Leadership Quote by Germaine Greer

Greer’s line lands like a corrective slap to a culture that treats reproduction as either fate (romantic, “natural,” inevitable) or scandal (shameful, political, criminalized). Calling fertility management a “function of adulthood” drags it out of the realm of private morality and into the unglamorous world of competence: planning, negotiation, risk, consequences. The phrasing is deliberately managerial, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point. It strips sex of its sentimental alibis and frames reproduction as material power.

The intent is twofold. First, it insists that adulthood isn’t just about earning money and paying rent; it’s about governing the conditions that can define an entire life, especially for women. Second, it refuses the coy idea that fertility “just happens.” Pregnancy is not a plot twist; it’s an outcome shaped by knowledge, access, and autonomy. Greer is quietly indicting any society that demands adult responsibility while withholding the tools to exercise it: comprehensive sex education, contraception, safe abortion, healthcare free of punishment.

The subtext is about control and who gets to claim it. When fertility is unmanaged, the costs are rarely distributed evenly; they land on women’s bodies, time, and economic futures. The sentence also needles a persistent double standard: men are culturally permitted to treat fertility as an afterthought, while women are expected to treat it as destiny.

Contextually, Greer speaks from second-wave feminism’s preoccupation with reproductive freedom as the hinge of equality. It reads now as both pragmatic and provocative: an argument that liberation requires not just rights on paper, but the everyday capacity to decide if, when, and under what conditions to become a parent.