It is hard to tell a nuanced story of pregnancy and parenting at this moment, when the most powerful people in the country talk paternalistically about whether women are having enough children. I’ve spent the past three years reporting a book about how this country makes being pregnant harder than it should be. I wince when talking about what can be beautiful about bearing and raising children, not wanting to sound cloying, preening or prescriptive. And yet I worry that without more of those of us on the left highlighting that beauty, an important piece of the human story is eagerly, and almost exclusively, being told by the right wing.