The political flurry in the US over the virtues of parenthood and a high birth rate is part of a much larger cultural moment in which the debate on the significance of falling global fertility is pitting two increasingly militant and unyielding sides against each other. We have trade wars, culture wars, even actual wars; we can now add fertility wars to the list. When Elon Musk, a US entrepreneur and businessman, calls Ms. Harris an “extinctionist”, because she has linked the reluctance of young people to have children to “climate anxiety”, he means it, just as he means it when he concludes that “the natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!”
How to get handle on this? With difficulty, but in the end, hopefully with precision and clarity. First, I will briefly show that the fertility wars have been fought for a long time. I will then draw the contours of three separate positions in the fertility wars today—on the Conservative right, on the left, and a feminist perspective—before offering a suggestion on where this discourse goes next, and where it ultimately ends up, if we are sufficiently unlucky or un-attentive.
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