Liberal NYT Opinion columnist Elizabeth Bruenig has been getting chewed out by some lefty feminists for ... feeling blessed to be a mother

Elizabeth Bruenig is a liberal New York Times opinion columnist. That’s not all that remarkable, really.

No, what makes Bruenig so remarkable is her ability to piss off other liberals, by doing things like … celebrating motherhood.

happy Mother’s Day 🌸 pic.twitter.com/RXOGI52HqT

— elizabeth bruenig (@ebruenig) May 9, 2021

Bruenig recently wrote a piece for the Times about her and her husband becoming parents at 25, how, despite the challenges they faced, they don’t regret it for even a second.

https://twitter.com/ebruenig/status/1391073728256172034

"One of the things they don’t tell you about having babies is that you don’t ever have a baby; you have your baby, which is, to you, the ur-baby, the sum of all babies," writes @ebruenig. https://t.co/xuknNuAnFq

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) May 10, 2021

A lovely piece just in time for Mother’s Day.

Clearly it must be trashed.

My favorite Liz Bruenig story is that she once publicly Tweeted her sonograms at me to convince me 18-week fetuses looked like people when you aborted them, and she has, ever since, publicly described this pregnancy as “a secret” https://t.co/8Bwnu9xUFe

— Jude Ellison S. Doyle (@sadydoyle) May 9, 2021

just really feel like a lot of this is way out of proportion to the offense of the article, which said i've been delighted to still grow and change after having kids pic.twitter.com/dybz2TDU6Q

— elizabeth bruenig (@ebruenig) May 10, 2021

To be fair, Jude Ellison S. Doyle recently defended Cori Bush’s invocation of “birthing people,” so we’d expect him/they to crap all over motherhood.

ahh yes there’s nothing men love more than being in strictly monogamous relationships with the same woman starting before they even graduate from college, then becoming fathers before 30…men are always fantasizing about this… https://t.co/SbwVxrEgEZ

— elizabeth bruenig (@ebruenig) May 9, 2021

Bruenig’s piece respects women a hell of a lot more than Jill Filipovic, or Amanda Marcotte, for that matter.

Based on some of the responses to Bruenig’s piece, you’d think Bruenig was shaming women who don’t have kids by 25. You’ll no doubt be shocked to find that the people making such claims didn’t bother to read what she wrote before going off.

Because people can be truly awful.

All due respect of course but this is an absurd attempt to universalize a very specific, individual thing. https://t.co/ECBgIhezeX

— Sam Wilkinson (@samwilkinson) May 9, 2021

No one cares that you got knocked up in your mid-20s

— Dunkle Wagon (@tears_pocket) May 9, 2021

Am I supposed to clap or something?

— Gerbert (@5h09un) May 8, 2021

Not necessarily, no. But you’re not supposed to get angry at her for being glad she had kids when she did.

Woof. Trad caths need to stop telling people to have kids when they're not sure about parenthood. Having kids should be done with your whole heart and soul, or not at all. Abortion is healthcare. I enjoy not being a mother. https://t.co/DHUiwMpjCj

— girl with a 🐿 earring (@ArtistAstrid) May 9, 2021

And Bruenig enjoys being a mother. So let her enjoy it while you do you. It’s not difficult.

L*z Bru*n*g, the tradwife who's basically a couple steps away from a white supremacist. https://t.co/GZMLzkiTt1 https://t.co/c3UWkx2Z59

— no time for this (@blackqueeriroh) May 10, 2021

It's ridiculous that she continues to get away with calling herself a progressive just because she likes socialism, even as her dogwhistling gets increasingly louder.

— Kathryn Brightbill ✒️ (@KEBrightbill) May 10, 2021

Kathryn thinks that Bruenig is “dogwhistling” to white supremacists by promoting replacement theory.

You've got to look at things in the broader context of society, and the fact that tradwife influencers have been pushing hard on the messaging that if you don't have multiple kids before 30, you're going to end up sad and alone.

— Kathryn Brightbill ✒️ (@KEBrightbill) May 9, 2021

Mainstream media outlets have been uncritically repeating laundered replacement theory talking points lately under the guise of concern over people waiting to have kids due to the pandemic.

— Kathryn Brightbill ✒️ (@KEBrightbill) May 9, 2021

Yeah, that too, and replacement theory is one of the subtexts to talking about more people waiting to have kids.

— Kathryn Brightbill ✒️ (@KEBrightbill) May 9, 2021

And the thing is, there's perfectly logical reasons to have kids while in your early 20s so that they're in college by the time you hit your early 40s, but when you start doing tradwife dogwhistles about your choice, that's a whole different discussion.

— Kathryn Brightbill ✒️ (@KEBrightbill) May 9, 2021

Kathryn should have a whole different discussion with a therapist.

So many of her stans think I'm jealous of her, which is so much projection too

— Kathryn Brightbill ✒️ (@KEBrightbill) May 9, 2021

If I'd wanted her life, I could have found some Calvinist dudebro in college who wanted a wife by graduation

— Kathryn Brightbill ✒️ (@KEBrightbill) May 9, 2021

Kathryn’s making a pretty bold assumption that she’d be some kind of catch.

"Blah blah motherhood is wonderful blah blah I'm so blessed to be a mom blah blah I really love subsuming my identity into being MOTHER yadda yadda black is white up is down freedom is slavery." 🙄🙄🙄 Hard pass.

— Casey Lewis (@cynical_tutu) May 10, 2021

Your husband is repulsive https://t.co/8mMsMeCJar

— Wendi (@soetsappies) May 9, 2021

Anyone could marry an uggo as soon as they left school and start popping out cum trophies. It's not an achievement.

— Wendi (@soetsappies) May 9, 2021

The irony of people like that dumping on Bruenig for being insufficiently pro-women is not lost on us.

Of all the things I find weird on this site—and I find plenty weird—the ability of Liz Bruenig to break the minds of so many people is definitely among the weirdest.

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) May 9, 2021

I love tweeting @ebruenig pieces because I get a little glimpse at how deeply, inexplicably unhinged even her most benign observations make some people

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) May 9, 2021

Twitter dot com is where you can go to find people outraged by an innocuous @ebruenig Mother’s Day column about having a child at a roughly average age for an American woman.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 9, 2021

Explicit multi paragraph discussion of how the age was only low relative to cohort, but who cares. I’m now mad about it too and plan to get myself fired

— elizabeth bruenig (@ebruenig) May 9, 2021

Perhaps if this [checks notes] New York Times columnist wasn’t such an addled trad she could have achieved something in her career.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 9, 2021

Some people are just very insecure https://t.co/rdX3IXUMpL

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) May 9, 2021

Imagine being so fragile in your worldview that Liz Bruenig’s enjoyment of her normie lifestyle choices puts you on tilt.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) May 9, 2021

I'm not familiar with her but didn't she say she's been with the same person since she was (checks notes) 16? That's not at all "normie." It's very (statistically) strange for modern-day America. No judgment but how many does this represent, meriting a NYT gig?

— A.J. Delgado (@AJDelgado13) May 9, 2021

“No judgment” from A.J. Except for the, you know, judgment that A.J. is doing.

If The NYT wants to have an op-ed columnist that represents extremely specific demos that aren't common in the U.S. (and def not among its readers) it can… but the "have kids early! I did when married to a lawyer and with a non-time-demanding writing job!" is annoying to some.

— A.J. Delgado (@AJDelgado13) May 9, 2021

If it annoys you that Elizabeth Bruenig is glad motherhood worked out for her the way that it worked out for her, then maybe you’re the annoying one.

For what it’s worth, as Bruenig herself will tell you, not everyone is completely awful and insane:

i think what i'm going to do in this thread is post reader responses so you can compare them to the twitter response. i think what you'll find is that the readership of the times is much, much, much more open-minded and curious than the twitter spectators. https://t.co/iCGDyCyD5r

— elizabeth bruenig (@ebruenig) May 9, 2021