Did Men Ruin Motherhood?

In the aftermath of watching our mothers and grandmothers surrender their identities and joie de vivre to what was sold as their ultimate purpose, we are now witnessing the outcome—birth rates collapsing to historic lows. In my generation, an ever-increasing amount of women couldn’t care less about going through the torture of pregnancy and the humiliation of motherhood to bring a dependent into a world on the brink of collapse.

Personally, I’m not mourning a future where women choose joy, safety, and each other over compulsory sacrifice. If humanity needs women to suffer just to keep going, I don’t feel particularly attached to the idea of preserving it. The only reason I even care about this conversation is that, for most women in the Global Majority, this kind of future is still wildly out of reach. Additionally, history keeps reminding us that when women collectively step back from reproduction, autonomy doesn’t necessarily get celebrated. It’s rather unlikely that the men in power would gather in front of a whiteboard to hold a little brainstorm session and actually concern themselves with why women are refusing motherhood, nor with how to make it more livable. They will concern themselves only with outcomes, and when those outcomes threaten the system, control is usually their only straw to hold onto.

If we’re serious about ripping the straw out of their hands, we have to redefine motherhood immediately. And if motherhood is going to exist at all, the terms will be written by women.

I believe a major reason many women are opting out of motherhood today is that, suddenly, it has become clear that motherhood is ultimate form of Russian roulette. It seems to me that the risks are wildly uneven, poorly disclosed, and almost entirely held by women. Even your closest friends who became mothers can’t truly prepare you because motherhood is less a shared experience than a structural gamble. The same act of reproduction can lead one woman into community, support, and expansion, and another into isolation, economic precarity, physical depletion, and lifelong dependence. There is no standardized outcome, no guaranteed safety net, and no meaningful recourse once the dice have been rolled.

My personal, admittedly radical stance, is fueled by my refusal to watch one more woman take the bullet for the wet dream of patriarchy. I believe we can till rig this game in our favor, and the secret ingredient is as simple as it is revolutionary: subtract the man.

Allow me a quick thought experiment. What happens when men are no longer the center of reproduction, caregiving, and survival? What happens when the mere presence of a man stops being sold as the ultimate safety net? Who absorbs the risk then? Who actually carries the work, day after day, year after year, when there’s no romantic mythology to hide behind? What becomes possible once we stop outsourcing women’s survival to hope and good intentions?

My guess is motherhood would stop being a gamble on someone else’s reliability and start becoming something women can actually design on purpose. Obviously, the risk doesn’t fully disappear, but it certainly becomes more measurable, and therefore negotiable. What’s left is a much clearer picture of what raising a human being truly requires.

My argument is not against love, intimacy or partnership. If anything, it’s an argument against organizing women’s lives around men who are socially, legally, and historically insulated from the consequences of reproduction. Yes, I hate that men are failing fatherhood individually, and at this point, calling out how low the bar is has become something of a hobby. But zooming out, the bigger picture is clear: men fail because the system is designed to let them fail without catastrophic cost to themselves. Women, unsurprisingly, cannot.

People often say, “Well, it’s simple. Just don’t marry a loser.” I always chuckle when I hear this phrase. In disgust. Not marrying a loser seems tempting until you realize that the worst person you will ever have to deal with probably won’t tell you they’re the worst person you’ll ever deal with on the first date. Instead, they’ll make sure to kiss the floor you’re walking on, only to slowly start breaking that ground until you’re falling so fast and so deep you can barely climb out again.

The idea that women can simply choose the right partner to be the perfect father is an illusion that once again places the blame on women for making the “wrong” choice, instead of holding men accountable for their actions. No amount of discernment can override laws that privilege paternal absence and economies that punish maternal presence. Wakey, wakey, betting your future on male reliability in a system that does not require it isn’t being in your divine feminine. It’s reckless.

I’m genuinely relieved that more women are waking up to the reality of questioning how we actually want to design our futures, especially now that our childhood fantasy of marrying a tall prince with biceps who will save us and hand us three perfect children reads less like a fairytale and more like a Republican campaign ad.

When I share that I’m raising my daughter by myself across different cultures, thousands of women chimed in to tell me my story made them realize they weren’t actually afraid of motherhood. They were afraid of raising a child with a man. Given how many ways a man can legally, financially, and emotionally sabotage a mother’s life, that fear is wildly underexplored and deserves far more credit in conversations about dropping birth rates. If anything, all of this makes one thing clear: it’s long overdue that we decenter men from motherhood as the default organizing principle.

The proof of concept, as usual, can be found in nature. There are plenty of female mammals who raise their offspring with little to no male involvement. What we can learn from our Orangutan, Elephant and Orca sisters is that reproduction and care don’t have to be conflated with control or permanence. Contrary to popular belief, a man's presence in raising children is not a biological necessity. Even in the entire span of human history, before patriarchy got introduced, males have not always been required to remain present in order for offspring to survive, socialize, or thrive.

Across animal societies and matrifocal human societies, the formula is simple: stability, collective care, and authority where the care actually happens. Females organize around one another.

In today’s world, that basically looks like women living with their besties and raising kids together. More fun, less drama, and children’s survival no longer hinging on romantic attachment, but on competence and continuity.

What these insights teach us is that partnered motherhood isn’t a biological destiny written into our DNA. In fact, it’s a social and economic arrangement that—predictably—works best for men. No wonder it’s starting to feel wildly incompatible with women’s lives in 2026. There are great fathers out there, but for many families, male involvement is inconsistent, self-centered, or outright destructive and harmful. In those cases, men often do more damage by occupying the role of “father” without the accountability it requires than they would by being absent altogether.

Men didn't ruin motherhood by being the villain in every individual story. Rather, they benefited from, upheld, and normalized a system that let them participate without any consequence, accountability, or emotional responsibility. It’s time we stop building motherhood around people—men—who are held to a low standard of support or are accepted for carrying a fraction of the weight parenting creates. If feminism gave women the choice to have children or not, a matriarchal framework of child-rearing gives us the power to decide how those children—and the world they will shape—are raised.