Parenting & Family Quote by Anne Lamott

Lamott’s verb choice is the tell: “inflict” turns birth into a kind of violence, a moral act with consequences, not a sentimental inevitability. She’s rejecting the cozy myth that bringing a child into the world is automatically benevolent. The sentence is built like a double exposure: first the intimate frame (a child “who will be resented”), then the civic one (“unwanted children on society”). That pivot is strategic. It refuses the culture-war trick of pretending reproduction is purely private, while also refusing the opposite trick of treating children as abstract units in a demographic argument.

The intent feels less like provocation for its own sake than a hard-edged compassion: don’t create a person as an obligation, a penance, a relationship bandage, a political symbol. “Resented” is a domestic word, almost quiet, but it carries a lifelong climate of punishment: the kid who learns early that their needs are evidence of someone else’s failure. Lamott’s subtext is that resentment doesn’t just hurt feelings; it shapes attachment, safety, and the odds of flourishing. The second clause widens the indictment to systems that romanticize “life” while underfunding the conditions that make life livable.

Contextually, Lamott writes out of American moral fatigue: a culture that celebrates birth rhetorically and then acts surprised when neglected children become a public crisis. The line also nudges at pro-natal pressure, religious guilt, and the denial around parenting ambivalence. It’s an argument for choice framed not as consumer freedom, but as accountability: if you’re going to make a life, you owe it welcome.