asked Michael Balter on twitter
That is the funniest question, all those assumptions.
NOT
VOLUNTARILY
The birth rate will go up in some places, actually a lot in some places, but they won’t be places where the survival rate of the children is likely to be very high, because of future pandemics, the social chaos brought on by the current pandemic, and climate change, which is not likely to back off just because we’re all having a horrible year. What you’re doing, when you’re being a hypothetical god of ideas looking at a screen upon which moves a nineteen year old Bengali woman who looks forty and has three kids in the ground already, is demonstrating readiness to be calmly philosophical about real human suffering, which I suppose is a great psychological advantage in this dress rehearsal for the fucking end times.
Anywhere there exists effective birth control, civic order, and interpersonal alternatives to the standardized hegemonic heterosexual-congress-while-married rules with which lovers of liberty must inevitably come into conflict, (ha ha, a little levity in the midst of this panorama of disease, greed and contempt) the birth rate’s gonna plummet. It will blip in a couple of years due to pent up demand and glue for new marriages for the sudden crop of ‘fuck I’m in my 30’s, a parent and I /we lost a partner’ 2nd marriages we’ll see over the next three years.
I believe industrialized world women who up until last Christmas were planning children are going to watch the slow motion chaos of the US response and think, no, I don’t think so. They will watch the global economy collapse and realize that they have a choice about whether they want to bring their kids into this mess or not. Especially after what I imagine will be more than one mass murder event in a major American hospital, when masked gunmen walk in and kill everyone they can find to ‘start a race war’ or ‘stop the hoax’ or whatever toxic bullshit youtube’s spun them up on.
As things go bad, we’re going to see the children of single parents who’ve died during the pandemic disappear into child trafficking, sex and cooking and agricultural slavery, and many women will say, if they have a choice, that they don’t want to make food for Moloch, the devouring god that modern capitalism always was before it became too big to fail. They won’t want to be forced into sex work to feed their children. And as the welfare state implodes, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities, so why bring a child into that? The wealth transfer from the older generations who are dying in higher numbers for this pandemic will come in the form of property, which is great, but there won’t be any cash, so nothing to start a new life with.
Also, modern men are trash. They do not know how to give head, they are unclean, jealous, spendthrift, cowardly, lazy and a sack of wet mice does better on an LSAT. Why would any woman in her right fucking mind want a child with one?
There won’t be any decent pre-natal care because there already aren’t enough obstetricians and up to four percent of them will die in the next eighteen months since the US is having such shitty outcomes for coronavirus when it gets to ARDS. After that, we’ll have a vaccine, yippee! With more than a 15% refusal rate, because it is imbedding a chip into us! Boo. And then after that, the general strikes, the food riots, more wars, and then – the real pandemic, which has yet to arise.
Could be Tennessee, could be Indonesia, could be China, could be Canada. We don’t know where the next one is coming from, and it will be coming into a world stronger in some ways in its response than today, but in many other ways weaker. We’re not coming back from this. Mass unemployment, structural unemployment on a scale not seen before in industrialized societies, will be a continuing feature of life, because pandemics will force so many people to stay home for at least one fifth of the next decade.
Also, this pandemic is leaving kids under five alone. If you think the next one will be so kindly, Atropos would like a word.
So no; there won’t be a baby boom. But isn’t it pretty to think that capitalism, after having shit on women in general and women of colour in particular, expects us feeeemales to do our duty to throw babies on Moloch’s pyre. Now why the fuck would any sensible woman do that. seriously
why
