OPINION
Tani Newton
Statistics tell us so much, and so little. These statistics are familiar to many of us: birthrates across the Western world have been below replacement level for decades. 45% of today’s young women will probably not have children, and societies which fail to replace their populations disappear from the world stage in a few generations. It could hardly be starker. The civilisation we inhabit is eliminating itself.
And yet our experience of this happening is infinitely complex. Mere statistics leave out the myriad of factors in multitudes of lives that result in childlessness. If I may dare to suggest a generalisation about something so individual, it seems to be more a failure of adult relationships than a mere aversion to children. And I would question whether scapegoats such as online porn are really a cause and not a symptom. What I am hearing is that relationships between adults have become so problematic, so fraught and so unpromising that a majority of young adults are deciding to do something else – almost anything else. We’ve made family life so complicated for ourselves that trying to figure it out is too exhausting.
All of this has happened before. It’s happened in most civilisations that now only appear in museums and history books. It happened before the internet, before feminism, before pop psychology, before the Industrial Revolution, before everything we can cite or blame. It happens whenever a society’s prosperity turns to decadence and people live only for themselves and their pleasure and gratification.
I don’t want to hear about Mothers’ Day this year. The mawkish sentimentality of it is bad enough, but sentimentality in the midst of such an existential crisis is almost ghoulish. The greatest and most high-achieving nations in history are dying for a lack of mothers and fathers. In a few decades, it will be all over and the world will be something else, shaped by the people groups who are still having children now.
Obviously, everybody has a mother, and it’s nice to acknowledge all that they have done for us. But we can’t escape the fact that the last few generations have done far too little. They have left us without the people needed to continue their work into the future. We are coming up against the harsh reality that when women are ‘liberated’ from the ‘oppression’ of having children, they doom themselves to extinction, and the future will be the province of others.
Who can foresee what that future will be? I’ll write on it again, and others will write and speak on it more ably and more knowledgeably, but it’s hard to imagine. The statistics tell us so much, and so little.