Should Bearing the Child Mean Bearing All the Cost? A Catholic Perspective on the Sacrifice of Motherhood and the Common Good‪.‬

The Single Most Common sacrifice that the majority of us will make in our lifetimes is the sacrifice of raising children. It is, of course, indisputable that the spiritual and psychic rewards of raising a child are real, concrete, and incalculable. But it is equally indisputable that child raising also entails sacrifice. On a practical level, raising children involves sacrifice of sleep, privacy, space, free time, and freedom, and sometimes a degree of one's sanity-sacrifices that are, like the rewards, real, concrete, and incalculable. Raising children, however, also involves financial sacrifices that are actually quite calculable. But the calculable financial sacrifice of raising children is not borne equally by those of us with children. The calculable financial sacrifice of raising children is borne, to an overwhelmingly disproportionate degree, by women who are raising children. Here in the United States, for those who have never had children, young women (between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-three) make 98 cents for every dollar men make.(1) In contrast, the wage gap between all men and all women--including working mothers this time---is an astonishing 59 cents to the dollar. Even if we take out all the women who work part time, and compare the wages of men and women working fulltime--and again include working mothers--we still find women's earnings are 77 percent of men's. (2) In contrast, having children seems to have no effect, and may even have a positive effect, on men's income. (3) And that's just the United States. (4)