It's an inescapable, self-evident truth: Our world needs fewer and better babies.
By "better" I mean, primarily, healthier thanks to the benefits of having adequate space to grow in, and more intelligent thanks to the benefits of growing up among adults not children.
There are different ways of being intelligent. One way is to recognize the symptoms of overcrowding--loss of a sense of the value of human life, sterility, "alternative sexual identities," loss of resistance to diseases, "depression," violent hostility--in our daily news. We need to stop population growth at a point that allows most if not all people to live well, with land of their own and meaningful employment. We have passed that point. So: time to slow down on baby production. We have reached the time when it was prophesied that the barren would have more blessings than the fruitful. Human scientific progress has reached a point where we can choose, instead of having a plague or a war, just to have fewer babies.
"Billions" means that there are a thousand times more humans than there need to be; that in order to get back to optimal population levels in one generation, only one person in a thousand should have one baby. We're not likely to achieve that but, certainly, every baby-free adult is helping humankind.
Our Vice-President-elect made an idle remark about "childless cat ladies" as people he did not expect to vote for him. It wasn't very funny but I proposed that some of us who had held our noses and voted for the lesser evil should have "Childless Cat Lady" printed on T-shirts and wear them to R victory parties.
Then that opened the door for really sick ideas about baby-free adults to start spewing out of some Rs. Is it "bad for society" when people aren't married or don't have children? It's bad for society when people have babies because they don't realize that they could have good lives without babies. It's bad for society when a child is not a choice. It's bad for society when people don't understand that our animal urge to reproduce can and should be sublimated into our human sense of vocations to produce all sorts of things other than babies.
Let's face it. America is greying. Into the lives of greying people there comes a time when we know that babies, travel, etc., are ceasing to be valid excuses for not rescuing animals from shelter, and we may acquire more animal companions than we can pet at one time. This is known as The Many Paws. It's a wonderful time of life. There are a lot of us, male and female, never married, formerly married, and still married, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, enjoying Many Paws in baby-free homes.
I think it's a mistake for people to think of animals as children. Animals are, or become, adults of their kind. They have their own parents and their own babies, in addition to any humans they have trained to fetch food for them. Animals are our friends. Our work is our "babies." Or rather, since we're all called to work but only some of us are called to have babies, parenting is one of many uses to which we can put our human brains.
We might do better to think of having babies as one of the lower forms of work. We already do know that it can be an excuse, and even an actual cause, for lack of success in work--"Daddy was a farmer but all he ever raised was us." We could do more, as a society, to encourage people to think beyond the nursery. We already know that, when "Mary is a teacher, John is a lawyer, and Jane is the mother of...", Jane is going to be the insecure one, inclined to obesity and depression, in need of help to find an identity she does not share with a stray dog.
I saw a video where a larval Republican, obviously thinking of a specific person as her stereotype of "childless cat ladies," asked, "Are those the kind of people you want running society?" Well. I think of a fat White woman I saw, carrying a baby and leading a toddler, on the Metro where it's illegal to eat or drink or carry food and drink in open containers. The toddler wasn't even whining but the horrorcow shoved a stick of sticky sweet sculch into its mouth. "Excuse me," I said, "it's illegal to have food on the Metro." Horrorcow, clearly feeling that trains full of roaches were better than the thought of teaching her child to wait for anything, brayed "He can eat if he wants to!" Are THOSE the kind of people you want running society? Or running around loose? Of course giving birth does not automatically make people selfish, greedy scofflaws, but you must admit there are correlations among personality traits...
No. The democratic process allows multi-infant horrorcows to vote and trusts that there will be enough decent human beings to offset the damage they do. Sometimes after age forty a multi-infant horrorcow even whips herself into shape, gets a job, and becomes a useful member of society--though it may not be possible for that ever to be said for the surplus humans she's inflicted on the world.
Surplus humans. Yes, Mommy-nom-nom. Human life is cheap. Countries as close to civilization as Japan and Canada have talked openly about thinning the herd, and from some US hospitals that reported high COVID fatalities have come reports that sound like an unofficial version of the same. If we don't want to become a society that talks frankly about the benefits of killing people with chronic illness or disability, we want to become a society where breeders bow their heads and murmur "Thank you for your continence" when the baby-free pass by.
We want to become a society where teenagers are exposed to, and tested on, information about the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth in enough detail that a majority of boys opt for vasectomies--why waste all that rubber? We want to be a society that rewards celibacy even more than marriage. We want to be a society where baby-free couples are seen as heroes of public spirit. We want to be a society that "sells" baby-freedom in every way, short of punishing the innocent babies. Where mommies and daddies can earn enough money to feed their broods, e.g., but promotion to management jobs is reserved for the baby-free.
We want those things because, although they run counter to generations of instincts that told us that our lives would be short and we needed as many babies as possible, they are also what will protect us from paying the favored type to have more babies while slaughtering the less favored type of humans. In order to be Nazi leaders Hitler and his colleagues had to be drugged-out and probably literally demonized, but it did start with "We love babies, we idealize the genotype that withstands even inbreeding among beautiful, hardy, healthy Icelanders, but we can't afford a socialist system for very many people..."They really couldn't. So they started killing.
Well, we don't want killing, and the alternative costs just a dime. It works like this: The woman holds the dime between her knees whenever the couple are together.
So then...the normal human instinct for self-actualization is always impeded when people "run down to babies." People are more likely to feel that they've succeeded at being themselves, doing what they were meant to do, when they're not entangled in diapers.
The normal family does not and never did consist of two adults and two children moved all over the country by corporate whims. Real families have roots, and there are more adults than the breeding pair in each one. The Bible writers spoke of Abraham's travels almost as glibly as if the man had been riding around like a lonesome cowboy with only a horse to talk to, but actually he travelled with a cantankerous wife, an elderly father, a nephew he and his wife had taken in to raise, animals by the thousands, and enough hired men to match a city-state's army--and win. Real families have grandparents, they have nephews, they have aunts and uncles and cousins. Baby-free people should not be imagined as anti-family, but as those aunts and uncles the family needs. Babies should not be left with strangers or in "day care centers," but sent to visit aunts or grandmothers, when the parents need baby-free space.
Despite the evil machinations of corporate employers, who feel powerful when they separate people from their family base, reality is that baby-free adults do not lead "childless" lives. We spend more time with children who are old enough to be good company than with yowling, drooling infants--a big improvement. We get some choice about how much time we spend with the next generation. Most of us enjoy our nieces and nephews, and of course those who became baby-free by rearing children to adulthood notoriously dote on their grandchildren. Many baby-free adults are interested in homeschooling because, after about grade three, we're called in as upper-level teachers./Our baby-making siblings went to the same high schools we did but they've forgotten a lot since they had these babies.
I think it would be good for children if we moved in the direction of being a society where people had ancestral homes, where people were free to travel but always knew where "home" was. A "citizen of the world" is a homeless, rootless wretch. We learn to be citizens by being citizens of a particular house in a particular neighborhood. Children need the controlled adventures of walking from Mommy's and Daddy's house to Uncle John's house next door, then Grandmother's house up the road, then Aunt Jane's house on the other side of town. Many families have lost that privilege by failing to acknowledge the roles of baby-free relatives in completing a family. "Nuclear families" are like isolated atoms, apt to be smashed or lose their elemental integrity; they need to reunite into extended families to be really part of their element.
I personally don't know any baby-free people who really feel that "the cats are my children." Joke about it, maybe. Cats are remarkably unrewarding substitutes for children. They can be great friends to those who appreciate them for what they are, but for a baby-substitute a rock would have to work better. How does any reasonable aunt deal with cravings for child company? She invites the nieces and nephews to visit, of course. A good aunt spoils children, now and then, swooping in with saved-up money to ask "Who wants to go to the mall, or the beach, or Dollywood?" A good aunt also makes children feel spoiled when they're being invited to help paint a room or pick fruit. Grandma Bonnie Peters taught a grandchild of the appropriate age to work for the privilege of vacuum-cleaning her carpets. Baby-free adults normally interact with children only for fun, and can enjoy feeling "more popular" than beloved parents are as children drop everything at the happy cry, "Grandma's here!" Cats...well...they can love and be loved. Some cats do try to cheer up humans who aren't feeling good; some will fight in defense of their humans, and some will try to lead their humans away from what they think may be danger. Cats do not really have many interests in common with humans. Nor do dogs, although dogs make even more persistent efforts to redirect humans' attention to the interests we do have in common with dogs.
But why, given that aunts and uncles and grandparents have all these natural, wholesome outlets for any baby-specific component in our instinct to do productive work, are there baby-free adults who direct what seem like frustrated parental instincts into nannyism? They live to help others, no matter how hard the others try to escape. Legislation that purports to keep people "safe" is usually subsidized by corporations (insurance companies that don't want to pay if someone falls off a bicycle, manufacturers that want to protect the world from the risk of not buying all of their products) and should not be blamed on aunts. There are, however, some detestable renegade aunts who are not welcomed by their nieces and nephews, so they feel sad and rejected, and take it out of everyone else by supporting those stupid corporate laws. It's not saaafe to let the children walk to and from school! Better to expose them to all those germs on the bus and then let them play football for exercise! And it's not saaafe to burn the leaves in the yard! Better to spray poison on the yard! And oh dear you'd better put down that stick before you hit OOOFFF...
Why do these people always seem to line up on the Left? "Seem to" is a keyword. They have in fact been found on the Right, but the Left gives them more visibility when they can be persuaded to whine about how they need a big, all-powerful government to keep them safe from their fool selves. A delegate to a Democratic Party convention, early in the present century, stood up in front of a TV camera and loudly proclaimed, "I have a broken brain!" Indeed. Childlessness may be an accompanying symptom, or an effect, of nannyism but the primary cause is the broken brain.
And then there are the poor souls who vote for all the nannyism and nincompoopery. Their plight really is sad. They are nice, normal, baby-free adults. You might be their housemate or co-worker and notice nothing wrong with them. What happened to them? Maybe they went to a "good" college on a scholarship and alienated some people who didn't have to earn scholarship-worthy grades. Maybe they had enough sense not to want to marry a college boy, however promising, and while they were keeping in touch with the college boys as friends, more desperate females threw themselves at the college boys, who are still trying to figure out exactly what they were thinking when they proposed marriage to the desperate females. (Or it might be the other way round; the pressure on men to get married, just to fit in, works differently but it works on men too.) So they were fresh out of college with their job skills and their jobs and their sweet youthful faces and their crazy adolescent energy. And then...
Maybe they thought the church could use their energy, and then they were allowed to read or overhear some "inside" church discussion of what to do about the horrible plague of single adults in the church.
Maybe they thought that, although they were paying off their student debt faster in industry jobs, they liked teaching, so they volunteered as substitutes or teachers' aides or maybe PTA officials, and they heard all the women who'd failed to get good jobs spitting about their not having babies yet.
Too many "conservative" groups have fallen into a habit of thinking of human beings as animals in a Noah's Ark toy to line up two by two. Oh, XYZ has a great singles group! These women hoped for the sort of casual fun they had in college activity groups, hiking, singing, volleyball for all I know. So they went to the singles group and someone grabbed them by their arms and plopped them down at tables facing the most unattractive men in the Eastern States, and ordered them to chat.
So they said, "I have a home. I need to go back to it now. Right now. I might have left something turned on," and they went home.
And then on the Left, even though some of it was pretty off-putting, they found such a warm, welcomng atmosphere. People noticed their job skills and offered them government jobs. They found housemates. They found other dog walkers walking at the same times they walked their dogs. Most of their new friends didn't have children, or even spouses, so there was no pressure about their being single. They never have believed any of the D party froth about how horrible Republicans are...but they have to admit they've known Rs who were pretty unpleasant to know, while these Ds are practically congenial...
Many of the different groups that are classified as conservative, in the United States, are bigoted against single, baby-free adults, and end up pushing them into the anti-marriage Left, even though the reason why the Loony Left was anti-marriage always has been that Loony Left men think all attractive women should be involved in theoretically state-paid, free-to-the-user prostitution. So we meet Ds who are still single at age forty or fifty because most people they know just don't like the idea of marriage anyway, and they've never found anyone that they liked the idea of marriage to, either. They're not anti-marriage themselves. When they're not in the city doing their jobs they like hanging out with their nephews. But they don't want to join the anti-bachelor social circles they left, or support whatever political ideas those people support, which just about have to be bad because those people are so icky. Whole neighborhoods in Washington are full of these bachelors. They actually belong to nice families, and like their families, but they have been alienated by hateful bigots who call themselves "pro-family." So they reach age sixty or seventy still trying to identify primarily with their buddies, like high school kids. (Many of them are still renting apartments and don't even have pets.)
They were my buddies once. I still have a few car-pool lists of dozens, hundreds, of them who were in various activity groups in Washington. Network members, prospective housemates, foster parents of my adoptive sister's school friends, dance partners, band members, hiking buddies, car pools, activists working on the same issues, dates. Marriage was almost like quitting school, a defection, a rejection of friends. A lot of us were still in that school when I left the city. Our lives were good, at the time. We were the bright young things sipping overpriced coffee at Starbucks. Now, as some of us begin to consider being old as a thing that can happen to us...in the famous words, to all old buddies going home to "take your place there the spent and maimed among," I hope all of you can "find one face there you loved when all was young."
Conservatives might get away with a few witticisms about the "childless" people who vote D, because most baby-free people that I know are comfortable with ourselves and can take a joke. Still, they'd do well to work on a positive outreach to welcome more unmarried aunts and uncles, more widows in no hurry to remarry, and more grandparents back into "the family." Honor and celebrate our single-mindedness. Save any job that involves making decisions, or could potentially involve overtime work, or would ever involve travel even to a different town, for someone who is baby-free. Thank us for our self-control and public spirit. Make sure that those of us who are not, in fact, Marxists are appreciated for our kind of political, or civic, or religious activity.
Churches could, for a start, organize more things for men's groups and women's groups, or for real family groups as distinct from couples, with spaces for aunts, uncles, and grandparents as part of the family. They could talk openly about how at one time God commanded humans to "be fruitful and multiply," but now it's plainly written in the Book of Nature that God has crossed this one off our list of things to do and now wants us to focus on practicing good will toward one another.
All of us could do with a bit of detachment from what may actually be selfish genes prompting us to babble, "But I don't want my heirs to look Chinese, I want a red-haired blue-eyed grandson with double-jointed thumbs like my grandfather..." Have a little faith at least in genetic science. For better or worse, whether or not we have grandchildren and whether or not our grandchildren resemble us more than they do their other grandparents, our genes will pop up again.
