Whenever I have a dinner party one of the standard weird questions I ask people is what thing they do routinely will be totally illegal in their (or their kids) lifetime.
The responses vary — eating meat or driving or flying are pretty popular dystopian choices — but a friend of mine suggested that all births will be IVF births by 2050. He’s an IVF father, so perhaps he’s ahead of the curve.
I suspect he may be on to something. That is — if we can still have children. I find claims of an impending Spermageddon a bit implausible but I do wonder sometimes.
Surely there must be a limit on the world population, I think. Is it 8 billion? Is it 9 billion? Is it a 100 billion? Who knows? I don’t have the view that there’s an overpopulation or an underpopulation crisis.
I recall a blog post from a few years back, reproduced thusly.
USAToday‘s "OnDeadline" blog finds some choice morsels from newly released transcripts of Henry Kissinger’s 1973 meeting with Mao:
You know, China is a very poor country," Mao is quoted as saying during the exchange. "We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands."
The Chinese leader drew laughter when he returned to the proposition a few minutes later. "Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you 10 million." he said, adding: "We have too many women … They give birth to children and our children are too many."
It’s not clear whether Mao is at all serious — he was a pretty crazy dude, after all — but Kissinger’s response is precious: “It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it.”
Nowadays Chinese fertility is collapsing. Do we dare mention potential millions of underreported COVID deaths in 2019 Q4, 2020 Q1?
And I suspect that that lack of a future is a big reason why China is starting to fudge the numbers.
We aren’t allowed (yet) to talk about population limits and whether or not there would (or should) be some sort of discussion about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to breed.
Julia Black has written a great piece at Business Insider about the pronatalist movement, starring the Collinses, a somewhat eccentric couple committed to having a number of kiddos. The whole thing is worth reading in its entirety.
In the spirit of full disclosure I am an investor in this space, especially in in vitro fertilization technology.
My main complaint with the industry is that many of the claims of IVF world should be rigorously checked by independent authorities — a sort of FDA for IVF—but in the main I support rethinking how we do fertility policy in this country.
You might ask how I square that view with my pro-life bona fides. Isn’t IVF against church teaching? Indeed it is. Lots of things are against Church teaching and, I think it’s our duty as Catholics to reconcile modernity and the Church.
Galileo was a heretic in his time, wasn’t? The Church must adapt with modern scientific advancement, especially considering the modern miracle of IVF helps produce more people, which is a basic component of a Catholic marriage.
We must have a seat at the table…or we will be on the menu. A world in which people are more intentional in the children that they have is a good one.
So too is one in which women are taught the truth about their reproduction. So yes, I invested in this space precisely because I believe that lots of women of my generation have been lied to and I wanted to say, years from now, that I did my part to forestall civilizational collapse if, indeed, that’s something we ought to be concerned about.
Maybe all the children who have been produced will thank me by naming their Martian settlement after me. Well, that’s a batty idea! But lots of those going around these days.
Here’s the free money available to anyone smart enough to seize on it — "subsidize IVF already.” You can have heath insurance companies require it.
It’s expensive having kids but what’s more expensive is hoping you’ll save your civilization with someone else’s babies — especially when they don’t exactly show up.
Government can help.
"Isn’t IVF against church teaching? Indeed it is. Lots of things are against Church teaching and, I think it’s our duty as Catholics to reconcile modernity and the Church."
If it's wrong it's wrong. The Church (before Pope Francis anyway) has been consistent going back to the Didachae saying only natural reproduction is licit and both abortion and contraception are wrong. Under Pope Benedict the nuanced doctrine was one could do such things as take pro-fertility drugs, but IVF was immoral first because it leads to discarding many fertilized ova -- babies; second because it gets around the natural process God requires. See Onan's sin.
"Galileo was a heretic in his time, wasn’t [he]?" Actually, the Galileo affair is more nuanced. For one thing, his holding the planets revolve in circles was wrong; Kepler showed it's elipses. See Stanley Jaki's "Galileo's Lessons," a short booklet; there's a review of it on Amazon.
"The Church must adapt with modern scientific advancement, especially considering the modern miracle of IVF helps produce more people, which is a basic component of a Catholic marriage." It's not a basic component if God doesn't want it the natural way. Infertility for married people is a tragedy, a Cross they must bear, but doing so inspires the rest of us in bearing our own Crosses. And see demographer Ed Dutton on how IVF is dysgenic: https://twitter.com/jollyheretic/status/1317388057348313088