There’s a growing awareness among a widening range of people that when fewer people have babies and the people who have babies have fewer babies, the type of world we live in changes. Such a future is not one merely with fewer people. Rather, it is a smaller population hemmed in by the concerns of the aged—often risk averse, settled in lifelong habits, awaiting death in a world without a legacy of human progeny to be remembered by.
It’s a stark future that awaits us, physically and spiritually. We are already feeling the effects, however subtly. Sometimes, the effects of these demographic trends are hard to gauge from the vantage point of personal experience. People who have many children tend to be part of a social group in which having many children is not uncommon. A child from a family of six was confused by the many strangers who approached with questions and astonishment. From the child’s perspective, “everyone” they knew had a large family and the attention seemed unwarranted.
Outside of these enclaves of robust family life, however, consider how many only children of only children we already encounter. This scenario is not always a choice. Consider, however, the growing number of grown people stridently demanding to be lauded for their choice not to have children.
While the worldwide population may still be increasing now, these trends will continue and have an effect. More people are suggesting, whether rightly or wrongly, that the scenario is a bit like the roller coaster ratcheting up the rails; once we get to the tippy-toppy of the trajectory, there will come a swift and sudden drop in many places across the globe.
There’s a group calling themselves pronatalists, who are trying to convince the wealthy and smart to “breed.” Fashioning themselves as enlightened pragmatists, the pronatalists are concerned by the statistics—for example, modeling out what the consumer market looks like in a place like South Korea where the birthrate is around .86.
Allegedly including a growing number of semi-anonymous, wealthy tech bros, the movement is sometimes viewed as the new means of achieving immortality. Because cryogenic freezing has yet to deliver on promises of a frosty resurrection, what is a godless tech brainiac supposed to do during a midlife crisis? Spawn as many children as possible, apparently. If that’s the motivation for producing offspring through any technological means possible, those superhuman wonder babies are unlikely to be a great boon to the future of the planet. More on that later.
Malcolm and Simone Collins have put themselves forward as the public face of the pronatalists. An achievement-oriented couple in their mid-thirties, the pair seem to take their reverse-Idiocracy strategy quite seriously. Having donned their thick-rimmed glasses to project the image of being “biologically young,” the pair have successfully engineered three children to-date. Engineered is the word, since, at least for their third child, they painstakingly analyzed genetic data on all their many frozen embryos to select what they deemed the fittest.
Genes associated with an increased chance of autism are allowed, because, they explain, Simone has autism. Increased risk of obesity, heart disease, or anything identifiable that might undermine productivity? That baby will be staying in a deep freeze for a loooong time. In the gladiatorial face-off of the cold embryos, Titan Invictus (a girl not given a girl’s name in order to improve her chances in postnatal combat) emerged victorious in the third round. Far from hiding their eugenic bent, the couple laughs about it and claims it can’t be bad because Simone had an ancestor who fled the Nazis. For being such self-satisfied pragmatists, their logic leaves something to be desired.
What so many in the pronatalist movement fail to understand is that it is not merely the producing of babies that is difficult. The task of nurturing human persons in a coherent and meaningful culture is a much bigger—and much more interesting—challenge. You can “give life” to whichever embryo you choose, but will that child once grown have a reason for living, let alone undertake the arduous task of producing eight children who will each have eight children for 11 generations, a fanciful future that would result in more Collins’ progeny than the current world population?
There’s a telling line in an article about the eccentric couple. The interviewer makes reference to the 6 AM “day-care drop-off.” The couple allegedly pulling in $70 million a year couldn’t afford a nanny? The details are not spelled out. It’s entirely possible what the interviewer describes as “day-care” is a one-to-one, dedicated caregiver scenario, which is demonstrably the best situation for the development of young children.
Regardless of the particulars of the Collins’ situation, they illustrate a trend that reveals our culture’s ignorance of what it means to nurture a developing child. One of the premises of the Collins’ eugenic experiment is that childbearing can never infringe upon Simone’s perceived right to continue any career ambitions she held before jumping on the pronatalist train. This is not to single out Mrs. Collins, for if considered, many mothers of post-modernity are operating on the same principle.
It’s now considered the right of every mother to explain grandiosely to her three-year-old the importance of her “work” and how her life is not circumscribed by the grubby-fingered demands of underdeveloped offspring.
For the healthy development of a human person, someone caring—acutely, immediately, responsively, individually—is not a nice added feature but a necessary component for every child. This person could be someone else, such as the father or a grandparent, but naturally and obviously the person to fulfill this essential human role is the mother.
To give Mrs. Collins her due, one article described her manic work habits of the neonate stage, keeping the child strapped to her for a full six months whilst working on a treadmill. That’s fabulous (not the walking while working bit but the keeping the newly born child close to the source of all nourishment and comfort known before birth). After six months, perhaps, the tot is booted to day-care. Who knows? Who really cares?
The point is: We want the results without changing the way we live. Deciding to repopulate the world at age 35 while refusing to forego any career ambitions in the present moment is unsatisfying as a vision of virtue to emulate. There are people committed to ideals who reserve marital intimacy for—get this—marriage, wed at a reasonable age in their 20s and happen to have a passel of children by the end of lifelong marriage. No engineering frozen babies required.
Simone and Malcolm may feel assured of making some kind of transactional return on their philanthropy—an important consideration noted by Malcolm’s mother. Such profit may further benefit their 8.5 billion descendants, but it sure as heck won’t convince many people to have kids. Abstractions about future population figures and car sales a hundred years from now do not motivate people. Ideals can be powerful motivators, as the pronatalist vision of a genetic superior future of tech bro immortality has apparently inspired some. Whether that is a worthy ideal has yet to be determined.
What we can know is that a generation of effectively motherless wunderkind produced for the sake of social experiment will be in a world of personal hurt that does the world great harm. We should not be manipulating the means of “breeding” to eke out our 2.1 without ever having to stop and examine our lives.
The good news in all this is that the Lamb of God continues to enthrall and happy large families are the greatest inducement to “breeding” known to man. Not everyone can have a large family. Not everyone wants one. But the good ones, in no small measure, make life worth living for us all.
