Will Humanity Go Extinct Because Women Don’t Want To Have Kids Anymore?
Many Women don’t want kids, so some people who believe civilization will fall if they don’t are trying to force them
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I’ll never cease to be surprised by some people’s audacity. I know the internet is anonymous, so I shouldn’t be. But I am.
I wrote a piece about why I don’t have kids and how I realized I never wanted them. And some guy took it upon himself to tell me that women shouldn’t be allowed to get an education until they’ve had at least two babies.
Yes, women should be forced to have babies or be deprived of education because, apparently, humanity is in danger of dying out.
There are people out there who believe that in a world groaning under the weight of 8 billion people, there are still not enough of us. And they are dangerous.
Because they’re doing their best to force women into childbirth.
An unholy alliance of Christians and Pronatalists
That pressure to procreate against your will comes from the most unexpected places. It’s no surprise that religious fundamentalists are screaming from the pulpits about abortion bans.
And how women must be subordinate to men and should pop out as many babies as possible.
If there’s something that unites people like Christian fundamentalists and the Taliban, it’s their belief that a very selective interpretation of some thousands of years old texts should be legislation for all.
And their fear of an independent woman.
What better way to make sure women can’t be independent than to take away their ability to provide for themselves and saddle them with a couple of children to take care of?
Sure, nothing new there. But they’ve found unexpected allies in the tech sphere.
Technology isn’t a field you’d associate with archaic interpretations of the universe. But have you seen Elon Musk? He has 11 children and keeps having new ones with random women who work for him.
He went on national TV to tell us that civilization will crumble if we don’t have more babies.
You might think, sure, Elon’s lost his marbles a while back. After all, that would explain what’s been happening at Twitter (which is now a hate-speech-filled hellscape called X), where Elon amplifies alt-right content. And the Tesla Cybertruck.
And I agree that it looks like it. But he’s not alone.
A lot of tech “geniuses” are pronatalists. They’ve come together to amplify a cult-like belief that we must crusade to save the world from a demographic collapse.
The pronatalist movement is spreading among the wealthy tech and venture capitalists. Billionaire business elites and people like Malcolm and Simone Collins, the founders of pronatalist.org, lead them.
Elon is the most well-known among them.
Pronatalists remind me a lot of the Quiverfull movement. Only that they’re fueled by a belief in Western superiority, not by the belief in the teachings of the Bible.
Both push for (predominantly white) women to focus on having as many babies as possible.
Is the decline in birthrates a real problem?
Pronatalists insist our civilization will collapse because women aren’t having enough babies. On their homepage, they blame “gender equality, education and technology” for the downfall of the human race.
They believe that the consequences will be terrible unless something dramatic is done. They say we’re heading for a society with old people and fewer workers. There will be no one to support the social programs and take care of the growing number of pensioners.
And, of course, innovation will suffer, and the economy and living standards will stagnate and collapse.
In short, birthrates below the replacement rate will lead to the end of humanity.
At first glance, this sounds plausible.
Yes, the population in many European countries is aging and declining. We must think about how we will care for these aging people. And yes, there will be fewer people in the workforce.
But is this a real problem?
Productivity has risen by 65% since the 1970s. This means that one person produces more than twice as much as one person did back then. What’s more, vast parts of our production systems have been automated.
And in the last 18 months, we have been reminded that AI is here to take our jobs over and over again.
Why exactly do we need more people when we don’t even have enough jobs to employ those we have now?
In truth, it would be beneficial for workers if there were fewer people around. A scarcity of labor would finally mean that wages would have to rise to a livable level.
Because while productivity has risen by 65% since the 70s, wages only rose by 14.8%.
Imagine a world in which human labor was a valuable commodity. In this world, no one would have to work a full-time job and still live in their car.
The only reason I see that billionaires would want people to produce more workers is because they want to keep labor cheap.
And that they believe only white people are capable of innovation.
Sure, if you think that white people are more valuable than everyone else, you might feel that there are not enough people.
Because in reality, there is no shortage of young people on this globe.
The median age of the world’s population is currently30.5 years.There is no shortage of people in the global South and Asian countries. People who are very eager to work, learn and innovate.
The average age of the African population is currently 19. India is at 28.2. The median age in Asia is 32 — and yes, that includes Japan and South Korea.
There are enough people to take care of the old people of this world. If you let them.
Are all children equally valuable?
There’s a strong correlation between the alt-right push for more children and xenophobia. Those who are most adamant that women need to start popping out children are also the most fervent anti-immigration crusaders.
They’re not afraid that there won’t be enough people. They’re afraid that there won’t be enough white people.
Like the Quiverfull people, the top ranks of the pronatalists are predominantly white. But they’re also very rich. Among them are people like Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto “genius” who defrauded his customers of over 8 billion dollars.
The great replacement theory of the alt-right that fuels a big part of the anti-abortion movement is rooted in the belief that people of other skin colors will replace white people.
And they’re not even hiding it anymore. Take Nebraska, where Senator Erdman openly used fear of replacement to push anti-abortion laws.
Pronatalists are more subtle proponents of the alt-right ideology — not Elon, though, who has become the vocal guardian angel of the anti-diversity, anti-immigration, and anti-abortion movements on his social media.
But generally, they mask their push to keep the white race on top of the food chain with their concern that civilization will fall.
But civilizations have come and gone: the Egyptians, the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Romans, and the Greeks. Gone. But humanity is still here.
There’s no reason to believe that the fall of civilization as we know it now will lead to the disappearance of the human race. Change is inevitable. But there are more than enough humans on this planet to keep humanity going.
No need to deprive women of their independence, lock them up at home and turn them into babymaking machines.
Humanity will survive even if you don’t have children
The US population is still on the rise; it’s expected to rise to a high of 370 million in 2080. After that, it might decline to 366 million in 2100.
The majority of people on the internet areyounger than 44. Much younger than I am, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
They don’t remember what the world was like in the 1980s. The global population at the time was only 4.6 billion people. No one was worried about the imminent demise of humanity.
Were nearly twice as many people now. If you ask me, that’s way more people than necessary on this tiny sphere hurtling through space.
We’re struggling with climate change, the distribution of resources, human rights and wars. There are many things that are a bigger threat to humanity than your or my decision not to have children. If anything, our decision may take a little load off the system.
Thanks for reading this piece, which was originally published on Medium.
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Thank you for this piece, so well put!