Shall we all stop having babies?

Despite the resurgence of Covid-19 with its danger and inconveniences, other questions which dominated the news last year are also back.

Migrants are in the news again and so is the environment; Extinction Rebellion are protesting, and David Attenborough is on TV. My column isn’t about any of those issues though. Instead I want to write about a movement which is growing precisely because of all these very difficult things: anti-natalism (not antenatalism!).

You might have not heard that word before. It describes the idea that it is wrong to have children on the grounds that it is always a duty to prevent harm and pain, but it is not a duty to create joy. Given that to be human is to suffer, it is then best not to bring any more into the world. That’s the philosophical version, but there are also plenty of people who are anti-natalists (or, more positively, ‘child-free’) for environmental reasons. If babies grow up as resources-guzzlers in time of climate catastrophe, they believe it’s better not to have them. Better even that humankind becomes extinct, than that we continue to mess up the world for all the other species which exist.

Does this seem crazy to you? In an atheist world it is remarkably logical. And to the current generation of teens and twenties, versed in the totalising and pessimistic politics of intersectionality, anti-natalism can appear a moral obligation, the next step on from veganism. Because, why indulge yourself with bringing life into the world, when you have a duty to wage war on oppression? From this perspective, childlessness looks like a noble sacrifice, to nurture a brood looks decadent.

We can add to the mix student loans, a poor job market and expensive housing, as well as the loud message from schools and the media that success is to be measured by career progression and outward image. Babies generally don’t help you climb the ladder and are not always an attractive accessory. Truth be told, procreation has been dropping for a while. The birth rate in the UK is now the lowest it’s been since records began in 1938, with numbers for those born outside of the UK, which had been increasing, now becoming static. This pattern is more extreme in other European countries and across the rest of the world population growth is slowing. The UN has published some predictions that this will diminish to a point where it plateaus, or even shrinks, in a number of decades. Some governments are worried: a declining birth rate makes elderly people a problem and children the chosen, pampered (largely male) few.

Blogger and author, Kevin de Young, got into trouble on Twitter last month for suggesting that because of this declining birth rate Christians should get on with multiplying. Of course, his critics were right to say that some battle with infertility and others are in financial straits; childlessness or very small families are most often not a choice. Nevertheless, he has a point. Christians should be pro-life; that means not only opposing abortion, euthanasia and slavery (which we must do, urgently and compassionately) but also optimistically welcoming life.

Get on with multiplying

This is not naïve or sentimental, as David Benatar, anti-natalist author, would argue. Rather, it rests on a profound theology of hope. If we believe that to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, to ‘fill the earth and subdue it’, is part of being in the image of God, then we are called to generous abundance following His own pattern. We are to extend our natural families by adoption, fostering, showing hospitality to the stranger and, yes, birth, and we are to extend our church families in the same way, all through Jesus’ grace and the Spirit’s power.

Many of the arguments against bringing children into the world rest on claims that it is selfish. People have children for what they get out of them; to reproduce is to use up more resources selfishly, to bring them into a world of pain is unfair. But this is counter to what the Bible says about children and growth and suffering. Children are arrows, sent out into the world; they are vines producing fruit. If we believe this, we must bring up our children as creators, not consumers; we must teach them the gospel principle that we grow as we give away. Most of all, we need to lead them to the cross which tells us that pain can bring forth beauty and life.