The age of the anti-natalists

As of 2023, the novel for which I may still be best known will have been out for 20 years. We Need to Talk About Kevin clearly reached the bestseller list because it hit a zeitgeisty nerve. The story of a high-school mass murder (after Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Uvalde, the one aspect of the book that has dated is Kevin’s pitiful body-count of nine) is told from the perspective of the killer’s mother, who’s anguished about whether her dislike of her own son from day one made the atrocity her fault. Proliferating the now commonplace expression ‘maternal ambivalence’, Kevin kicked off a larger discussion about the downsides of parenthood and the merits of giving children a miss. Interviews with me were subsequently anthologised in the likes of Childfree and Loving It! I was uneasy with my role as the anti-kid at the time, and now that uneasiness has given way to full-blown queasiness.

For two decades later, we’ve no need for an anti-kid. Western fertility has remained depressed. The age at which women bear their first child, if they ever bear even one, has steadily risen. Anecdotally, I meet far more British and American young women who have forsworn motherhood than who hope to raise a family. Shriver’s schtick is not only old hat; mea culpa, it’s malign.

Besides, my mild parenthood-ain’t-always-a-bowl-of-cherries line has been superseded by a multiplicity of positions on the culturally omnipotent left that, taken as a whole, embody not simply a neutral, elective relationship to childbearing, but an active hostility towards it.

When the first deluge of documentaries about transgenderism hit our televisions starting in about 2012, one of the concerns conspicuously unaddressed was fertility. The parents on these shows who were eager to encourage their children to embrace whatever he/she/it felt they were never raised the issue of whether pumping their progeny full of hormones might just possibly impede the kids’ capacity to reproduce.