Will the Species Go Extinct if We Don’t Force Childbirth on Women?
Short answer: no.
A while ago, I wrote an essay entitled “Childlessness Should Be the Default.” I expected the comments to an article criticizing reproductive pressure to be varied and potentially even hostile. After all, there are still plenty of people out there who hate the childfree, especially childfree women.
What I did not expect was the number of people who seem to think that if our culture doesn’t use coercive tactics to force unwilling individuals into parenthood, the human race will go extinct.
Of course, some of these commenters only read the title and responded to that. It was obvious they hadn’t read the article. But there were also commenters who clearly had read the piece and still concluded that a species that does not foist childbirth on unwilling women and parenthood on disinterested adults is a species doomed to the same fate as the dinosaurs.
The end of the world as we know it?
I’ll be the first to say parenthood is a raw deal in this day and age — not that it hasn’t always been kind of a raw deal for women — but this attitude surprised me, as I’m still not of the persuasion that if we don’t force women to give birth against their wills, the human race will cease to exist.
I’m well aware I’m still in the numerical minority as a childfree person. Sure, people are having smaller families than they used to, but the urge to reproduce is an innate drive in every species, despite the fact that it doesn’t appear in every individual.
Even if some of us don’t have a strong internal motivation to procreate, many people do, and those with no interest in reproduction are not a significant enough proportion of the population to drive humanity to extinction.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say childfree people like me — those who would not want biological offspring under any circumstance whatsoever — are a minority within this minority. Statistically speaking, our current global socioeconomic and cultural configuration is more likely what’s driving the precipitous drop in births, not a decline in social pressure to reproduce.
Most people cite external factors as motivation for their refusal to become parents. They can’t afford it because it’s become enormously expensive. They don’t think they can handle the intense pressure of raising kids in an isolated, post-industrial nuclear family. They worry there won’t be much of a planet left for their children if they have them, and on and on and on.
Of course, it’s not outrageous to assume that at least a few of these people just don’t want kids and are too embarrassed to admit that, so they rely on an external factor out of their control to excuse their childfree status. However, it’s also reasonable to assume that many of these childless individuals would have kids under more favorable circumstances.
Do us all a favor
The reality is everything about our current geopolitical and socioeconomic situation is designed to pressure people not to have kids.
So even though cultural pressure to bear children is still being exerted in the media and interpersonal interactions, this pronatalist pressure is coming at individuals awash in a tide of student debt, depressed wages, economic instability, and insufficient social support.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that we seem to be teetering on the brink of environmental and civilizational collapse, as well as yet another global war.
Everyone nowadays knows if they have kids, they’ll be parenting mostly on their own in an increasingly dangerous and unstable world. The extended family unit is a thing of the past. At least in the US, there’s no institutional support, no “village” to help bring up the next generation.
We also have to factor in the extreme misogyny present in many of the cultures with the lowest total fertility rates, places like Korea and Japan. Countries that give women the choice between financial independence and personal autonomy or marriage and motherhood should not be surprised when a large chunk of them choose the former.
Even most animals will not reproduce under such unfavorable circumstances. The females of quite a few species will abort their pregnancies if it looks like there is a high chance the energy expended upon them will go to waste.
Hell, animals kill and eat their own young under certain conditions. The idea of the self-sacrificing parent does not always hold evolutionary water.
Humans, animals that we are, are no different. Historically, in times of deprivation, women have aborted their pregnancies and avoided new ones, and parents of every gender have killed their infants and even abandoned their older kids if they couldn’t care for them.
The avoidance and elimination of unwanted offspring during periods of intense stress are not anomalous. Such behaviors are routine, and this should surprise no one.
It’s not an effective evolutionary strategy to bear progeny in a time where you might die in the attempt to raise them, leaving them to die as well and ending your genetic line. Thus, it’s perfectly reasonable to presume a large proportion of humans would instinctively avoid having kids under the unfavorable circumstances presented by our current society.
This means that the human population isn’t declining because no one would want kids in the absence of social pressure to have them. It’s declining because it’s natural to delay or forgo reproduction in times of danger and difficulty.
The real extinction threat
Those who want to turn things around would do well to fix the unfavorable circumstances tanking the birth rate — and I’m not just talking about throwing cash at the problem.
Institutional childcare, tax breaks, and even payments per birth have all failed miserably in countries with low fertility rates because institutions don’t just need to offer help to parents.
They need to make substantial strides on climate change in order to have a planet to leave future generations. They need to stop fighting wars that turn everyone’s children into cannon fodder. And they need to overhaul the global culture of misogyny.
Educated women devoted to their careers are not going to look favorably on the fact that they will be expected to give up their financial independence and public life upon giving birth.
Furthermore, no rational woman can be expected to jump into motherhood in full knowledge that she will be bringing home the bacon and simultaneously doing virtually all the unpaid care work while her male partner “helps” a little and plays video games a lot.
Beyond that, it’s not reasonable to expect anyone of any gender to want to bring children into the middle of a collapsing civilization, burgeoning global conflict, and mass extinction.
Why would anyone burden themselves with children if there’s no reason to think the next generation will know anything other than misery, worry, and deprivation?
If you offer people the choice between self-preservation and reproduction, a helluva lot of them will choose their own lives over some nonexistent baby. When starting a family becomes overly burdensome and even perilous to the parents, people don’t start families. It really is that simple.
That’s why the birth rate is declining all over the world, not because applying social pressure to have kids is becoming more faux pas in a limited number of areas.
Under favorable circumstances — let’s say, a thriving natural environment, livable wages, robust institutions, solid support systems, high-quality healthcare, and political/economic stability — I don’t think there’s any reason to believe most people wouldn’t want kids, even in the complete and total absence of social pressure to have them.
Under the current circumstances, however, it’s no big shock that even the most intense reproductive pressure doesn’t make a dent in the global fertility decline.
I can only hope we are able to turn things around to the point that everyone who wants children can have them and enjoy them without the fear of drowning in debt, losing them to war, or leaving them on a dying planet.
I also hope that the people who believe parenthood is so awful that the species would go extinct if it weren’t forced upon unwilling participants never have kids of their own.