To Have or Not Have Children

In December 1941, Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Hers was not a wanted pregnancy; we know from her diaries that she had never desired children, and had even considered a hysterectomy “in a rash and pleasure-loving moment.” Hillesum wanted above all to be a writer. Like many women before (and after) her, Hillesum self-managed her abortion; she mentions swallowing “twenty quinine pills” and assaulting herself with “hot water and blood-curdling instruments.” She left behind an account not just of her methods, but of her reasoning. “All I want is to keep someone out of this miserable world. I shall leave you in a state of unbornness, rudimentary being that you are, and you ought to be grateful to me. I almost feel a little tenderness for you,” she wrote. Hillesum was aware of the dire political circumstances around her, but her rationale was entirely personal. As she explained to the entity growing within her, her “tainted family” was “riddled with hereditary disease.” She swore that “no such unhappy human being would ever spring from my womb.”

Eighty-three years later, the Dutch philosopher Mara van der Lugt looks to Hillesum in contemplating a central question she believes that everyone must attempt to answer for themselves: that of whether or not to have children. In her new book, , van der Lugt—a personal, ethical and philosophical problem, especially in a secular age.” Perhaps, she ventures, it is “the greatest philosophical problem of our time.”