Parenting & Family Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s line cuts with the kind of unsentimental clarity that makes modern life look slightly absurd. It’s built on a blunt contrast: biology’s timetable versus capitalism’s. “The body is ready” and “Nature wants it” sound almost clinical, even authoritarian, as if the organism is issuing a memo. Then she twists the knife with that last clause: “when the income can handle it.” The joke isn’t soft; it’s accusatory. We’ve engineered a society where the responsible moment to have children is pegged not to human capacity but to financial survival.

The intent isn’t to romanticize early motherhood or scold people who wait. Morrison is after the trap: a culture that demands extended schooling, precarious early careers, expensive housing, and privatized childcare, then moralizes individual “choices” about fertility. The subtext is that “choice” is often a luxury good. If you need stable insurance, a partner with benefits, a down payment, and job security before you can even imagine a baby, your reproductive life becomes another asset allocation problem.

Context matters: Morrison wrote across decades when women’s expanded educational and professional horizons collided with institutions that never restructured around caregiving. The quote is also a rebuke to the myth of progress-as-delay, the idea that you can postpone the body indefinitely while building a life the economy will finally approve. Nature doesn’t negotiate with your 401(k); society, meanwhile, has decided it won’t negotiate with your uterus.