To Bear Or Not To Bear: That Is The Question
- Jan 14
- 7 min read
The birth dearth is a fake right-wing crisis. Declining fertility is real; the fix is easy but the U.S. government discourages it
When I was six or seven I told my mother before Christmas, “I don’t want dolls anymore. I’d rather have stuffed animals.”
Barbie was the exception; she wasn’t a baby doll. I played house and emulated my mother as she took care of my new brother, but there was an early tell I might not be as motherly as I’d been acculturated: When Mom took my brother out in the stroller I followed along, pushing Winnie-the-Pooh in my toy pram.
I felt more love for Winnie than I did for baby dolls.
I was drawn more to peoples’ pets. Dogs wagged their tail and cats rubbed against your leg. Babies were boring and mostly cried or screamed. When they weren’t screaming they slept.
“Come on, don’t you want one of your own?” my cousin’s wife asked me years ago after she had her one and only child. She couldn’t, really couldn’t, understand how any woman could not want a baby of her own. She asked me several times. “Look at this! Look at this child! How can you not want one?”
“Meh,” I’d answer. Then I’d go back to playing with their dog Martin, who was a thousand more times adorable, and after whom I never had to clean up.
Ten years later, I got my tubes tied. I never changed my mind as so many had warned. At thirty-nine, I hadn’t felt even the tiniest pull toward motherhood.
I’ve never regretted my decision. I am a free spirit. I was never wired to be a parent.
Sexless In The City
Declining fertility is real, as are the problems we’ll face without more humans, but it’s not the crisis the right pretends it is. The childfree by choice differ from the childless, who don’t want to be, even as the Western world suffers an epidemic of sexlessness. Predictably, the answer from the tech bros is, not surprisingly, technology, along with a return to good ol’-fashioned unrestricted penising.
The sixty-year era of hippie (not-so) free love appears to be drawing to a close, more out of lack of sexual desire than incipient morality. Love and sex aren’t dead, and never will be, but they are on indefinite leave as humanity recalibrates and decides whether it wants to continue propagating. Or even surviving.
We work on finding ways to perpetuate humanity without ever having to deal with the messiness of choosing a partner and doing it the traditional way. God help us, anything but having sex with someone else’s body!
Billionaires pay strangers to gestate their progeny. A German (of course!) biotechnologist is developing a ‘designer baby’ lab. It’s envisioned from a sincere desire to help infertile couples or women who’ve had their uterus removed to produce their own dual-biological babies just like everyone else. It will also reduce or eliminate C-sections and premature birth, because guess what, the young’uns are grown in a lab ‘womb’ too.
It’s positively Brave New World.
Even when allowance is made for human-to-human contact, ‘polycules’, fashionable in the ‘effective altruism’ movement, reinvent the male desire for feelings-free polyamory. Like in Brave New World, ‘everyone belongs to everyone else,’ and getting overly-attached to one person is discouraged.
Problem is, neither technology nor polyamory has ever truly worked for a species whose ability to procreate and raise good humans is reliant on sexual relations and pair-bonding. Fortunately, not all men are as divorced from their emotions as tech bros. There’s a natural evolution for both sexes to eventually settle down, despite us outliers. Many ‘sow their wild oats’ until one day someone comes along who changes their mind. Like Neil Strauss, who documented the Pick-Up Artist culture he engaged in, and later rejected, in his controversial book The Game.
Many women who think they’re ‘too feminist’ to have children find that pull to settle down and propagate as they get older, including old-school radicals from the First Wave. Bernardine Dohrn, ‘70s radical Weatherman leader, found as she approached 30 that she’d rather blow up birthday balloons than government toilets.
Sexless gooning, MG/WGTOW-ing, and fake wombs as dangerously untested as sex changes for children are depressingly unnatural and anti-human. The right suggests the solution—a return to marriage and the two-parent family—but doesn’t take it seriously enough.
Make America Fertile Again
J.D. Vance, America’s only hope if Dozy Don kacks it in office, wants Americans to make more babies, despite having only three himself, when he’s rich enough to support many more. Maybe Usha has put an ‘Out of business’ sign over her cervix.
Vance and the rest of the Make America Fertile Again gang don’t seem much interested in why people choose not to have babies. They pay lip service to parenthood while the President denies the affordability crisis, perpetuating parenthood untenability, leaving it to their biggest donors farming their progeny out to strangers on the Internet.
Keep America Fatherless!
Trump at least is calling for IVF treatments for all, despite his Veep’s historical opposition to it.
J.D. and the MAFA gang assume they know what’s best for us non-conformists. They’re hell-bent on forcing parenthood at least on women by making abortion harder to find than a rent-stabilized apartment. They’re frowning at birth control too, especially emergency contraception, encouraging women toward celibacy.
It otherwise leaves rape as the only way to perpetuate one’s genes. Fortunately for today’s women, the virgins have no idea where to put their ding-dong.
Trigger warning: Sexual violence
As always, the subtler reason behind MAFA is returning women to the home and nursery, leaving men as to run the world without a Great Feminization. Or HR.
The clear and easy answer to the birth dearth is filling in the blanks with surplus humans from other parts of the world. Like maybe an immigration policy that falls somewhere between throw-open-the-doors and white-South-Africans-only?
Rampant xenophobia and consequent government raids in the current administration is only one of many reasons why Americans can’t have affordable produce. Some farmers report 70% of their farm workers are missing which means cutting back on planting and higher supermarket prices. Alien hysteria impacts child care too, as parents and guardians are forced to cut back their hours, leave their jobs, or just return to stay-at-home parenthood.
Some day, when the ICE Age is lifted and sane federal administration returns to Washington, we can also ‘lift our lamp, beside the golden door,’ to take in once again the huddled masses yearning to be free. And to raise the kids parents don’t have time for.
We will survive
Society changes and adapts to every unexpected blow, like most recently the pandemic. It adapted to the Baby Boom explosion and so too, will we, for fewer humans. We’ve survived famines, volcanic eruptions, and countless wars. At eight billion and counting, there’s no birth dearth in the world; simply a misalignment of humans.
What we should be worried about is our planet’s finite resources we’re blowing through with every pointless new iPhone release. Scientists argue whether we’re in the midst of an Anthropocene Era-driven sixth mass extinction. We merely haven’t imagined yet how it will look with fewer future adults.
We’ll just invite others back, if they trust us not to keep electing senile old men to positions of great responsibility.
The ‘birth dearth’ is a course correction. Parenthood is not for the casual and irresponsible, and we are as free as we ever were to not produce other over-consuming humans. We can barrel forward childfree, guilt-free, inventing and creating and traveling and communicating with people who don’t pronounce the third number as free.
I feel for kids who weren’t wanted, whose short miserable lives passed before my eyes in newspaper headlines. Like Charlie Wright, a 7-year-old Akron boy in 1987 beaten to death by his hooker mom who had “no desire to be a responsible parent.” Or the starved Turpin kids, or Jeffrey Baldwin, a 5-year-old starved to death by his Ontario grandparents when his mother lost custody.
I feel for these kids because I was born into a good family, with parents who loved my brother and I and supported us. They didn’t beat us, rape us, starve us, tell us we were worthless or leave us alone for days at a time. I don’t know what I did to deserve my parents, nor what those dead children did, either. I was luckier, I guess.
We don’t have to breed to fill jobs sitting idle. Just as you wouldn’t want a frustrated pro golfer operating on your dad’s heart because his parents insisted No, that’s a silly dream, you’re going to be a doctor, you want only the truly dedicated to raise children. We merely have to get rid of our political xenophobes and reintroduce a sane immigration policy with better screening for criminality and terrorist leanings.
How else might we adapt? We could reduce our consumption considerably, and challenge how much we need all our useless stuff. We might find other things to do with fewer running factories. We could farm, return to hand-crafted items, and hang out with our fellow humans more. Do you really need a virtual reality set? What if reality is more fulfilling than fake-Tenerife?
There’s no guarantee being a good parent, or a co-parent, will result in a child who makes you proud, but at least you can die knowing you did the best you could, despite your mistakes.
We don’t need more humans. We need more humanity—the kind that emanates from our hearts, and allows us to connect as God or evolution designed us, before we allowed the tech bros to offer us a depraved new world.
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