The "fertility crisis" is inevitable and men need to accept this

How much would you require in payment to go through what women do to have a baby?

Men want kids more than women because they don’t have to have them.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the “fertility crisis” lately. Almost entirely by men. 

Now, whether or not this is actually a “crisis” versus an overblown panic versus a blessing, is a separate question, which I’m not looking at here.

I’d like to focus on why it is overwhelmingly men who are pushing this fertility crisis view. And why young women are now far less likely to want kids than men (only 45% of young women want kids compared to 57% of men: Men more likely than women to want to be parents someday

Now, it’s true that there are a few women here on Substack who seem concerned about this, or at least curious about the cause. Like Tove K:

Make children part of the competition of life

and Ruxandra Teslo:

Culture over Policy: The birth rate decline

But these are ultra-cerebral data nerds (said with all admiration), and outliers among women.

In normie land, it is almost entirely men who are worrying and writing about this issue. And trying to scheme up ways to convince women to have more kids. And of course, they’re mostly right-leaning men. If one were to draw up a list of what constitutes a right-leaning ideology (since it takes so many forms, cross culturally), desiring a higher birth rate is a crucial and universal factor.

But even among regular people, take a look at the comment section next time you see one of these articles, and you will find that women virtually NEVER say that other women should be encouraged to have more babies. It’s always men going on about how fatherhood is the greatest most wonderful thing ever and life would be meaningless without having kids, etc. The women commenters tend to say they understand the tradeoffs, and that even if they love being a mom, they would never want anyone to have kids if they don’t fully want to. They're also much more likely to say they would have been just as happy if they hadn't had kids.

Now, I’m an OG at being intentionally childless, as I knew I never wanted kids as soon as I learned how they were born. And throughout my life, I have had DOZENS of men argue with me, tell me I’ll change my mind, criticize me, try to persuade me (sometimes feeling the need to send me long missives via email trying to change my mind). And I’m not just talking about boyfriends or relatives who had a reason to care – I mean coworkers and random friends. And I can’t recall a single time a woman tried to convince me otherwise or tell me I was wrong (other than my own mother dismissing my declarations of never having kids when I was a teenager, though even she gave up by the time I was in my late 20s and clearly settled in my decision).

But I’ve had SO many men tell me I’m “exactly the type of person who should” have kids (read: not poor, not ugly, not dumb, I think?), or that I was committing a wrong upon the world by not endowing it with my genetics, or how very sad it made them on my behalf, or how I’d end up miserable and alone and full of regrets (though I’m now mid-40s and none of those things). And I assume this is now happening en masse to younger women.

It’s biological and it’s inevitable.

So why is this? The obvious reason is that all it takes for a man to make a baby is an orgasm. While it costs the woman two years of her physical health, energy, looks, risk of actual death, and she probably didn’t even get the lousy orgasm.

Another way of saying this is that sperm is about the most over-supplied commodity in the world, which far outstrips demand, and there’s an extreme imbalance in the supply/demand curve.

In nature, other than the egg-laying species, it is always the males who spend basically their entire lives fighting each other for access to females in heat, and chasing/wearing down/trying to impress/bullying females to get them to mate with them. And even in some egg-laying species this is the case, if the male doesn’t share egg-warming and hatchling-rearing duties. It’s a well-known story: eggs are scarce and expensive, sperm are cheap and plentiful, you know the drill.

Watch any nature documentary involving mammals, and you will come away feeling very sorry for the mothers of the animal kingdom, spending their lives sacrificing tooth and nail to keep their pups alive while the males basically come around once in a while to threaten them all, maybe try to kill the pups, and then try to bang mom and knock her up again. The few mammalian species where males contribute anything to raising the young…or even just aren't an active threat to them…are few and far between, and rare enough that they stand out as outliers (wolves, marmets). Less than 5% of mammal species involve fathers who contribute anything whatsoever to caring for offspring, even in an indirect manner like letting them eat the scraps of his food.

So why can’t people accept that the rule applicable to all other animals is also applicable to us? Sure, we are one of the 5% where fathers have any involvement at all (well, most of them, not all). But still, it is perfectly NORMAL and to be expected that males are 1. more interested in creating babies, since physically, it is cost-less to them, and 2.  desirous of trying to convince, cajole, or coerce women into bearing them, since they incur 100% of the physical costs. If there has ever been a time when it was NOT the case that men wanted more pregnancies and women wanted less, we should all wonder why, as it violates every biological and evolutionary principle.

And the reason this may have been the case in the past (though I’m doubtful it was ever the case) is simple: women did not have the information and/or power to do anything about it. Now they do, so that’s that. We don't go into heat like most mammals where we have no control over our impulse to bang, we can conceptualize the future and make plans for it, and it just very simply and obviously is a significantly worse deal for women than men. That's hardwired in, and other than a few outlier ultra broody and maternal women, you're not going to convince them otherwise because you'd be arguing against obvious reality.

So right-leaning men should stop being in denial about this fact, and more specifically, about the source of their feelings. Please, just try to sit with it. I KNOW your brain is shouting rationales at you regarding civilization or God or economics or some other abstract principle for why your deeply felt conviction that young women should be having more babies is objectively and concretely true.

But just consider for a moment…WHAT IF it was truly just your testicles whispering to your reptile brain that they’ve done a bunch of work manufacturing those billions of sperm, and surely it must be an eternal truth that they should all get used? Do you really think that your biological wiring, which every sperm-carrying organism has, to put that sperm to use is entirely unrelated to your being upset about women not being knocked up enough? Is it truly impossible that you are just overlaying post-facto rationalizations onto inchoate emotions that are neither pure nor objective? Could you perhaps admit that you are not at all capable of viewing this topic rationally, when your body is wired to reproduce as its foremost mission, at a cost that is about 1 to 1,000 as far as the sexed allocation of the burden? And that it doesn’t really make sense for you to place so much supposed concern on the solvency of our social security system 40 years in the future, or whatever your given rationale is? Could you maybe just admit that deep down, you just have a strong urging that young women should be pregnant, damn it!?

Sometimes it’s liberating to face our impulses and motivations, and accept what we see. I encourage you to do so.

And I’m not saying that if you’re a man who wants birth rates to increase, that you’re bad for feeling this way. I’m just saying you’re operating on an pre-rational, animalistic impulse, no different than every elk bull in rut, and then dressing it up after the fact with words and economic theories that aren't convincing and barely abide by ordinary logic. And I’m also saying that women simply don’t share your intuitions and never will. Because we don’t produce billions of sperm, and we don't get to have a baby just from an orgasm.

So can you please at least take this into account when you write about this issue??? I would just like to see it recognized. What you do with that information is another question, but please at least admit that is is a biologically wired-in divergence, and not something that's strange or confusing or a symptom of cultural malaise. It's merely exactly what we should expect to see, even if one was an alien who knew nothing whatsoever about humans other than how their reproduction works.

There’s no mystery here. Birthrates are declining because women bear MONUMENTAL risks and costs, compared to men, in having kids, which cannot and will not be overcome unless we get to artificial wombs (which is a separate topic where opinions are wildly all over the map).

But given the baked-in extreme divergence in biological costs, as soon as women have any true, free choice, they’re going to want less kids than men, or no kids at all. It may not have seemed like it in prior times, when women had limited choice or control over their options, but that’s the way it is now, and it’s not going to change, absent some type of take-us-back-to-the-stone-ages civilizational catastrophe.

This will happen in every culture and community where women have access to facts, and enough options and agency to make decisions about their own lives. All over the world. Yes, even the mormons. So stop trying to find a magical cultural or memetic solution. There isn’t one.

What the lasses are thinking

If you’re still doubtful, just go to one of the many, many internet forums where women congregate and discuss such things. There are extremely popular groups on Facebook and Reddit etc., with hundreds of thousands of members from all over the world, who are mostly women. They’re out there posting memes and discussing with each other, free for anyone to see.

I posted one popular meme at the top. It’s pretty representative. What else do they post and talk about?

Well, they complain about men giving them shit:

And they talk A LOT about how much they love animals and their pets.

(Hint for men: telling women they’re going to end up a cat lady is not scary to women, it’s threatening them with a good time. It would be like women trying to scare men by telling them “one day you’ll regret not settling down, when you’re surrounded by a gorgeous harem of beautiful women.” That’s how ludicrous it sounds to a woman’s ears.)

Women really, really like animals and nature and gardening.

Sure, men like those things too, but women love them much more. This is obvious if you look at charitable contributions to animal charities or really any measure. “Climate change” is not actually a very commonly cited reason women give for wanting one or none, but wanting both earth and their own home to be a nice place for animals IS a big reason. So if you’re hoping to convince women, you’re going to have to stop using pets as something you threaten them with or try to use to insult them. Because this kind of meme gets millions of likes:  

Or this:

Or this:

The thing is, puppies and kittens and baby bears are simply much cuter than human babies, and most women have a very strong hardwired emotional and physical impulse to love on baby animals. One that’s just as strong as the male impulse to stare when a gorgeous 19 year old goes jogging down the street in a sports bra. So try all you want to shame them out of it, but it won't work.

The other things they talk about a lot are money, freedom, lack of worry and stress, sleep, and desire to avoid chaos, mess, and screaming. Sleep is a big one. They also talk a lot about how generally awful parents’ lives seem. Lots of this kind of thing:

The Physical Costs

But there’s one huge reason women who don’t want kids (or don't want ANOTHER kid) cite, which I want to focus on, because it’s weirdly not talked about often. Whenever I see surveys asking people why they don't want kids, it’s usually never even included among the possible responses.

That big issue is: not wanting to be pregnant or give birth.

This is a MAJOR reason women provide when they’re talking in friendly forums, both for not wanting kids at all, and for not wanting more. But there’s still a weird taboo around this, I suppose because parents are just supposed to gracefully sacrifice everything without complaint, even their own physical health. And women are just supposed to accept the physical horrors as part of their destiny, or something. Even though the entire history of humanity is us learning to exercise more and more dominion over nature, in a way that lets us avoid everything painful or uncomfortable or inconvenient.

So if you want to raise birth rates voluntarily, this can't be ignored.

Because like all other taboos, once exposed to the internet, it was bound to be eroded. And having lurked on these forums, fear and avoidance of pregnancy and birth is very, very, very commonly cited as a reason, and is often THE top reason, among several.

What’s odd is that even a lot of women seem uncomfortable fully admitting the tremendous and unilateral toll of pregnancy/birth, other than making a few jokes about it. They often laugh it off, or try to promote it as “natural” and “beautiful.” I’m sorry, but cancer and death are natural, and very little about reproduction is beautiful. Praying mantis eat their mate’s head off their body when they’re through, octopus babies eat their mother’s dying corpse, and childbirth routinely killed women before modern medicine — it’s not beautiful, it’s cruel and callous nature not giving AF how mothers suffer, so long as the babies get made. I know there a few women who seem to actually enjoy pregnancy and have an easy time of it, but they're a small minority.

Weirdly, I’ve found that men actually seem to understand and potentially even sympathize with the horrors of childbearing, moreso than women, many of whom seem to have developed psychological defense mechanisms to help them deal with what is an unavoidable horror, if one wants children.

But the problem is, even when men seem to comprehend the physical toll logically, there’s still a disconnect with them being able to translate that into an understanding that women may reasonably prefer to avoid the whole thing altogether, or limit it as much as possible.

I don’t know why that is, and perhaps it just hasn’t quite sunk in yet that women are serious with the whole ‘we don’t want more babies’ thing. More likely, it’s that men can’t truly put themselves in the shoes of a woman facing this decision. It’s too impossible for them to ever have to consider actually being in that position themselves. It's the single thing men can never do and never have to worry about.

But sometimes, dollar signs help quantify things.

So here’s what I’d like: for men to calculate and tell me exactly how much they would have to be paid to go through – or at least accept the risk of going through – all the things that women do, to have a biological child.

I am NOT considering sacrifices and risks that equally impact both parents (at least theoretically) and have no underlying biological basis (things like financial strain or lack of sleep or changing diapers). I purely want to consider the risks and consequences that are unavoidably divided by sex.

So for this exercise, I do NOT want you to imagine you’re a woman. I want you to think about yourself, as a man, in your actual body, in your actual life, with your actual job, and your actual spouse or reasonably expected partner if you don’t have one yet, and with the actual options available to you in life, and how going through these things would impact your decisions. And I want you to really consider what it would be like to be HAVE to experience these things in order to have a child, with no other option but adoption, while the mother did not have to go through any of them. That’s an important part to remember. In this exercise, you and the mother are not suffering together. She’s fine and feeling good and unphased. It will only be you going through these things, and she will only remotely understand and (if you're lucky) empathize.

Note: yes, this is necessarily a hetero-sexual exercise, we’re talking about how babies get made, get over it.

I’ve set forth below the sex-based risks and costs that are fairly standard, and relative risk level. I haven’t included the rare, freakish things that happen to some women, nor all the risks. And some of them can apply 1:1 to men, like nausea and vomiting. But some cannot, so I’ve set forth what I believe is a reasonable analogue.

And then I’ve included what my GUESS would be regarding how much a man would need to be paid before he said “sign me up”. But these are just my guesses. Poor men would obviously take a lower dollar amount than rich men. And I’ve assumed that the reward of a baby offsets much of this and lowers the dollar value from the amount it would cost for just pointless suffering. Maybe you will find my estimates reasonable, maybe not. But how much would you need to be paid? Or would you not accept this under any circumstances? Or would you happily do it all for free, if it was the only way to have a biological child?

*Note: not that I expect anyone will actually read this piece, but when I originally drafted this up in a Word doc, I had links to all my figures/stats. Then I realized I can’t paste in a table on Substack. So I had to make images of my table, and the links became non-clickable so I deleted them. Since I’m not expecting (m)any to read this, I’m not bothering to add back all the links, so just google it or ask me.

I did not intentionally try to get this to come out at a million dollars. I was just putting in guesstimates about what I thought was a reasonable amount an average man would need to be paid to accept the risks, and only tallied it up after the fact.

So what’s your number?

Even if you think children are so wonderful and joyous that you would be happy to go through all this, surely you can see why the piddling pro-fertility incentives some governments are trying have not worked.

And I’m sure some people would object to my having valued things like having to be shorter or fatter as costing MORE than true health risks like abdominal surgery. But I’m just being realistic. If we judge by people’s behavior, that’s the kind of thing they care a lot about, and pay a lot to avoid. In fact, people voluntarily pay a lot of money to voluntarily undergo surgery to try to FIX those problems. So I think those were realistic assessments.

Another objection I can imagine is that women shouldn’t have to care about or worry about babies ruining their looks or their dating market value, if they’re married. Except that men make it so blatantly apparent, practically shouting it from the rooftops on a daily basis, that all they care about is a woman’s beauty and youth, so yes, they do need to care. Even a married mother has to constantly worry about KEEPING her spouse, and no one can control if they get left, man or woman. So I want men to put themselves in similar shoes to get the correct economic equivalent, in dollar terms.

Last, I want to be clear that this is not one of those dumb “calculate how much a wife would be worth if she was paid as a professional chauffeur/nanny/housekeeper/etc” type arguments. Those arguments are inane. Because no one gets paid to do things for themselves that are in their own interests, they only get paid to do those things for OTHER people.

And realistically, most men could pay a part-time nanny and housekeeper less than the cost of maintaining an upper-middle-class wife, so these arguments are nonsense. I always find it bizarre when women focus on the supposed unpaid economic value of their labor as a wife, when in reality it’s clearly not worth much to others. Cleaning and making sandwiches is unskilled labor that anyone can do, with plenty of low-paid competition.

So it's a strange thing to focus on when there's something that IS incredibly valuable and costly: carrying, birthing, and feeding a baby. That’s where the high value is, yet you rarely if ever see women arguing for compensation, or that they’re undervalued, for bearing children. Which is really weird. You can damn well bet men would demand compensation and expect accolades and honors.

I’m not telling you what to do about this, but at least acknowledge it.

My point here is NOT to suggest that we should be paying women a million dollars per baby. I’ll let someone else make that proposal.

I also don’t blame men for any of this — it’s not their doing. Mother nature dealt women this shit sandwich, not men.

And the shit hand dealt to women used to be well known, and people didn’t used to bother trying to hide nature’s cruelty to mothers, since they couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Childbirth, gangrene, the plague, death…all just facts of life, and nothing you could do anything about.

Though I do suspect that reticence about discussing this is precisely because of fears that women will have even less babies if they’re confronted with too much truth, or think about it too much.

And yeah, I know some women will give woo-woo type descriptions of the awesome power of natural childbirth and the sanctity of the maternal experience, or how the rewards far outweigh the sacrifice, or how easy THEIR pregnancy was for them. Great for you, sister, no one has to worry about you. But I can’t make that leap, it just looks like a shit sandwich to me. And life is too good to go eating shit sandwiches when one is not starving.

So what I’m aiming at here is simply to encourage more honest admissions of just how drastically different the physical costs are between the sexes, and why given those costs, NO ONE should expect women to be as enthusiastic about having kids as men are. It defies reason.

So if you don’t have the stomach for coercing women against their will (which many of you thankfully do not), then maybe start thinking a lot more creatively about this “problem”, if you insist on viewing it as such.

And also, be nice to your mom! And your wife if you have one! They really do deserve a medal of honor, and not just a crappy mother’s day card and $20 bouquet once a year. I don’t even care if she was a bad mother. If she was, it’s probably because she never wanted to be one in the first place, and regardless, she went through hell and ruined her body and probably her life to make you exist, you ingrate.

Last, I leave you with this with nugget. Fathers enjoy parenthood more than mothers, and experience increased well-being from being fathers. Separate from everything above, women who are mothers have LESS well-being, and are less happy, in general, than non-mothers. Here's the study: Mothers have lower enjoyment and wellbeing in parenthood, than fathers 

So that’s the dollop of dessert on the shit-sandwich served up to mothers. Nature wires mothers to experience more stress, anxiety, worry, and fear, while fathers are mostly unphased and enjoy it. Because that’s how we get babies that don’t die…by making sure their mothers are constantly stressed and vigilant. Their hormones and wiring make them unavoidably more anxious and stressed and concerned. Maybe I should’ve added this to my list above of sex-based physical costs to mothers…increased anxiety and unhappiness. And maybe I’m rethinking the part where I said mothers shouldn’t get paid a million dollars each.

Thanks for reading all this, if you somehow stumbled across this. And if you’re a man — or a woman who doesn’t want kids (or another kid) — let me know what your number would be.

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