Maternal Instinct Without Object

An Essay on Mass Childlessness and the Pathology of Misdirected Care

The Unprecedented Experiment

In 2014, Oberlin College distributed guidelines instructing faculty to use each student’s preferred gender pronoun — not as a matter of courtesy or respect, but because a professor who used an incorrect pronoun “prevents or impairs their safety in a classroom.”[1] The word safety. Not comfort. Not feelings. Not even dignity. Safety — the word we use for locked doors and fire escapes and children who might wander into traffic.

That same year, the University of Northern Colorado hauled an adjunct professor before administrators after a student filed a “Bias Incident Report” against him. His offence was facilitating a class discussion on transgender issues — the topic his students had chosen — using an article that presented sceptical perspectives. He was told to avoid the subject for the rest of the semester. He was not rehired.[2] At New York University, signs in restrooms urged members of the community to call a “Bias Response Line” to anonymously report one another for speech that felt like bias, discrimination, or harassment. By 2017, nearly four in ten American colleges maintained some form of bias reporting system, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.[3] Anonymous reporting. Of speech. At institutions nominally devoted to free inquiry.

The psychologist Nick Haslam gave this phenomenon a clinical name in 2016: “concept creep.” He documented how the scope of key psychological concepts — abuse, bullying, trauma, prejudice — had expanded in two directions since the 1980s. Downward, to apply to progressively less severe situations. And outward, to encompass new phenomena that the concepts had never originally described.[4] The word trauma, once reserved for physical brain injury, now covered a professor’s failure to issue a content warning before assigning Ovid. The word harm, once denoting injury, now described the experience of encountering an unwelcome argument. The word safety, once about bodies, now encompassed feelings.

This pattern — of care that suffocates, protection that infantilises, safety that imprisons — has a name in Jungian psychology. Mary Harrington identifies it as the devouring mother: the archetype who destroys her offspring through nurture, smothering their potential in the name of love.[5] In Disney’s Tangled, she is Mother Gothel, who keeps Rapunzel locked in a tower, filling her imagination with stories about how dangerous the outside world is, monitoring and controlling every aspect of the girl’s life — all while insisting this is care. The moment Rapunzel expresses a desire to leave, Gothel’s soft maternal sweetness flips to cold-eyed fury. Jordan Peterson links the archetype to the rise of institutional safetyism.[6] Harrington traces it through the capture of care by technology and markets.

But neither the archetype nor the institutional analysis explains where this impulse originates at population scale. Mother Gothel is a fairy-tale witch. A university administrator sending bias response memos is something else. She is not an aberration. She is a type — and the type is proliferating across institutions in every Western nation.

The answer is demographic, biological, and historically unprecedented.

No civilisation in recorded history has operated on mass voluntary female childlessness. The maternal instinct is not a metaphor. It is a documented physiological transformation. Pregnancy permanently alters a woman’s brain: new neural circuits for vigilance, bonding, and threat detection are laid down and persist for life. Mothers become so attuned to their particular infant that they can identify their own baby by stroking its hand. The same brain regions that light up in romantic love activate when a mother sees her child’s photograph. Oxytocin and dopamine flood the reward circuits, creating a bond that neurologist Louann Brizendine compares to addiction — and this transformation occurs even in adoptive mothers who maintain continuous physical contact with the child.[7] The instinct is real. It is powerful. And it does not vanish when it has no child to attach to.

The gap between the instinct and its object is widening. The desired average number of children for American families has held steady since the 1980s at around 2.6. The actual birth rate is 1.6.[8] That gap — a full child per family — represents not a free choice but a systemic failure, a million individual stories of delay, circumstance, infertility, and foreclosure. The proportion of childless American adults who say they will probably never have children rose from 37 percent to 44 percent in just three years, between 2018 and 2021.[9] And this is not a policy problem that better parental leave can fix. Norway offers 49 weeks of paid leave, universal childcare, and generous child benefits. Its fertility rate is 1.41.[10] Sweden and Denmark tell similar stories. Every country that has tried to reverse fertility decline through state support has failed. The children do not arrive. Demographer Wolfgang Lutz warns of a “low-fertility trap”: once rates fall below a certain threshold for a sustained period, they may be mathematically irreversible.[11] The cultures, norms, and expectations that sustained higher fertility dissolve, and each successive generation normalises smaller families or no family at all. The trap has a ratchet built into it: fewer children means fewer future parents, which means still fewer children.

We are running an experiment with no precedent, no control group, and no stopping rule.

Mary Eberstadt argues that the question “Who am I?” has become one of the most fraught of our era precisely because the structures that once answered it — family, extended kin, religious community, place — have disintegrated in what she calls the Great Scattering.[12] An illiterate medieval peasant could answer that question with certainty. He knew his parents, his siblings, his parish, his trade, his village. He knew where he came from and where he would be buried. His identity was given, not constructed.

When those structures dissolve, the instincts that evolved to serve them do not dissolve with them. They find new objects.

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The Convergence

Three forces converged to produce mass female childlessness. None was sufficient alone. Together they created a ratchet that moved in one direction.

The first was technological. The contraceptive pill, approved in 1960, did not merely prevent pregnancy. It dissolved the entire social architecture that had been built around managing fertility. For centuries, societies maintained elaborate codes governing contact between men and women — courtship rituals, chaperones, prohibitions on premarital sex — because the consequences of unmanaged fertility fell catastrophically on women and their children. The pill removed the material consequence, and without it the social codes collapsed. Louise Perry writes that the pill brought into being “an entirely new creature: the apparently fertile young woman whose fertility had in fact been put on hold. She changed everything.”[13]

There had been earlier attempts at sexual revolution — the Bloomsbury set, the Roaring Twenties, various bohemian experiments — but none stuck, because without reliable contraception the consequences were real and visible. The pill was only 91 percent effective with typical use, meaning roughly nine in a hundred women taking it would become pregnant in a given year.[14] Across a population, that was an enormous number of unplanned pregnancies. This created demand for legal abortion as a backstop. Harrington, drawing on the legal scholar Erika Bachiochi, traces the ratchet in detail: the existence of contraception changed norms so radically that the absolute number of casual sexual encounters increased, which — despite contraception — increased absolute numbers of unplanned pregnancies, which drove the legalisation of abortion.[15] Each technological intervention produced the conditions requiring the next. Technology delivered what ideology had only imagined.

The second force was ideological. The feminist movement was never monolithic on motherhood. Nineteenth-century feminists sought what they called “voluntary motherhood” — the right to refuse sex within marriage — and, as Bachiochi documents, regarded abortion as indistinguishable from infanticide.[16] They were pro-mother, pro-child, and anti-coercion. The hostile turn against motherhood came in the twentieth century, and it was explicit. Simone de Beauvoir, in a 1975 interview, stated: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children... Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”[17] Margaret Sanger called women who had large families “breeders.”[18] Shulamith Firestone envisioned mechanical wombs enabling “the freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction by every means possible.”[19] This strand of feminism did not cause childlessness. It provided the moral vocabulary that recast childlessness as liberation and motherhood as bondage. The ideology followed the technology — then accelerated it.

The third force was economic. Perry describes the ideal market participant: “The atomised worker with no commitment to any place or person is the worker best able to respond quickly to the demands of the market... she has no connection to anywhere in particular... and, without a spouse or family to attend to, she never needs to demand rest days or a flexible schedule.”[20] The market does not care about ideology. It selects for availability, flexibility, and total commitment. A woman without children can relocate for a promotion, travel without arranging care, work late without guilt, and devote herself entirely to institutional life. Over decades, this selection pressure concentrates childless women in positions of institutional power — not because anyone planned it, but because the incentive gradient points one way.

Technology made childlessness possible. Feminism made it virtuous. The market made it profitable. Each force reinforced the others. The pill enabled the career. The career validated the ideology. The ideology celebrated the pill. No single cause was sufficient; the three together formed a one-directional ratchet.

The question this essay addresses is not how we arrived at mass childlessness — that story, while important, is increasingly well documented. The question is what happens next. What does a society become when millions of women carry a powerful, physiologically real instinct, and the object of that instinct has been technologically foreclosed, ideologically devalued, and economically penalised? The instinct does not disappear. It redirects. And the form it takes when misdirected has a name.

Four Functions, Four Pathologies

Mothering, when it works, does four things. It protects the vulnerable from genuine danger. It nurtures toward strength and competence. It transmits the knowledge a child needs to make sense of the world. And it lets go — releasing the grown child into a life of her own. Each of these, when severed from an actual child and redirected toward abstractions, inverts into its own pathology.

Protection is the first and most primal. A mother’s threat-detection circuits are biologically recalibrated by pregnancy. She becomes hypervigilant about infant safety — electrical outlets, choking hazards, the hands of strangers. Her brain centres for monitoring sight, sound, and movement are sharpened and tuned to her child. Brizendine documents that mothers who have given birth develop better spatial memory, greater adaptive flexibility, and reduced fear responses. Female rats who have had at least one litter are bolder and more efficient predators. These changes persist for life.[21]

This protection is fierce and pre-rational. It is also bounded. The child grows. The threats change. A two-year-old needs to be kept away from staircases; a twelve-year-old needs to navigate a city bus; an eighteen-year-old needs to manage her own risks. The protective instinct, when properly attached, calibrates itself to the developing capacities of its object.

When protection has no proper object — no actual child growing toward competence — it expands to fill available space. Haslam’s concept creep maps precisely onto this expansion. The definition of harm stretches downward, to encompass experiences that are merely uncomfortable. The definition of safety stretches outward, to cover situations that are merely unfamiliar. Words become violence. Disagreement becomes danger. Legal adults become children who must be shielded from ideas.

The pattern repeats across movements that share no obvious ideology but operate with identical emotional logic. Campus safetyism treats university students — legal adults — as fragile creatures who require trigger warnings before encountering classic literature, safe spaces where no challenging ideas may enter, and bias response teams to police one another’s speech. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff document the timing precisely: this conflation of emotional discomfort with physical danger spread across American campuses beginning around 2013, as students born in the mid-1990s arrived at university.[22] Haidt attributes much of this to overprotective parenting — helicopter parents who never let their children take risks or resolve conflicts independently.

But the parenting style didn’t emerge from nowhere. Those parents were following expert advice, institutional guidelines, and cultural messaging that had been saturating pediatric medicine, education policy, and parenting media for decades. The vocabulary of child safety had been expanding since the 1980s — concept creep operating in real time, with each new category of danger (choking hazards, stranger danger, online predators, emotional harm) requiring new interventions, new monitoring, new institutional responses.[23] The parents Haidt describes were downstream of a culture already captured by the logic of maximal protection. They were doing what the experts — the childcare professionals, the educators, the psychologists, the administrators — told them to do. The institutions taught a generation of parents to treat childhood as a condition of permanent vulnerability. Those parents then raised children who believed it. And when those children arrived at university, the institutions that had shaped their parents’ anxieties were waiting for them with policies that confirmed everything they’d been taught: that feelings of discomfort are evidence of danger, that safety means the absence of friction, that adults should be protected from ideas the way toddlers are protected from electrical outlets.

Climate activism directs the protective instinct toward “future generations” and “the planet” — abstractions that cannot be harmed the way a real child can, and therefore can never be adequately protected. The threat is always imminent. The protection is never sufficient. The apocalyptic framing mirrors the hypervigilance of maternal anxiety without the grounding presence of an actual child whose development puts natural limits on the response. A real mother worries about her real child crossing a specific road. Climate protection worries about all future children facing all possible catastrophes, forever. The worry has no boundary because its object has no body.

Mandatory vaccination campaigns frame medical interventions as “protecting the vulnerable,” recasting dissent not as a disagreement about risk calculation but as an act of child endangerment — the most potent accusation the protective instinct can generate. The language of the campaigns is not epidemiological but maternal: the unvaccinated are not merely making a different risk assessment, they are threatening babies, grandparents, the immunocompromised. The emotional register is a mother’s fury at someone who has endangered her child. That the “children” in question are often abstractions — statistical populations, hypothetical vulnerable people — does not diminish the intensity. It amplifies it, because an abstract child can never be confirmed safe.

Social justice movements recast entire demographic groups as vulnerable populations requiring protection from speech, images, and ideas. The language of “harm” and “safety” saturates the discourse, not as metaphor but as literal claim.

In each case, the logic is identical. And in each case, the protection is unbounded because the object is abstract. A real child will eventually grow up, learn to assess risk, and stop needing to be shielded from the world. An abstraction never will. There is always more harm to detect, more safety to enforce, more danger to name. Eric Hoffer observed that a person is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. “When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”[24] The devouring mother’s protection, scaled to an institution, becomes indistinguishable from control.

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Nurturing, the second maternal function, is perhaps the most intimate. Brizendine documents a level of attunement between mother and infant that borders on the telepathic — mothers can recognise their own baby by touch alone, can distinguish its cry from another infant’s within days, develop olfactory sensitivity so acute they can identify their child by smell.[25] This attunement is not passive. It builds the child’s capacity. Healthy nurturing strengthens. It responds to actual needs, develops real competence, and aims at a condition where the nurtured person no longer requires it.

The pathological inversion of nurturing is enforced dependency. When the instinct to care has no proper object, it attaches to whatever is available — and it needs its object to remain dependent, because the nurturer’s sense of purpose depends on being needed. The “cared for” are never permitted to develop resilience, because their growth would make the caretaker redundant.

Haidt and Lukianoff identify this dynamic in what they call “moral dependence.” When administrative remedies for interpersonal conflict are easily available — when you can file a bias report instead of having a difficult conversation — people’s ability to resolve disputes independently atrophies.[26] The institution models the devouring mother: all-encompassing care at the price of the offspring’s development. The more the institution intervenes, the less capable its charges become of managing friction on their own, which produces more demand for intervention. The feedback loop is self-reinforcing.

Abigail Shrier documents a version of this dynamic in families where mothers appear to need their child’s gender transition more than the child does. These are not negligent parents. They are, by Shrier’s account, often extraordinarily devoted mothers who “rose early to take their daughters to practice, abandoned lucrative jobs to homeschool or address any emotional need their children had.” They “searched out every specialist, shared their daughters’ every enthusiasm, and chased down their daughters’ interests and talents to afford their girls a moment on stage, a chance to succeed and shine.” They knew “the name of every boy their daughters fell for, and every teacher who gave them a hard time.”[27] If these mothers — relentless, intelligent, devoted to the point of exhaustion — had raised daughters who fell into gender ideology, Shrier asks, what chance was there for anyone else?

Shrier occasionally wondered whether these mothers “had unintentionally inspired their daughters’ deep dive into an ideology that seemed inseparable from teenage rebellion — the irresistible chance to stick it to mom.” The mothers had been so accommodating, so open, so eager to meet their daughters wherever they were — embracing atheism, communism, every new identity and allegiance — that perhaps they had “robbed their daughters of the rebellion they so badly seemed to want.”[28] The child’s transition, when it came, offered something no previous announcement could: a crisis that could not be absorbed, affirmed, and moved past. It demanded a permanent response. And it offered the mother a new object for her care: a vulnerable child requiring shepherding through a complex medical system, advocacy with hostile schools, defence against a world that did not understand. The child’s autonomy — including the autonomy to desist, to change her mind, to simply grow through a difficult phase — was subordinated to the mother’s need to nurture a child who would never stop being in crisis.

The dynamic is not limited to gender clinics. Therapy culture generalises it to the entire population. Ordinary friction — an argument with a friend, an awkward interaction at work, the discomfort of being disagreed with — is reframed as trauma. Common emotions are pathologised as disorders requiring professional intervention. Adults are encouraged to see themselves as wounded children in permanent need of care. The therapeutic vocabulary — “boundaries,” “triggers,” “safe spaces,” “self-care,” “doing the work” — is maternal vocabulary applied to people who did not ask to be mothered and are not, in fact, children.

The expansion of this vocabulary tracks with institutional incentives. Every new category of psychological distress generates demand for new administrative remedies, new counselling positions, new compliance training, new reporting mechanisms. The institution that has adopted the nurturing role cannot permit its charges to be well, any more than the devouring mother can permit her child to stop needing her. Wellness would be an institutional death sentence. The system needs its patients.

Harrington describes the institutional endpoint: a “cyborg devouring mother” that offers “impersonal, tech-mediated care” modelled on “the industrialised para-mothering of a nursery or hospital.” This form of care “devours the possibility of mothering as such, crowding out or ‘virtualising’ myriad mute, pre-rational, instinctive, particularistic or simply impossible-to-monetise ways of relating.”[29] The Covid-19 pandemic made this cyborg mother visible as government policy: masks, screens, social separation, enforced isolation, the replacement of human contact with technological substitutes — all in the name of safety, all administered without endpoint, all justified by the protection of unnamed vulnerable people. The actual mothers — the women trying to nurse newborns without support, to raise toddlers without playmates, to work while simultaneously homeschooling — were ground up by the machinery of institutional care. New mothers experienced perinatal psychological distress at rates reaching 70 percent in some studies. Infants born during the pandemic scored lower on motor and communication skills.[30] Real mothering and the cyborg devouring mother cannot coexist, because one is particular and embodied and the other is universal and procedural, and when they collide the procedural system wins. The actual mother who held her actual baby and learned, through touch and proximity, how to nurse — she is replaced by procedural systems that can never achieve that attunement but can scale indefinitely.

Healthy nurturing builds capacity and eventually becomes unnecessary. The devouring mother’s nurturing creates dependency and therefore perpetuates its own necessity.

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Transmission is the third function. Mothers — and families more broadly — transmit culture across generations. Language, values, habits, tastes, stories, warnings, rituals. This transmission is particularistic: this family’s ways, passed on through relationship rather than instruction. It is conservative in the small-c sense — it passes on what already exists. A child absorbs her mother’s speech patterns before she can read, her father’s posture before she can name it, her grandparents’ stories before she can evaluate them. The transmission is embodied, relational, and deeply specific.

When there is no child to receive this transmission, the instinct redirects — and both the content and the vehicle change. Particular culture gives way to universal ideology. Intimate relationship gives way to institutional policy. The mother who would have taught her daughter how to cook her grandmother’s recipe instead writes a corporate training module on unconscious bias. The specificity is gone. The universalism is compensatory.

The capture of cultural transmission by institutions is visible across domains. In education, gender identity curricula now begin in kindergarten — K through 6 lessons on gender spectrums, pronoun selection, and the distinction between sex assigned at birth and gender identity.[31] These curricula are not supplements to family transmission; they are replacements for it. They intervene precisely in the territory that families once occupied — the shaping of a child’s understanding of who and what they are. Shrier documents the scope: schools that socially transition children without parental knowledge, counsellors who affirm a new identity after a single conversation, educational materials that instruct children to question the gender their parents assigned them.[32]

Mandatory institutional training performs the same function for adults. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes transmit a comprehensive moral framework — complete with its own vocabulary, its own saints and sinners, its own catechism of approved responses — through institutional channels rather than familial ones. The training is compulsory. The framework is non-negotiable. The transmission runs from institution to individual, reversing the familial direction of culture from parent to child. A mother teaches her daughter what she believes. An institution teaches its employees what it requires them to believe. The content is different. The mechanism — the deep need to shape the next generation’s understanding of the world — is recognisably the same.

Climate activism inverts the transmission entirely. Children become the moral authorities, lecturing adults on their failures. Greta Thunberg addressing the United Nations — “How dare you” — is a child shaming parents, reversing the generational flow of moral instruction. The instinct to pass values downward finds expression in a movement where values flow upward, from the young to the old, from the innocent to the guilty. Transmission without children of one’s own becomes confession to other people’s children.

Eberstadt’s analysis illuminates why this institutional capture meets so little resistance. When families are intact, they provide competing sources of identity, value, and meaning that limit the reach of any external ideology. The medieval peasant who knew who he was through family, faith, and place had no identity vacuum for an ideology to fill. The Great Scattering created that vacuum. People deprived of the elementary human connections through which identity was once formed are precisely the people most susceptible to ideological substitutes — and most willing to propagate them.

Hoffer observed that “when our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.”[33] He noted the “almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle-aged women at the birth of mass movements,” and observed that “marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name).” The boredom of women who “can no longer find joy and fulfilment” in their lives “stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning.”[34]

Hoffer wrote The True Believer in 1951. He was describing a pattern that mass childlessness has since industrialised.

Family transmission is inherently conservative — it passes on what exists. Ideological reproduction is inherently revolutionary — it replaces what exists. The Great Scattering is both cause and consequence: family dissolution creates the demand for ideological substitutes, and ideological frameworks that position the family as oppressive accelerate its dissolution.

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Releasing is the final function of mothering, and the one that distinguishes care from possession. The entire arc of mothering points toward this moment: the child individuates, separates, becomes autonomous, leaves. The mother lets go. This is the hardest thing. It is also the thing that makes everything that came before meaningful rather than parasitic. Protection that never yields to independence is imprisonment. Nurturing that never yields to self-sufficiency is control. Transmission that never yields to the child’s own judgment is indoctrination. Releasing is what retroactively transforms all of them into love.

The devouring mother’s defining failure is her refusal to release. She cannot let go because her identity depends on the dependent remaining dependent. In Harrington’s reading of Tangled, this is the moment the archetype reveals itself. The instant Rapunzel tries to leave the tower, Mother Gothel drops the mask. The soft maternal sweetness gives way to cold fury. The care was never about Rapunzel. It was about Gothel.

Every movement shaped by the devouring mother’s psychology exhibits this same refusal to reach an endpoint — and the same rage when one is attempted.

Safetyism has no condition under which its work is complete. There is no level of safety after which the institution declares students safe enough. Each new accommodation — trigger warnings, bias response systems, content warnings, speech codes — generates demand for the next, because the fragility it cultivates produces people who require still more protection. Haidt and Lukianoff document this as a feedback loop: overprotection creates fragility, fragility generates demand for more protection, more protection creates more fragility.[35] The eighteen-year-olds arriving on campus in 2013 functioned, by multiple measures, like the fifteen-year-olds of a generation earlier. They had less experience with unsupervised play, less tolerance for risk, less ability to manage conflict without adult intervention. They were antifragile systems that had been denied the stresses they needed to develop strength. And the institutions responded not by providing those stresses but by removing still more of them.

The trans medical pathway, once entered, has no exit ramp that the system acknowledges or facilitates. Puberty blockers lead to cross-sex hormones, which lead to surgeries, which require lifelong hormone replacement and ongoing medical management. The affirmative care model, as Shrier documents, treats any doubt — from the patient, the parents, or the clinician — as a threat to be overcome rather than a signal to be explored.[36] One therapist’s website promises he will never serve as a “gatekeeper” between patients and their hormones or surgeries, guaranteeing a same-day first-consultation letter of fitness for medical intervention.[37] Detransition is barely studied, poorly supported, and actively discouraged by institutional frameworks built around affirmation as the only acceptable posture. The patient’s dependence on the medical system is permanent by design. The care never concludes. The patient is never released into a body that does not require ongoing pharmaceutical maintenance.

Climate activism operates on permanent escalation. There is no scenario in which enough has been done, no emissions target after which the crisis is declared managed, no point at which the activist can stand down. The horizon recedes with every step. This is structurally identical to the devouring mother’s relationship with risk: because the object of protection is an abstraction (the planet, the future, the vulnerable), no amount of action can produce the satisfaction of a concrete child reaching concrete safety. The anxiety is bottomless because the object is limitless.

Social justice movements define their goals in terms that cannot, by design, be achieved. Equity — as distinct from equality — is a receding horizon. Systemic racism, as theorised, is not a set of specific practices that can be identified and remedied but a pervasive condition that saturates every institution and interaction. There is no completion state. There is no graduation. The work is never done because the framework does not permit it to be done.

And when someone tries to leave — when a student questions the orthodoxy, when a detransitioner tells her story, when a researcher publishes inconvenient data, when a parent resists affirmation — the response is not the measured disappointment of a mother whose child has made an unwise choice. It is rage. Cancellation. Professional destruction. Moral excommunication. The devouring mother does not grieve when her children leave. She punishes them.

The pattern is consistent across domains. Researchers who publish findings inconvenient to gender-affirming care are not merely criticised; they are investigated, defunded, subjected to campaigns of professional annihilation. Parents who decline to affirm a child’s stated gender identity are told they are endangering their child’s life — that the alternative to affirmation is a dead child. “Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?” is the question posed to parents who hesitate, a formulation that contains within it the devouring mother’s core threat: comply with my care or the child dies. The emotional structure is not that of a scientific disagreement. It is that of a custody battle conducted in the language of emergency medicine.

Teachers who dissent from ideological curricula are not engaged in debate; they are reported through anonymous systems designed to bypass dialogue entirely. Climate activists who are told that nuclear energy could address their stated concerns respond not with interest but with hostility, because the point was never the solution. The point was the crisis, which is to say the permanent state of protective emergency that justifies the movement’s existence and the activist’s purpose within it.

Hoffer again: “The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless.”[38]

The Selection Mechanism

The pattern would be troubling enough if it were merely cultural. It is structural.

The three forces that produced mass childlessness — technology, ideology, market incentive — also produced a selection mechanism that concentrates the psychology of misdirected maternal care in positions of institutional power.

The mechanism is straightforward. Women without children have more time, more energy, more geographic flexibility, and more institutional availability than women with children. They can work longer hours, relocate more easily, travel without arranging care, and devote themselves entirely to careers. In professions that reward total availability — academia, government, corporate management, media, law, medicine — childless women advance faster. The system rewards childlessness with power.

Over decades, this selection pressure reshapes institutions from the inside. Women who have redirected maternal instinct toward professional purpose reach the positions where policy is set, curricula are designed, regulations are drafted, and culture is shaped. The institutions then reflect their psychology. Universities adopt safetyist frameworks. Human resources departments expand the definition of harm. Medical institutions embrace affirmative care models that mirror the nurturing instinct’s need to provide care indefinitely. Government agencies expand the protective state. Media organisations amplify a moral framework built on the vocabulary of care and safety.

These same institutions then further discourage motherhood — structuring careers around total availability, treating parenthood as a competitive disadvantage, framing children as obstacles to professional fulfilment, normalising childlessness as the aspirational default. The ratchet’s three original forces are reproduced inside the institutions themselves. Technology makes childlessness frictionless. Ideology makes it virtuous. The institution makes it mandatory for advancement.

The devouring mother reproduces — not biologically, but institutionally.

Consider what this means for the women inside the system. Many did not choose childlessness as an ideology. They delayed marriage because the sexual marketplace, deregulated by the pill, made stable partnerships harder to find. They delayed children because their careers demanded total commitment during their most fertile years. They woke up at thirty-eight to discover that the fertility they had been assured could be managed on their own timeline had in fact a biological deadline that no technology reliably overrides. The gap between their desired 2.6 children and their actual zero is not a political statement. It is a wound. And the institution that inflicted the wound offers, as compensation, the chance to mother the world instead — through policy, through programmes, through the vocabulary of care and safety applied to everyone who comes within reach.

This is not an argument about individual women. Many childless women live full, generous, outward-facing lives that no reasonable person would describe as pathological. Many mothers are themselves devouring — the archetype does not require childlessness, only the wrong relationship to the instinct. The maternal instinct is not inherently virtuous — it requires a proper object to take its healthy form, just as appetite requires food rather than substitutes. And many women arrive at childlessness not through ideology but through circumstance — economic pressure, delayed marriage, fertility problems, the sheer difficulty of finding a reliable partner in a mating market that the sexual revolution deregulated. The system selects for their childlessness and then extracts a psychological price from them, offering institutional purpose as compensation for the family it helped foreclose.

The argument is about populations and institutions: what happens at civilisational scale when a biologically real instinct is denied its object and then amplified through institutional power. The answer is visible in the vocabulary that now saturates public life. Safety. Harm. Vulnerability. Care. Protection. These are maternal words. They are the words of the nursery and the paediatric ward, not the town square or the legislature. They have been detached from actual children and applied to adults — students, employees, citizens, entire populations — who never asked to be mothered and are not, in fact, vulnerable in the way a child is vulnerable. An actual child needs to be told what is dangerous. An actual child needs to have its choices supervised. An actual child cannot yet judge the trustworthiness of strangers or the reliability of its own feelings. When a university tells legal adults that their feelings are “probably right,” that speech they dislike constitutes danger, and that anonymous reporting of one another’s words is civic virtue, it is treating adults as children. The question is why this treatment is spreading, and why it meets so little resistance from the people subjected to it.

The university administrator who sends the bias response memo may not be childless herself. She may be a devoted mother of three. But she operates within an institution that has been shaped by decades of selection for the psychology of misdirected maternal care. The vocabulary she uses, the policies she enforces, the emotional logic she applies — all of it comes from an institutional culture built by and for people whose care instincts had no proper object and found institutional ones instead.

She is the product of the unprecedented experiment. And the experiment has no control group, no stopping rule, and no one left in the institution who remembers what it looked like before the tower was built.

The instinct that was supposed to raise the next generation is instead raising the next policy, the next programme, the next intervention. The children it was meant to protect are never born. The adults it protects instead are never permitted to grow up. And the mother — the devouring mother, scaled to a civilisation — never has to let go, because there is no child to release, and no moment where the caring can be said to be complete.

She will keep you safe. She will keep you safe forever. She will never, ever let you leave.

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Notes

[1] Haidt and Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, citing Oberlin College faculty guidelines (2014).

[2] Haidt and Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, on the University of Northern Colorado case.

[3] Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Spotlight on Speech Codes database (2017).

[4] Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Psychological Inquiry (2016).

[5] Harrington, Feminism Against Progress.

[6] Jordan Peterson, various lectures and writings on the devouring mother archetype.

[7] Brizendine, The Female Brain.

[8] Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, citing demographic data.

[9] Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, citing Pew Research Center data.

[10] Berg and Wiseman, What Are Children For?, on Nordic fertility paradox.

[11] Swan, Count Down, citing Wolfgang Lutz on low-fertility trap.

[12] Eberstadt, Primal Screams.

[13] Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

[14] Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, on typical-use effectiveness rates.

[15] Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, drawing on Erika Bachiochi’s legal scholarship.

[16] Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, citing Bachiochi on nineteenth-century feminism.

[17] Wilson, Occult Feminism, citing de Beauvoir interview in Saturday Review (1975).

[18] Wilson, Occult Feminism, citing Sanger’s Motherhood in Bondage (1928).

[19] Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, citing Shulamith Firestone.

[20] Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

[21] Brizendine, The Female Brain.

[22] Haidt and Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind.

[23] Haidt and Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, on paranoid parenting trends.

[24] Hoffer, The True Believer.

[25] Brizendine, The Female Brain.

[26] Haidt and Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind.

[27] Shrier, Irreversible Damage.

[28] Shrier, Irreversible Damage.

[29] Harrington, Feminism Against Progress.

[30] Various studies on pandemic effects on maternal mental health and infant development.

[31] Shrier, Irreversible Damage, on gender identity curricula in schools.

[32] Shrier, Irreversible Damage.

[33] Hoffer, The True Believer.

[34] Hoffer, The True Believer.

[35] Haidt and Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind.

[36] Shrier, Irreversible Damage, on the affirmative care model.

[37] Shrier, Irreversible Damage, on gender-affirming therapists.

[38] Hoffer, The True Believer.

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Works Cited

Berg, Anastasia, and Rachel Wiseman. What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. St. Martin’s Press, 2024.

Brizendine, Louann. The Female Brain. Broadway Books, 2006.

Eberstadt, Mary. Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Templeton Press, 2019.

Haidt, Jonathan, and Greg Lukianoff. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin, 2018.

Harrington, Mary. Feminism Against Progress. Forum, 2023.

Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Harper & Row, 1951.

Perry, Louise. The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Polity, 2022.

Shrier, Abigail. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Regnery, 2020.

Swan, Shanna. Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering the Development of Boys and Girls, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. Scribner, 2021.

Wilson, Rachel. Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation. Self-published, 2023.

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