Do Women Have a Moral Responsibility to Have Babies?
Reasonable people disagree – but they don't account for the Aunties
In 2017, a team of researchers published the findings of a review of 185 studies of male fertility that had been conducted over the past few decades. Globally, the researchers reported, sperm counts had fallen nearly 60% between 1973 and 2011 – which, if that’s true, oh my freaking god. Since then, other studies have complicated the picture, and now it’s not clear whether men’s sperm counts are declining or not, at least not in the United States.
I bring this up not as a public health advisory – I’m not at all qualified to say which research findings better describe reality – but rather to share with you how I felt when I read that sperm counts might be in free-fall. Aunties, I’m not proud of this, but my first emotion was relief. I was like, “Okay, phew. The human race can just slowly die out and the earth will regenerate and become lush and green again and maybe small bands of survivors will learn to make better decisions about how to run civilization in the future.”
Then I thought about the film Children of Men1 – which depicts a brutal future dystopia in which no babies have been born in over two decades and the world is nothing but urban rubble and detention centers and government-supplied suicide-by-mail kits – and I decided after all that I might not root for humanity’s catastrophic collapse. But being real with you, I do still feel like it’s complicated. I’m not convinced that the future needs the same number of people we have now. Maybe?
Today’s post is about humans’ moral responsibility (or not) to keep populating the earth, which, of course, is really about women’s responsibility (or not) to bear and raise children. While sperm counts may not actually be cratering, it is true that global birth rates have been declining for decades, and in most nations including the United States, fertility is currently below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. So what does the whole birth rate situation mean for us? Should we try to do something about it — like, as a society? Should we advocate for public policies to increase the birth rate? And do you and I personally have a responsibility to populate the earth with more babies – especially given that the women among us typically have to do way more than our fair share when it comes to childbearing and childrearing?
I think the above are important, interesting philosophical and practical questions – but there are also some morally repulsive ways to think about our responsibilities vis-á-vis the birth rate, so let’s first clear those out of the way to make space for the actually interesting conversation.
As you may be aware, so-called “pronatalism” has become an ideological pillar for the U.S. American far right (and probably beyond the U.S., too). Conservative Evangelicals and elected officials alike increasingly argue that families need to be large, women need to be mothers, and the care of children should happen in the home. From this perspective, being single is bad, being unmarried is bad, being anything other than heterosexual and cisgender is bad, not having children is bad, contraception is bad, abortion is of course very, very bad, being a working mom is bad, daycare is bad, and white people are morally bound to churn out as many children as possible (a Biblical “quiverfull”) in order to fend off the supposed “great replacement” of white people by Black and brown people. Elon Musk is a well-known right wing pronatalist. So is J.D. Vance. So is Donald Trump, to the extent that he actually believes in anything: thanks to his Big Beautiful Bill, families with U.S. citizenship will receive a $1000 “baby bonus” for every new baby born.2 (Pay no attention to the fact that raising a child in the U.S. now costs well over a quarter of a million dollars).
Okay, so in my view none of that is very worthy of our attention. Right wing pronatalism is not what we’re talking about today, because here at The Auntie Bulletin, we don’t spend time with fools.
What I do find interesting are the pronatalist arguments from the left. Also, there are antinatalist arguments out there, and I find those interesting, too. In what follows, I’ll offer a primer on the contemporary pronatalism/antinatalism debate – as articulated by ethical, reasonable people who know what they’re talking about. I really respect the experts whose ideas I’ll be summarizing, and I encourage you to follow their work, including clicking through to check out the sources for this post in more detail. That said, I also think there tends to be a big piece missing from much of the conversation about natalism, pro and con – and you won’t be surprised to hear that the missing piece is shaped like Aunties.
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