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Around the beginning of the '70s came a convulsion of disgust at what some regarded as the tyrannical conventions of the American family. Both the need for population control and the urgency of women's rights impelled various writers to launch polemics against having kids. It was not an antichild so much as an antiparent movement. Among the voices raised against the tyrannies of automatic motherhood was that of Betty Rollin, who is now a correspondent for NBC News. "Motherhood is in trouble, and it ought to be," she wrote. "A rude question is long overdue: Who needs it?" The feminist Ellen Peck recruited Critic John Simon, TV Performer Hugh Downs and others to form the National Organization for Non-Parents ("None is fun"), devoted to the ideology of non-propagation.
Something interesting has happened to a few of the N.O.N. believers. They have grown older and changed their minds.
Now Rollin says she "feels like I've missed something" by not having a child. A number of women who in their 20s concentrated on their careers decided in their 30s, as they began to contemplate the impending biological limit of their childbearing years, to have at least one child while there was time. Says Novelist Anne Roiphe (Up the Sandbox): "We're seeing a whole rash of people having babies just in the nick of time. There's a difference between what one says at 20 and what one says at 38." Roiphe persuasively argues that the dogmas against children—or at least, against having children—are undergoing revision. "There has indeed been a swing of thought against children, but it was against this whole idea that one must have a family," she says. "Now I think it's probably going to swing back. All the excesses of the women's movement, including that one shouldn't 'look nice' and so on, are all going to be sifted through."
A doctrinal attitude toward children—for or against—is not the prevailing approach of most Americans. Michael Novak suggests that only the "idea elite," the 10% of the population in well educated, upper-income groups whose work centers on education, the professions, communications or some such —may harbor ideological or even environmental biases against children. That group could not have accounted by itself for the almost uninterrupted decline in the U.S. birth rate in the 70s. It is very likely that the economics of child rearing has had much to do with the trend toward smaller families, which has been encouraged by legal abortions.