People generally aren't allowed to buy babies and that's probably for the best. But, as it turns out, governments can't even pay people to have them — and that's a problem.
A Wall Street Journal report Sunday confirmed globally what various local reports had shown: that government efforts at bribing people into having babies aren't working. "Imagine if having children came with more than $150,000 in cheap loans, a subsidized minivan and a lifetime exemption from income taxes," the paper reported. "Would people have more kids? The answer, it seems, is no."
"Reversing the decline in birthrates has become a national priority among governments worldwide, including in China and Russia, where Vladimir Putin declared 2024 'the year of the family.' In the U.S., both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have pledged to rethink the U.S.’s family policies. Harris wants to offer a $6,000 baby bonus."
$6,000 is about one year of car insurance for my eldest son.
One unspoken reason for Russia's nearly three-year effort at subjugating Ukraine is Russia needs more ethnic Slavs because Russian women aren't having enough babies, but Russia's increasingly restive Muslim minorities are having plenty. Of course, Ukrainian women aren't having enough babies, either. Putin seems to think that strapping two sinking boats together will make one seaworthy craft, but it doesn't work that way.
Either the baby-deficient peoples of the world turn that around, or entire cultures become self-selected for extinction. I like a world of endless variety that has Americans and Russians and Chinese and French and Koreans in it. Cultural suicide goes against every cell in our bodies — and against everything we're taught, or at least used to be taught.
Would stricter abortion laws help? Perhaps at the margins but likely not more than that. Ireland makes a decent test case, having gone from an outright ban in 1861 and constitutionally recognizing "the equal right to life of the pregnant woman and the unborn" in 1983, to allowances for abortion by constitutional referendum in 2018.
Despite some of the West's strictest abortion laws, Ireland's fertility rate dropped below the replacement level in 1992 and has only declined slightly since the 36th Amendment guaranteed abortion access in the first 12 weeks.
The crux of our baby problem isn't legal or medical. It's cultural.
In an August column for the New York Post, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds recommended making parenting "cool" again.
“Free range” kids are mentally healthier and easier to raise, but our culture is so opposed to the idea of autonomy for school-age children that parents get cited for letting their kids play in their own front yards without direct oversight.
And parenting is, let’s face it, a low-prestige activity in our society.
As with so many dystopian — or at the very least, dysfunctional — trends, this one seems to have originated in California. Or at least, 30-plus years ago, San Francisco is where I first heard my lefty friends sneer at people with children as "breeders."
"It wasn’t always that way," Glenn added. "TV shows once portrayed multi-kid families as normal and happy, and parents as sensible and admirable."
Left unsaid: even marriage is often portrayed as uncool. Particularly in women's TV shows, both male and female characters are generally too self-obsessed to make the difficult — but rewarding — effort to settle down and start families.
This father of two — I'd have gone for three but I didn't meet the right girl while still young enough — was lucky enough to have found Robert Heinlein in my early teens. One of his most enduring characters, Lazarus Long, once said, "If there is a purpose in life more important than two people cooperating in making a baby, all the philosophers in history haven’t been able to find it."
And government never will. It's up to us.
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