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[There was] growing awareness that Quebec's incentive policies were not producing the expected birth increases. Although there was an initial increase in the late 1980s in the total fertility rate from 1.49 children per woman in 1988 to 1.72 in 1990, after 1990 total births decreased, and families with three or more children remained uncommon. Overall, policies favoring third and subsequent children were viewed increasingly as contrary to the needs of most families.

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Clearly, promoting higher fertility has not been effective for the past half-century. Like many other modern societies, Quebec faces a low birth rate and an aging population. The Quebec government cannot convince women to bear more children than they desire.

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Reactions to these forms of direct financial assistance varied. Noninterventionists argued that fertility decisions were individual, not governmental, responsibilities. Some even charged that the pronatalists had invented a fertility crisis to advance the nationalist agenda. One scathing critique by feminist professor Heather Maroney of the University of Carleton charged that Quebec's pronatal policies marginalized women, reducing them to objects of demographic policy.

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I agree with French feminist Elisabeth Badinter, who, in her short, sharp polemic The Conflict, argues that intensive, obsessive mothering bodes ill for women's equality. As long as women's primary focus is domestic, men will run the world and make the rules... Dr Bill Sears, guru of attachment parenting and, not incidentally, a devout Christian, is fairly explicit that mothers shouldn't have jobs – he even suggests that couples borrow money from their parents to enable the wife to stay home.

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Not only is this arrangement bad for women; I don't think it's necessarily good for children either – being hovered over constantly and obliged to serve the emotional needs of an adult who has blocked herself from normal adult modes of pleasure and accomplishment. (One woman profiled in Time has even given up her friends. The only time she let anyone else care for her baby was when she was in labour producing another.) What does attachment parenting tell daughters about how big their dreams should be? How does it teach sons not to expect women to cater to their every whim? How does it teach any child that the world does not revolve around him or her? It's true that only a tiny number of families practice attachment parenting to the full – there are only 5 million stay-at-home mothers in the whole country, and most of them are either very wealthy or very poor – but its ideals are pervasive: As Badinter puts it, Baby is king; Mom is servant.

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Badinter blames intensive mothering for distorting feminism and pulling women back into the home. But one could also say it's a socially approved way of withdrawing from a workplace that, in addition to all the usual sorrows and pains, has been sexist in general and hostile to mothers in particular, and of resolving the frustrations of the double day – women's greater domestic burden.

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Where Badinter goes wrong is that she blames women for adapting to this unjust state of affairs by moralising their own subjection and making it the basis for their identity. This lets men off the hook yet again.

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Dear Prudence: My mom let me and my brother breast-feed until we were each about 5 years old. She let us touch and play with her breasts for years after that. She never told us what sex was, and later when I found out, I felt revulsion at the memories of how I touched, and wanted to touch, my own mother. Now I'm 18, a senior in high school, and I have a little sister who’s 9 years old. Mom breast-fed her until really late, and now my sister feels my mother's breasts the way my brother and I did. My sister is my mom's last child, and my mother persists in treating her as a baby. My mother refuses to consider she could be encouraging inappropriate impulses in my sister. When I tell my mother that I'm grossed out and that my sister's too old for this, she won't listen. But I don't want my sister to have the same revulsion at her own memories and confused feelings that I suffered. I'm so disgusted it's keeping me up at night. What should I do?

—No More Mother Love


Dear No More,
I hope you missed the newsstands last week and didn’t see the cover of Time featuring a young mother with an almost 4-year-old latched to her breast. That picture would have given you some traumatic flashbacks. I’m not insinuating that women who breast-feed their children past toddlerhood are doing something wrong. It’s your description of the postweaning, clearly sexual breast fondling that is alarming. Your mother sounds like a sexual predator disguising herself as the ultimate attachment parent. Because there are so many more male molesters, it’s easier for sick women to get away with it. Being an earth mother is the perfect ruse that allows your mother to use her own children to gratify her disturbed impulses. It’s awful to look back on your childhood with shame, but it’s a good thing that you feel revulsion for what happened to you. It shows you are able to distinguish appropriate boundaries, see how you were manipulated, and mourn for your childhood. You don’t mention a father (or fathers), so I’ll assume he is not in the picture to provide help. As painful as it is to contemplate turning your mother in to the authorities, for the sake of your sister, that’s what’s you should do. But it would be best if you had some adult support in taking that step, which will be a life-changer for everyone in your family, perhaps in the most positive way if you mother gets some help. You could go directly to Child Protective Services, but as an interim step consider making an appointment to talk to your sister’s pediatrician, who perhaps is still your doctor, too. You might be more comfortable talking first to a professional who is familiar with your family. The pediatrician will be a mandated reporter, which means she or he will be required to forward any suspicion of abuse. You should continue your healing with a therapist who specializes in sexual mistreatment. This should help you feel comfortable with the normal sexual impulses your mother cruelly exploited.

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GOMI
You’re not a martyr, Kristin. You’re just another well off married white lady who is turning her vagina into a salad shooter for babies and going to church.

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Dear fellow Americans: Should you decide that you don't like living in "One Nation UNDER GOD", please leave the country. Thanks!

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Isn't it great we can agree to disagree? America is a wonderful place.