Nestorius (d. 451) was the great heresiarch of anti-natalism. The Empress Pulcheria, a virgin, had insisted that Mary had given birth to God. “I cannot call a baby of two or three months old my God,” Nestorius vehemently complained.
People are finally realizing that the media have been barking up the wrong tree. It is now apparent that while popular culture has long fixated on the total number of people in the world, the far more important number is the birthrate. It is the more important number because people die — something we as moderns work to forget. In the developed nations of the world, the birth rate has fallen well below replacement level (2.1 children per woman), and most of the world’s developing nations are embarking on a similar path.
The United Kingdom’s leading demographer, Paul Morland, points out in his new book, No One Left, that the women of every developed nation report that they have fewer children than they want. In the U.K. and the United States, the numbers amount to a deficit of three-quarters of a child per woman, and in Spain a full child (121). This may not seem like much to those unacquainted with demographics, but in a few generations it may be the difference between societal vitality and extinction.
There are all sorts of reasons why more and more young women are choosing to remain childless, and elected officials, civil servants, educators, and husbands would do well to listen carefully. One reason Morland considers is the fear of environmental collapse. One woman he interviewed confessed, “I wanted to have a child, but I was also looking at the planet and thinking: ‘Well, what kind of future will we have if there’s more of the same?’” Another proudly announced that she had decided not to have children because of the looming environmental apocalypse: “I wouldn’t want to subject my children to that,” she said. Morland points out that a comprehensive survey of people ages 16-25 in developed and developing countries found that 39 percent were hesitant to have children given the prospect of climate change (127).
Morland takes for granted the science of global warming. But he rightly points out that the effects of climate change are not well understood and that important advances have been made by the world’s leading economies. Even the United States, which falls behind other developed countries in many metrics, has managed to reduce emissions by a third in the past 20 years (136). Morland also tackles the myth of overpopulation head-on, pointing out that only 15 percent of the earth’s surface is inhabited, and that the same quantity of food that was produced in 1960 can be produced today on a mere 30 percent of the land, given great advances in crop yields (133).
Despite such hopeful numbers, many young people today conclude that humanity is in such bad shape that it probably isn’t worth trying to save it. Morland mentions the oddity that young people should feel this way given that the hardships we face seem to pale in comparison with the challenges faced by our parents and theirs. He walks the reader through a litany of demographic figures, including infant mortality, life expectancy, nourishment, and education, and concludes, “based on the current data, there has never been a better time to be born” (128). “It is a paradox,” Morland adds, that “precisely at the time when things have grown so much better, many people have come to perceive the world as so much worse” (132).
We can frame this paradox as a question: “Why have so many young adults lost hope?”
Christine Emba begins her article “The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids” (The Atlantic, Aug. 1) by stating the facts: while in 1960 American women had, on average, 3.6 children, in 2023 the total fertility rate was 1.62, the lowest on record. Emba then compares two books, What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, and Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk.
The contrast could hardly be starker. Berg and Wiseman describe the decision to have a child as “paralyzing” and “anxiety-provoking,” but such anxiety about reproduction is notably absent in Pakaluk’s narrated interviews. She quotes one mother of seven who confessed that she believed each new child “brings benefit to the family and to the world.” Emba remarks that to have this kind of confidence is to risk sounding “hopelessly naive.” But to speak of the hope that such women have is to say nothing of the hardships of motherhood they have all experienced. And in this it gives us a clue about what hope is.
Hope, in this case, is hope in the face of human frailty, suffering, and mortality. This kind of hope shines through in much premodern literature and art, and one does not need to look far to find it. I recently watched the 2012 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables with my family. The movie ends with Jean Valjean dying in the arms of his beloved adopted daughter, Cosette, with her lover Marius nuzzled close. To the contemporary viewer, Marius is an appendage of sorts, important because Cosette and her happiness require another man to journey with her once her father is gone. But for Hugo and his first readers, this young man is not, as he is for modern viewers, merely Cosette’s ticket to happiness. He is the door to her future just as she is for his, since their union holds within it the great hope that life, precarious though it is, will yet endure.
Hope is having something more than your immediate circumstances to base your valuation of your life upon. And in this case, it is easy to see why it is linked not just to religion but to childbirth. The woman who receives a new life in her arms can no longer think exclusively of her welfare. Whatever she may be feeling about herself and her worth is relativized by the more urgent matter of tending to a life that is utterly dependent upon her. As the child’s father is drawn into this movement, he too will gradually be drawn away from his concerns to the concerns of another. It should be noted that this is, according to the teachings of Jesus, a very Christian business.
But it would be wrong to reduce childbearing and child-rearing to what Protestants have long called “sanctification.” There is something more fundamental at work in the birth of a child, which we can identify if we consider the contraceptive neurosis surrounding the whole business of having to “decide.” I too succumbed to this fear even after four children: considering the possibility of another was like staring into a dark chasm, populated by things I could not see. I stepped back because I realized that I could not control what I could not see. St. Peter can be rightly chastised for taking his eyes off of our Lord and peering into the darkness (Mt 14:30). But I am not the one to chastise him as I view the spectacle from the security of the boat.
The relationship between high religiosity and high birth rates is uncontested in the literature, and we might point out, for instance, that secularists of the United States have almost a full child less per woman than the religious. The contribution of Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God is to demonstrate that the intimate relationship between religiosity and natality is such that it might be described as a two-way street. According to Eberstadt, the point is not just that a turn from religion to secularity tends to precipitate a turn from the family, but that a turn from the family tends to precipitate a turn from religion, as it is how religiosity is cultivated and maintained.
Could it be that the decision to have a child is a decision for religion? Perhaps. But that is in part because the decision of a young man and a young woman to come together in a state of nature is intrinsically destabilized by the possibility of childbirth. It opens into an unknown and unbridled future, which can in no way be managed and controlled.
To come together in this way is to jump into the terrifying experience of creaturely finitude in which natality is lodged; and that is the apportioned place of the human encounter with God. Here they are opened to their Lord. Scripture, after all, speaks not merely of God being born, but of his genealogy. He was born as a consequence of God’s decision to make Mary fruitful and to make many other ancestors fruitful, including Eve, whom he married to Adam. God gives his children the gift of children so he can give them himself.
If we dare to speak of hope, we must speak of the Incarnation. And we cannot speak about the Incarnation without speaking about childbirth. And we will speak about the Incarnation, furthermore, as the culmination of history and as God’s entry into it. We will speak of it as a single place where God gives himself to his people in and through their generational histories, and through which he makes these histories his own. We turn our backs on the place of primordial encounter with God when we turn our backs on its primordial grounds, childbirth.
Penitence is demanded of us, for we have stood with Nestorius for far too long. The hope we once had, as a church and as a culture, will be ours again only as we turn, with Pulcheria, to stand against him. The church that believes in Christ, making God known to us in his encounter with us in childbirth, will be pro-natal in two respects. It will celebrate childbirth, and it will overcome the divide between parents and non-parents by making the discipleship of its children a signal imperative for all. Hope, after all, is a child. It is the Child, and in and through him it is every child — in figure, yes, but also in fact.
The Rev. Dr. David Ney is a native of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, and a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. He currently serves as associate professor of Church history at Trinity School for Ministry, in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.