“Where are all the children?” asks a recent lengthy Globe and Mail exposition into low fertility. Hardly a day goes by where there isn’t an article attempting to explain the Western world’s low and getting lower fertility rates. The Globe, “the paper of record” (if there is any longer such a thing) asks this important question, crescendos to beautifully connecting some dots, and then falls flat by politicising the problem and entirely missing the mark for any possible solutions. 

The piece is a case study of San Francisco, the city with the smallest child population in the United States. We begin reading about an empty park on a weekend and the accompanying “eery silence.” There are “no strollers left by doorways,” and “no shushing or crying or cooing.” 

Then there are cafes filled with the laptop class working endlessly, sans interruptions of the kind children reliably bring. To round out the picture of what is happening, Canadian professor of gender studies Andrea O’Reilly is quoted comparing childless lives with living in theme park that is actually “a sci fi horror show.” 

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“It’s a loss of our humanness to live in a world just with adults,” she tells us.  

Indeed. The effects of this are to promote something of a ruthless efficiency. 

“Everywhere you look is a billboard for AI,” we are told, “the low whirring sound of a self-driving taxi gliding by like a UFO. It’s a city run by techbros in Teslas, and a culture consumed by technology and competition.” 

So far so good. But political prejudice plagues the author and the article. We come crashing down into some really off base observations. 

The first is simple: You can say this is a description of San Francisco, but the reality hits a bit closer to home. I’m reminded of a journalist friend in Toronto whose (female) boss told her not to get a dog as it would detract from her ability to work uninterrupted. 

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Living and working in downtown Toronto early in my career, I once came out of the office elevator to encounter a parent with a child. There may as well have been a small space alien standing there for my surprise. 

The other problem is that the Globe simply cannot resist blaming Donald Trump. Apparently, we are told, this question of low fertility is being used by “conservative politicians including U.S. President Donald Trump” to “assert control over women’s health and bodies—a justification for a return to ‘traditional values.’” 

What those traditional values would be is left undefined, but it’s safe to say there’s a very sizable portion of traditional people who do not view Donald Trump as wearing that mantle. 

A professor of sociology, Amy Blackstone, then opines that women are being treated as if we are not human, “that we are part of the machine” with 13 states that have banned abortion, of which California is certainly not one. And who is treating whom as being part of the machine? Could it not be the very ones putting their eggs on ice, working 24 hours a day for “techbros”? I also can’t help but note all the woman cited who are opting out of parenthood are in their 30s. The women expressing regret over the childlessness of their San Francisco neighbourhood are 56 and 73. 

The Globe’s concern is that the progressive bona fides of the city are gone: “The city’s reputation was once as a haven for liberals and progressives.” 

But statistics also show these are the very people not having children; so-called red states have higher fertility rates. A gay woman is cited in the article as putting her eggs on ice at age 33 as she and her partner discuss the question of whether to have kids. And just as most cities are approaching San Francisco’s child-free status, aren’t we all like that gay woman now? 

We make sex infertile, choosing to take a small pill or embed a contraceptive coil to deny what women’s bodies might otherwise do while we discuss whether we can or cannot have children. These are the individual choices we make that accumulate in a celebration of the “child-free life.” These decisions don’t always have little to do with affordability, child care access, or capitalism. 

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Yes, it’s sad to live in a world without children. Yes, we needed, starting decades ago, to consider what to do when people stop having kids. Better late than never but always remember: Consideration of these questions needs to remain in the realm of what it means to be human, without reflexively turning to create a bogeyman of those who wish to protect life at all ages, even in the womb. 

Andrea Mrozek is Senior Fellow at Cardus.ca