I’m delighted to be able to respond to my trio of thoughtful reviewers. Writing a book can be a lonely pursuit—and the long lag between when the author is finished and the book is in the hands of readers is a hard wait. I tried to approach The Dignity of Dependence in a convivial spirit. Throughout my planning and drafting, I had the substack community of Other Feminisms to turn to for an ongoing conversation. It clarified my thinking and was always a welcome break from the maelstrom of social media. Every chapter went first to my husband for his read… with me incorporating his last set of notes just a few hours before I went into labor with our youngest. This trio of reviews were the first I got to read in the run-up to publication, and I’m so lucky to begin with these careful, curious interlocutors.
I am grateful for Agnes Howard’s emphasis on pregnancy as the paradigmatic human experience. I know well that there can be a reluctance to place too much weight on pregnancy. If pregnancy is so important, aren’t you asserting that the male half of the human race is cut off from something essential to being human? And, on the flip side, don’t you pose a danger to women, making all other rights and responsibilities secondary to the capacity for childbearing? And isn’t this salt in the wound for women who hope to bear children but are unable to conceive or struggle to carry a baby to term?
What I think all these critiques neglect is that pregnancy is a two-way relationship. As Howard writes, “Like confusion over a story when the reader’s imagination inserts her as the wrong character, such worries approach this human condition from the wrong direction. In this story you are not the mother, you are the baby.” I make parallel arguments in my public policy work, when I advocate for expanded family benefits, especially a baby bonus paid out to families after a birth. This isn’t a matter of squeezing childless adults to subsidize families. Everyone, including people who grow up and do not have children, begins as a baby. A benefit for babies is the most universal social support we can offer. Everyone has an infancy, even if not everyone lives long enough to collect social security.
Our own origins can feel irrelevant to or alienated from our sense of self, because we do not remember our time in the womb, our long lazy afternoons at our mothers’ breast, or the unstable steps that marked a new independence. That means that to know ourselves, we must be around young children, the disabled, the elderly, etc. Their visible need and others’ love in response to need shows us what we once wordlessly demanded and hopefully received. As Howard sums up, “We are even dependent on people to show us we are dependent.”
Dependent on whom? A mother at the very beginning. Even before she knows her child is there, her body is reaching out, twining tiny capillaries around a poppy seed-sized body, preparing to feed the child. As we grow, we must ask for help more explicitly, and we rely on someone to choose to give an active Yes. But beyond all those human relationships of need and being known, there is one great dependence in the background. It is God who conserves us moment to moment in existence, and it is Jesus who pulls us out of the pit that we could never escape on our own.
My book is more a work of anthropology than theology, but it is impossible to examine men and women without seeing the shadow of our Maker. I’m grateful for the way Nadya Williams and Rachel Roth Aldhizer deepen this argument in their own reviews. I walk a slightly narrow path in the book deliberately. Just as I hope men will not dismiss a book on dependence as solely for women, I pray that the book can reach secular readers without being dismissed as irrelevant because I am religious. For my hope, I’m indebted to Daniel Williams’s Defenders of the Unborn, a history of the pre-Roe pro-life movement. When I read it, I recognized many of the pro-immigrant, anti-war, progressives I grew up with—the kind of people who always want to err on the side of the voiceless. Reading Williams’s book made me feel like part of my own patrimony (matrimony?) had been lost, and advocacy for the unborn had somehow been severed from the history of civil rights advocacy I grew up with.
My book leans less heavily on theology because I think the fact that we are dependent, that a human being is someone who cannot stand on his or her own, is as accessible to all of us as the rest of the natural law. As Nadya Williams points out, Christianity becomes indispensable when we consider the moral implications of our own dependence. It takes more than just the natural law to see our dependence as an invitation to love, not despair. My hope is that by telling the story of who we are warmly and clearly, I can draw the reader’s attention back to the reality of who she is and give her some faith that being human is not humiliating.
I was fascinated by Williams’s exploration of my book through the lens of war and the weakness of civilians. Unfortunately, many of the nations that advocated for the weak by writing the Geneva Conventions now see the weak as legitimate targets for killing in peacetime. Far from the battlefields, it is the euthanasia clinic that now applies the pagan calculus of who is dead weight, excess need. The surest sign of our post-Christian collapse is that it is the word “dignity” that is used to justify their deaths.
It is partially for this reason that my book leans so heavily on the word “burden” which I’ve been repeatedly warned sounds pejorative. I don’t think any other word can encompass all the people I want to shelter. I am relying on “burden” for my own protection if I live long enough to undergo serious mental or physical debility as I age. As Aldhizer notes, it is “becoming a burden” that her father-in-law sees as the red line that would justify his own disappearance. A reassurance that he will never cross that threshold cannot comfort. It is not a promise we have the power to keep. As Aldhizer explains, his life has already been reshaped by his dementia.
Here, again, is the moment we need to move from the natural law to its Author. Saint John Henry Newman put in clearly in a sermon titled “Remembrance of Past Mercies:”
We cannot be our own masters. We are God’s property by creation, by redemption, by regeneration. He has a triple claim upon us. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness, or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous.… But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state—[that] may do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end. No, we are creatures; and, as being such, we have two duties, to be resigned and to be thankful.
There is no escaping our creatureliness. I think all readers of my book already know that. For some of us, like Aldhizer’s son David (or Aldhizer herself, given her ties to him) our dependence will be the loudest fact about us when we venture into the world. For others, the truth about ourselves can be pushed to the side for years at a time, until one’s own body or that of someone beloved makes its needs loudly known. I want to give my readers permission to speak what they already know. I hope my books are passed from friend to friend, and they make it easier for both to ask for help, even when they cannot reciprocate what they receive. It takes practice to learn that we can be loved when we cannot “earn” it. We rely on others to instantiate the utterly unmatchable love of God. If our worldly relationships depend on being “even,” we will not be prepared to accept the unrecompensable gift of the Atonement.