, raising children involves sacrifice of sleep, privacy, space, free time, and freedom, and sometimes a degree of one's sanity—sacrifices that are, like the rewards, real, concrete, and incalculable. Raising children, however, also involves financial sacrifices that are actually quite calculable. But the calculable financial sacrifice of raising children is not borne equally by those of us with children. The calculable financial sacrifice of raising children is borne, to an overwhelmingly disproportionate degree, by women who are raising children. Here in the United States, for those who have never had children, young women (between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-three) make 98 cents for every dollar men make.1 In contrast, the wage gap between all men and all women—including working mothers this time—is an astonishing 59 cents to the dollar. Even if we take out all the women who work part time, and compare the wages of men and women [End Page 15] working fulltime—and again include working mothers—we still find women's earnings are 77 percent of men's.2 In contrast, having children seems to have no effect, and may even have a positive effect, on men's income.3 And that's just the United States.4 It is a simple, tragic fact that throughout the globe significantly more women and children live in poverty than do men. Mary Ann Glendon recently reminded the United Nations that three-quarters of the world's poverty population today is composed of women and children. In the developing world, hundreds of millions of women and children lack adequate nutrition, sanitation and basic health care. And even in affluent societies, the faces of the poor are predominantly those of women and children, for . . . there is a strong correlation between family breakdown and the feminization of poverty. The costs of rapid increases in divorce and single-parenthood have fallen heavily on women, and most heavily of all on those women who have made personal sacrifices to care for children and other family members.5 Across the globe, without exception, and really without exaggerating, it is legitimate to say that raising children generally impoverishes women financially. As Catholics, how are we to react to the stark reality of this concrete financial sacrifice? How can Catholic teachings help us sort through the complex and tangled web of the issues involved in securing mothers' access to financial security? Tackling this issue as a Catholic legal academic requires grappling with two bodies of thought that are about as different in perspective from one another as they could conceivably be—the Catholic Church's teachings on the role of women and the law-journal articles and books of feminist legal scholars. The most interesting discovery for me in beginning this endeavor has been finding surprisingly Catholic ideas woven into the feminist arguments, and surprisingly feminist ideas woven into the Catholic teachings. [End Page 16] In this article, I will explain the ways in which I believe these two bodies of thought are compatible. I will argue that this compatibility suggests a number of ways in which Catholic thought could contribute to the development of a theory of justice that is compatible with both Catholic and feminist theorist agendas. I will also argue that this compatibility suggests a potentially helpful way to begin the difficult work of translating Church teachings on this topic into concrete policy proposals—namely, focusing carefully on the precise nature of the "common good" that women's sacrifice of child raising is ultimately considered to be fostering. Over the last couple of decades, feminist theorists have been struggling with the inadequacy of the image of the autonomous individual on which "the liberal theory that dominates...