Oh, Stop It With The Baby-Making Crap Already
Childfree-by-choice is still and always an option. Don't listen to the most unfit, irresponsible Genghis Khan wannabes. Eight billion is enough.
The above photo is from a small cemetery around the corner from where I live. Six Bryans children, and only two made it to adulthood. I remember reading elsewhere of a nineteenth-century family in America who had twenty children, only one of which made it that far.
Back then, relentless breeding was necessary to perpetuate the family line. Today, losing a child is a tragedy beyond imagining in an era where parents can reasonably expect their children to outlive them.
My French grandmother lost her firstborn to a tragic accident back in France, but it’s a wonder she didn’t lose more of her six children. Although her last three were born in the late teens and ‘20s, and in America, where kids drank milk instead of wine at meals, and had vaccines for tuberculosis, diphtheria and tetanus, and wars were fought elsewhere. My mother knew a child who died of a childhood illness. Fifteen years earlier, she would have known several.
Six billion humans later…
The eight-billion-strong human race is in no danger of under-replacing the dead, no matter what you’ve heard from billionaires racing each other to see who can be the most Genghis Khan, at least with consent since mass rape is now largely frowned upon.
Baby production is the renewed conservative obsession, propagandized by Elon Musk and Greg Lindberg, whose baby-factory network landed him in prison. Other criminal billionaires the enterprising womb can engage with is Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, who claims to have fathered over 100 babies around the world and is currently also in legal trouble in France.
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Rich men seek out young beautiful women to bear their children, in true 21st-century form—sexlessly. In fact, only one of Elon Musk’s children was conceived while he was there.
Right-wing baby-making is liberally (ar ar) led by the very worst stereotypes of irresponsible non-fathers spreading their sperm as if that’s all that matters, who believe fathers really aren’t all that important in raising a child.
(Um, how is this right-wing again?)
Some conservatives ignore it, seeming to believe fathers are only tsk-tsk necessary when a woman gets pregnant by someone who isn’t an entitled rich guy. Rather, she’s a deplorable welfare ho whose kid will grow up to be a CVS smash ‘n’ grabber because he didn’t have a steady paternal hand.
But when a father decides to seed a child from afar, and nothing else, many conservatives are silent, except for the ‘family values’ religious right, with whom I haven’t agreed on anything for forty years until now.
Nearby are ‘tradwives’ who prefer housewifery to the rat race, and work to convince others via TikTok and Instagram that really, doing everything for your man and your children is all the fulfillment you need.
While I won’t deny that avenue, it’s the very reason why Betty Friedan freed women from the family trap in the first place, since women weren’t finding the Betty Crocker life as fulfilling as they might.
It was a trap for fathers, too. They didn’t get to see the kids grow up. They didn’t get to see the ‘firsts’. First smile, first wobbly step clinging to the divan, first time discovering grass. (The lawn! The lawn!)
Gen X introduced—with some success—the notion that men should spend more time with their families, in a world in which both parents now worked, but with only limited success. Digital media made the sex divide even worse—mobile-addicted young people can’t even connect with each other like normal humans, many remain virgins, and young males (virginity Ground Zero) ruin themselves through porn or toxic influencers like Andrew Tate.
While young women ruin themselves with toxic feminism and ‘progressive’ politics:
Is there a real argument behind the concern about declining fertility?
The reduced fertility hand-wringing isn’t for naught. Fewer or no children means no one to take care of the elderly in their dotage. Fewer taxpayers mean reduced services all around, not to mention reduced federal funding for states. Lower fertility worsens labor shortages, although wages failing to keep up with the cost of living for decades also contributes.
The anti-immigration sentiment will fade quickly when populations realize they need to get shit done.
The Trump administration is pondering $5,000 ‘baby bonuses’ to encourage people to go forth and be fertile—already a demonstrably failed policy, as the South Korean government has ponied up $200B trying to get South Koreans to propagate which failed to inhibit their ‘4B’ movement - No dating, no sex, no marriage, no babies. Why? Because Korean women are sick of misogynist men with prehistoric attitudes who resist women’s advancement, feel entitled to sexually harass, and are often overtly hostile.
Maybe the money would have been better spent addressing the four U’s of South Korean masculinity: Undateable, unshaggable, unreliable and unmarriageable.
Meanwhile, back in the States….
A more level-headed strategy for boosting birth rates won’t please liberals: Graduate from high school, get a full-time job, marry first, then have babies.
Fifty years ago, everyone was doing it. Now, not so much.
But as Rob Henderson pointed out in his newsletter recently, it works.
The only proviso is this ain’t the 1950s and you can’t make much money on a high school education unless you learn a trade, which pays a lot less than it did before union-busting.
Unions, love ‘em or hate ‘em, built the U.S. after the war, and as they declined, so to did the middle class.
The drive to thrive is highly complex and will take more than one or two solutions to resolve.
For certain young women, rich-entitled impregnation makes sense if she wants a child but is surrounded by man-children, and knows she can’t afford single motherhood. But. Strike a deal with a faraway sperm donor who provides the child support, and voilà ! You have a right-wing Murphy Brown.
Billionaire genetics must factor in as well. Maybe she, too, could produce a genius kid who might make billions and set her for life. Except for the research she may not be aware of that consistently links negative outcomes to fatherlessness by about 76%—mental illness, suicide attempts, incarceration, dropping out of school. Environment and culture matter as much as genetics.
If she doesn’t find a loving stepfather to provide the real example and effort billionaire donors don’t, she may raise the most deviously genius CVS looter in the ‘hood.
Conservatives need to remember their most cherished value is that it takes two to make a baby, and, if they remain true to their ideological values, two to properly raise it. They must make up their minds: Are fathers important or not? If not, admit the libs were right and stop shaming single mothers. If not, prove it by doing it. Get married, make babies with one woman, and help raise and take care of them.
But condemn those of your own who aren’t doing it right. What’s good for the libs is good for the cons.
What would happen if a few billion humans quickly died off?
Experts think we’ll hit peak humans at somewhere between 9-10B in a few more decades and then live with regular human decline permanently.
There’s a controversial ‘Toba catastrophe theory’ which begs an interesting question: What if a chunk of humanity suddenly died off? The theory considers whether the human population experienced a serious reproduction bottleneck 70,000 years ago after a supervolcanic eruption in Indonesia. It’s theorized to have brought down a ‘volcanic winter’ on the world population after ejecting ash and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, resulting in vegetation die-offs and significant cooling in some areas—and maybe to a huge decline in human reproduction.
Scientists cite the fairly low genetic variation in humans at this time, without the same in other primates. After recovering from the catastrophic event, humans eventually moved out of Africa and populated other parts of the world.
Archaeologists argue that some regions may have been more affected than others, while other experts argue there might have been other causes for the mass migration.
So how bad would it be if something similar happened and we lost, say, a quarter of the world’s population—about two billion?
That would take us back to the world of 1999.
Depending on how and where the population declines were worst—most likely the poorest and unstable parts of the world—post-shock humans would eventually come together and do what needs to be done to pick themselves up and move on, like our ancestors had to do throughout human history.
To misquote another great philosophical thinker—Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, humans, like life, find a way. Which is why I don’t lose sleep over declining fertility rates.
There are genuine consequences to a globally declining birth rate we need to consider and adapt to; there are, I would remind population hysterics, other solutions besides baby-making. Maybe we’ll need to spread our resources differently. Maybe we’ll need to take care of our own elderly family members more. (Maybe give that $5,000 to people caring for relatives instead.) We didn’t know how to handle a pandemic lockdown until we were forced. Rather than fretting about a baby dearth, we can accept the drop until humanity somehow collectively decides the time is right to go forth and be fruitful again.
Maybe declining fertility is all just part of the natural evolutionary process.
Childfree by choice is still an option
There’s a lot to be said for not raising humans you don’t want. I chose the professional life, and never regretted it.
My life definitely does not suck. Many others’ don’t either. In fact, it would probably be greatly to our benefit to stop fucking for ten or fifteen years. Darwin knows it would be a boon to the environment, and we keep forgetting we still have to live here since Elon can’t build a rocket yet that doesn’t explode like Mentos in Coke. It would probably suck even if he could get us there. Seriously, after about three weeks of a tedious landscape you can’t easily visit, or send the kids out to play in, you’re going to long for a walk on a beach, or a mountains horizon (with trees), or Jesus, even the flat unending plains of Saskatchewan.
The hell with baby-making. Americans especially can’t afford it now with a mentally unstable old man ruining the economy and ensuring low prices will never terrorize consumers again. If Trump’s MAGAs really want to make America fruitful again, maybe they should raise wages and stop destroying jobs. In fact, raise taxes on the rich rather than everyone else which is what tariffs do. After all, if billionaires can afford to pay 100 women to have their babies, they can sure as hell afford higher taxes.
Just sayin’.
When I’m not thanking Goddess I never had children, I help women and others reclaim their power here on Grow Some Labia.
Brava! What you suggest would, I think, make a tremendous difference. But America is apparently hellbent on its present trajectory. And neither end of the political spectrum seems capable of looking in a mirror. People our age will just have to sit back and watch the show as we live through our decline. But thanks for trying to inject some sanity into the discussion.
If the right wing men want to turn back the clock and get young women to get married and multiply, they need to get their young men off the internet where they are getting way too much advice from idiots like Andrew Tate and porn. You can't berate and insult women into wanting to marry and near children.