Baby Bust Rhetorical Analysis

The ideal young Canadian woman raised in the twenty-first century is taught to feel empowered by her own drives and ambitions and to dismiss the traditional expectations created by previous societies. She learns that being educated guides her to success, and that the only validation she will ever need is from herself. But above all, she understands that sometimes sacrifices are necessary to achieve her full potential, especially when it regards her professional career. In reality, some women are reluctant to give up or reduce their career position upon starting a family, as giving up even a small fraction of it means giving up a portion of the product of their hard work. The fact is, many young women of this generation place precedence on

In the “Baby Bust” essay, it is portrayed as if it is somehow a woman’s responsibility is to bear children and contribute to society by increasing the overall population size. However, it is not just exclusive to Canadian women who decide not to have children: “in Europe where, where one government after another experiments with costly childbearing incentives, the universal experience is that bribes don’t work. Women must want to have children” (367). Women willingly do not want to start families because they have other responsibilities to themselves like “finishing their training” and “rising within their chosen job”, as indicated in by Klass. Despite the declining population, women voluntarily opt out of parenthood, and as a result no incentive or bribe will be effective in convincing her to have children. On the contrary, in “Ambition”, women are presented as wanting to achieve success on their own, through the process of self-reflection, and trusting in their own abilities: “you limit your ambitions and become realistic, wiser about your potential, your abilities, the number of things your life can hold” (415). Therefore, women choose to fulfill their obligations and responsibility to their career, and ultimately to themselves. Klass’s writing favours the side of pursuing one’s dreams and career endeavors over building a family, through the encouraging the different pathways in which a woman can better develop herself through the development of her