MomsRising gets my blood pressure rising

I was recently invited by another mom who also has two children in the same church preschool program, to attend a film called “The Motherhood Manifesto” at a local library. “Come hear about the policies that make it so hard to be a mom these days,” the invitation said, along with a cheery request to bring something “yummy” and an offer to provide babysitting.

The word “manifesto” in the title sent up red flags for me, as anyone who is taking a page from Karl Marx’s playbook probably doesn’t share my views. (The fact that it the film is narrated by actress Mary Steenburgen was my second clue.) But I went to the recommended website – www.momsrising.org – to see what the components of the “manifesto” are. Cleverly, the website’s authors have used “MOTHER” as an acronym for their demands: M = (paid) Maternity and paternity leave. O = Open, flexible work. T = TV and afterschool programs. H = Healthcare for all kids. E = Excellent childcare. R = Realistic and fair wages.

“Manifesto” was the right word for it, all right. Virtually everything on the site advocates government regulation of business and taxpayer-funded social services. The site is filled with factoids about Canada’s allegedly wonderful health care system, how many school-age children are home alone each afternoon (14 million!), the need for government censorship of the (40,000) TV commercials children see each year, and so on.

Even worse, I read through everything on the site and wondered, where in any of this is the ‘mothering’?

I considered going to the event, and expressing my views there, but decided that a Saturday afternoon was better spent with my two toddlers. So I declined, and drafted the following response to the mom who had invited me instead:

“Thank you for the invitation, but I went to the website and discovered quickly that I don't share most of the views expressed there. One notable example - but by no means the only one - is the site's apparent advocacy for "universal health care" - meaning, presumably, government-provided health care. I was a law professor and free-lance writer in Detroit in the 1990s, and I can attest that Canada's plan is hardly the model plan that MomsRising.org seems to think it is. In Detroit, we saw the hordes of Canadians come across the border to avoid months waiting for necessary surgery, for a choice of doctors, or to obtain America’s demonstrably better medical research. Canada's system is a failure for the same reason the United Kingdom's is a failure: when people perceive that something is "free" (because the costs are hidden to them), they use much more of it than they would if they had to pay for it.

A universal health care system paid for in this country by tax dollars would collapse in an astonishingly short time. You only need to look at the impact of medical malpractice insurance on obstetrics. In the 1980s, we began to see multi-million-dollar jury verdicts in questionable cases (where malpractice was unclear or even unproven) because the jury knew that an insurance policy would pay the verdict. But this drove the premiums up to the point that doctors could not - and cannot - afford them.

No doctor - no matter how successful – is going to stay in a specialty where the insurance premiums are over $100,000 per year. And this is now the case in many high-risk specialties like obstetrics and neurosurgery. Doctors cannot pass the costs of those premiums on to patients in the form of fees; patients cannot pay them, Medicare and Medicaid will not pay them, nor will HMOs or PPOs, all of whom have fixed prices for what they will pay. Once the cost of an hour's work for a physician is greater than what he or she can make - they close their doors. After this started happening across the country, legislatures began passing laws to cap pain and suffering awards in malpractice cases.

My point is that while there is much wailing and moaning about prices, no one pays any attention to costs. You can clamor all you want to fix or control or cap prices, but the costs are what they are - and once the price you can charge for the service is less than the cost of providing it, the business or practice is gone. Unless, of course, you are going to have the government order people to stay in business, and it is not difficult to imagine the catastrophically poor care that we would get with people forced to stay in medical practice.

And the economics is just as bad in the MomsRising site's claims about "fair wages," the "mommy tax," and "excellent child care." When wages are adjusted for time that mothers spend out of the work force at home with their children, women in the same jobs make dollar for dollar what men do. (See Thomas Sowell's excellent work in this area.) It is absurd for women to want to be paid to be home with their children, and then also to be paid as much as men who did not leave the work force for any amount of time.

For example, many of my female law colleagues took time off to be at home with their babies. Some stepped off partnership track altogether. Others took longer to get there. Some did part-time or flex-time while their children were young. These are all great options. But if I elect one of these options, and choose to go up for partnership in 10 years rather than seven, it is manifestly unfair to the man (or woman, for that matter) who went up for partnership three years before I did, for me to demand that I now be paid as much as they are. They worked a 60-hour work week the entire time I was on leave, or part-time, or flex-time.

And the economic prescriptions for lower income women make even less sense -- women who don't make enough in their jobs to pay for someone else to take care of their children while they work. I find it incredible that women are both demanding to be paid MORE for their positions, in order to pay for childcare that they admit is already inadequate and too expensive, and they want the child care to be "excellent," which will make it even more expensive, and oh, by the way, someone else should pay for it. If you make less than $25,000 per year (as MomsRising.org claims is true of one-quarter of families with children under six), then how is it logical to pay someone else between $4000 and $10,000 per year per child (another MomsRising statistic)? Wouldn’t it make more sense to stay home and take care of your children yourself?

All of these economically disastrous prescriptions are supposed to be motivated by our recognition that motherhood is terribly important. I happen to think that motherhood is the most important profession, and that our culture doesn't even give lip service to it. But I also think as mothers we do a terrible disservice to our children by farming them out all day long. More to the point, it's pathologically hypocritical to claim some moral high ground for motherhood while working tirelessly to make it possible - and desirable - for mothers to be everywhere except with their children.

Here's a sample "tidbit" from the MomsRising.org website:

"A recent study found a widespread scarcity of quality, affordable infant-toddler child care in all communities."

What's shocking to me about that statement is that there is NO shortage of quality, affordable infant and toddler care in any community - it's called "parents."

To my way of thinking, very little at MomsRising.org celebrates being a mother. What it does attempt to do is use having a baby as a moral bludgeon to trumpet for government control over childrearing. I cannot think of anything worse. It is no substitute for mothering (or parenting in general), psychologically and emotionally catastrophic for children, and economically disastrous for the country.

What galls me most about so many of these women-driven and allegedly mother-centric initiatives is that they betray American women’s complete lack of understanding of basic economics. As long a some public policy pronouncement is “for the children” or accompanied by a compelling story of a family’s struggle or financial hardship, we’re supposed to be all for it, even if it brings the government and the economy to the brink of collapse.

I truly wonder sometimes: where is the intellectual depth and political leadership that was supposed to have come with giving women access to education and the right to vote? Women’s “understanding” of politics seems to extend only to the existence of a constitutional “right” to destroy their own offspring, and of economics, that everyone else should pay to raise their children if they deign to have them.

If The Motherhood Manifesto is any indication, a real appreciation for motherhood in the United States is falling, not rising. And, sadly, women must bear much of the blame.”