Save the World, Become Selfless

A look at birthrate statistics

I was trying really hard to avoid that Ballerina Farm thing from last week—I still haven’t read it—but then my thumb slipped and I read this other thing and then this other thing.

…Just to interrupt myself. Isn’t it odd how we—those of us who are “very online”—spend so many of those online moments writing about other people’s reactions to content? It’s not like someone invented some new philosophical system and elegantly articulated it in a pamphlet, or decided to invent a new country. No, it’s that someone on Instagram got a lot of followers and so someone wrote about it and then other people read that and wrote about it and tweeted and then other people wrote about the tweets. There’s a sort of slow-moving whirlpool of ever-diminishing critical depth about “social” “phenomena.” I mean, I am Not complaining. I was made for such a time as this. If it were the sixteenth century, I would probably have been a stocky peasant with only half my teeth hoping for a crumb of news to drop my way after church. Or rather, I would have already died in childbirth. In this way, I would have been probably a lot more holy and intelligent and basically useful to society, should the child have lived. Ah well, we all have to do what we can.

In this case, it’s not to saw on endlessly about how happy or unhappy Hannah Neeleman is. It’s to zoom out, as it were, to this Wallstreet Journal thing titled “Why Americans Aren’t Having Babies: The costs and rising expectations of parenthood are making young people think hard about having any children at all.” It’s full of surprising statistics, and much end-stage civilization. Here’s one:

Women without children, rather than those having fewer, are responsible for most of the decline in average births among 35- to 44-year-olds during their lifetimes so far, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey data by University of Texas demographer Dean Spears for The Wall Street Journal. Childlessness accounted for over two-thirds of the 6.5% drop in average births between 2012 to 2022.   

And here’s a statistic with a side of je ne sais quoi:

Birthrates among 35- to 44-year-olds give demographers who study fertility an early look into millennials’ changing approach to parenthood. But these researchers also look closely at women over 40, reasoning that if a woman doesn’t have a child by then, she is more likely to remain childless.    

Ah yes, how is it possible that this is not common knowledge? Of course women over forty are “more likely” to “remain childless.” It’s not impossible to have a baby after turning forty, but it is very much less “likely.” This is why getting married and having children young for most of human history has been the spiritual and practical assumption, because by the time you’re forty, your body and your mind are inclined, already, to turn towards various other matters. I wonder who the “researchers” are and why they didn’t know this already.

The writer then makes this bland observation:

As more women gained access to birth control and entered the workforce in the 1970s, reshaping family life and expectations around gender, Americans began having fewer kids. By 1980, the average number of children per family was 1.8, down from a high of 3.6 during the post-Depression baby boom, according to Gallup. Now, researchers say, having children at all has begun to feel optional. 

Who could have possibly foreseen that totally upending the social order by giving women an “easy” out on the thing that has given shape and purpose to the human family, tethering them to their own, as I’ve been calling it, “biological realities” would have produced the strange effect of people deciding, on purpose, to have fewer children?

Except that, I don’t think people make decisions in that fashion, not really. Rather, one innocent but tragically unconsidered action leads to another leads to another until so much time has gone by that you can’t go back and start again.

It’s not that you think when you’re twelve, ‘You know what would be great? Becoming a childless cat-lady who lectures other women about their privilege and intersectionality scores. Can’t wait for the day when I’ll become a meglamonical Kimberly Cheatle-level corporate shill. How soon can I sign up for an engineering program?’ Au contraire.