I guess before we get going here, we need to acknowledge the large elephant in the room, which anyone who has read a bunch of my stuff might know about — is that I’ve been trying to get my wife pregnant, via science and organic methods (that means sex) for a while now, and it hasn’t worked, and it’s probably my issue. I’m also a dude. You combine those two elements — “can’t impregnate wife” and “a dude” — and it’s easy to think anything I say about motherhood is inherently resentful. If you want to take that angle on this, you absolutely can and I would understand why. Let’s now move on.
First I think we need to acknowledge that multiple children has long since ceased to be an economic necessity (“work the farm”) and is now an economic luxury and/or even a burden, especially given inflation, child care costs, how we re-contextualized the role of schools during COVID, etc. I still know plenty of people with five and six kids, and some of them are good friends of mine. I also know people who dreamed of 3–4 and stopped at one via economic constraints. I think we all know that global warming is a thing, climate change is a thing, food production is a thing, overpopulation is a thing, and automation is a thing. All these “things” are going to change what the future looks like for a current newborn. We don’t always admit that stuff, but I think most of us know it. The argument women…
