Will Democratic success result in the extinction of our species?

How Republicans persuaded women to re-elect President Obama
For the activists of Emily’s List, working to improve women’s political representation, Republicans like Todd Akin were a gift
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/15/republicans-persuaded-women-reelect-obama

Yes of course my headline is a bit of hyperbole, but I really do have a point. As I was finishing up my previous post, mentioning the previous high birth rate, the idea that we are creating a society that will eventually stop breeding enough to continue made me think about birth control and the shifting of women’s child bearing patterns. The article above sort of crystallized the thought, so even though the article is at best tangentially related to my thesis I will be outlining below, I felt it was worth making the association.

It is rather well known that as a nation gets industrialized that its birth rate decreases. In fact, it tends to rapidly decrease to the point where the population growth actually turns negative (meaning that there are not enough children born to replace the old fogies as they die). France has got to the point they are actually paying women to bear children. The Japanese government wants to encourage immigration (I guess they know it is pointless to pay women to produce more children) but the native Japanese are extremely racist as a group and are strongly resisting the efforts (they are happy with short-term visitors, just not making them citizens). While the US has a net increase in population, ‘native’ members (i.e., second and subsequent generation immigrants) tend to birth at less than the rate needed to sustain a population (about 2.33 children per female). Something the rabidly anti-immigration Tea Party doesn’t realize is that without immigration there won’t be anyone to purchase their houses when they dodder off to a nursing home (staffed, of course, by immigrants on visitor visas because Americans don’t want to wipe each other’s butts), but hey, intelligence and forethought has never been an American strong point.

Anyway, my point is that the US already has a real problem with keeping its population stable (even if we open our arms to immigration, the fresh immigrants tend to drop right into our less than replacement birth rate in 1-2 generations) and this has been true with the GOP steadfastly doing everything in its power to marginalize women in an attempt to keep them barefoot and pregnant. Now, with the apparently clear repudiation of that effort (helped, of course, by the idiotic ‘coming out’ by the Todd Akins of the party) it seems highly likely that it will become even more difficult for America to maintain a positive birth rate. I can’t blame women for wanting control over their wombs (rather the opposite as regular reader(s) should no doubt know), but unless medical science figures a way to make child bearing easy, inexpensive and painless for 40 and 50 year olds, I see the success of this last election as likely putting the US on the fast track to extinction.

Of course, this somewhat changes if we manage to radically extend our (healthy) lifespan, something I also hold out strong hope for, but if women continue to reach the end of their child bearing ages at 40-50, then increasing lifespan doesn’t necessarily translate to satisfying the replacement rate. Each woman (on average) would have to choose to bear her 2.33 children before she reaches menopause, something already increasingly unlikely with our lifespan of ‘only’ 80 years. Doubling that life span doesn’t double the chance of children (unless menopause is also put off (and women still want to bear children when they are 80)), so as the third world gets industrialized (as it is quickly doing), I think that it is rather realistic to suppose that our species will go extinct with a whimper rather than a bang. Of course, those who breed the most will last the longest (as genetic strains are concerned), but while I am sure that some women will produce more children through the love of children or some personal obligation, I expect that most of her daughters won’t, unless, of course, they are part of some fundamentalist order where they are coerced into being barefoot and pregnant, but, my mind, that is taking huge steps backwards in civilization and not the direction I care to go.

Is there a solution? Should there be a solution? There are many realistic arguments to be made that the human population could use a large dose of population retrenchment, but reversing (or even stabilizing) that trend is the trick. Unless we go the opposite of China’s one child per couple restriction and create a 2.33 child per couple requirement (how the hell to enforce that!?), we would have to rely on much more passive, market driven processes. France’s idea of paying women to produce children is actually a fairly good one, it seems very plausible that many women put off child bearing because they want to have a stable home environment, if they could be compensated well enough that they could be confident that they could raise their children that, I am sure, would help a lot. Another thing, though, is the opportunity cost. Many women I know were/are quite intent on their careers and, absent a radical extension of human life span and coupled with the ever present ‘ageism’, is still likely to result in enough women putting off child bearing until it becomes very difficult to produce children. Something that _might_ work, but would require a rather radical redesign of our societal mores, is for some women being paid to be baby ‘factories’ and put their little dears up for adoption to the couples in their 40’s who have now managed to have their successful careers. Were this to become culturally acceptable (I see that as being a rather huge challenge to surmount) then that might go a long way toward stabilizing our population. Those women who really enjoy the child producing process (I am not talking about sex, you pervert!) could operate in a nice safe, financially secure environment and have their future looked after. They, of course, would have to produce well in excess of 2.33 children each, probably well over 10, possibly as many as 20 (it would all depend on what percentage of women born each generation were happy with a career of being ‘barefoot and pregnant’), so that, in and of itself, would be a massive challenge.

I expect, though, that either we will to extinct as a species (it might take a few thousand years, of course, but it would be very hard to reverse) or revert with a ‘bang’ to some sort of fundamentalism that traps women ‘barefoot and pregnant’ with no opportunity for anything else. Given my love of women who are _not_ barefoot and pregnant, I can’t support the fundamentalist direction. Additonally I see the culture change toward baby factories as unlikely, so I am someone convinced that we really will have an ‘apocalypse’ that we won’t recover from. Who knows, with longevity treatments we might all get to witness the end of our civilization.

Author: Tfoui

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