Are humans headed off a demographic cliff?

eminists are casting about to find reasons why feminism was not to blame for our low birth rates.

Countless other causes have been suggested, including obesity, heart disease, and more ‘idiosyncratic’ ideas including daylight savings time ^[1], racism,^[2] the phase of the Moon,^[3] pollution, and even global warming.^[4,5]

At least the lunar theory has a sort-of-basis in science. Indeed, the Moon is moving farther from the Earth by 3.8 centimeters each year, thereby weakening its gravitational effect by 0.000001977 percent in the past century alone.

While we may be able to put that one on the back burner for now, the question of cause vs effect can be asked of most of the other causes. Capitalist industrialization? Rise of the nuclear family? Decline of religion? Just because these factors correlate with a decrease in birth rates means very little.

A common belief is that industrial chemicals and pollution are to blame. Of course you can always find scientific articles that claim this. But correlation is not causation, and contrary to what people think, while pollution is increasing in some countries, our exposure in the West to toxic chemicals, especially air pollution and heavy metals, has greatly decreased in the past century.

Pollution is also blamed for the decrease in male sperm counts. But the body produces sperm at a relatively constant rate, so sperm counts are inversely related to abstinence time. So maybe one reason is that people aren't abstaining enough. Even here, there's doubt: shorter abstinence times might lead to lower DNA fragmentation and, perhaps, higher quality sperm.^[6]

Genetic programming

Fig. 1 Correlations between various measures of male-female inequality and fertility rate across 107 countries. Data source: Fertility rates data SIGI Index data

It would be shocking if something as important as fertility were not genetically programmed into our behavior. There's no doubt that human fertility is pro­gram­med to increase or decrease in response to changes in physical safety, food availability, anxiety, social stability, and war. Perhaps it even explains why Europeans threw open their borders to migrants, perhaps unconsciously trying to add new genes to their gene pool. Or it could explain why men and women are constantly testing each other without realizing they're doing it. It's virtually certain that much of our history was caused by ways our genes affect our psychology in ways not yet understood.

But the challenge is proving it. It's not enough to say that 'stress' or genetic programming does something. You have to prove it by finding the specific gene and showing how it works. Science is designed to reject speculation by insisting on a mechanism down to the molecular level. Without that, science would turn into a branch of politics.

Stress

People always think they're under more stress than ever before. But the stress we have now is nothing compared to what our ancestors dealt with. Even when you invoke cortisol and norepinephrine, stress is just a default explanation. Anyone who has ever gone to a doctor knows that ‘stress’ is just a way of saying ‘we don't know what's wrong, so it's just stress.’

Le Pill

For some reason, people avoid mentioning the elephant in the room: The Pill. Biologically it mimics pregnancy, so in addition to making fewer preggers we would expect it to have a profound effect on human social behavior. Messing with hormones always affects the brain in ways we're only beginning to understand.

Feminism

Feminism has largely self-destructed in recent years, but they're still out there, being quiet . . . too quiet. One says that because Spain and Italy, which are said to be less affected by feminist ideology, have lower birth rates than more northern countries, feminism is ruled out as a cause.

But if we look at a bigger sample, a different picture emerges (Fig. 1). There is a highly significant correlation between fertility rates and the sex inequality index. The highest correlation is with women's “restricted physical integrity,” which is a euphemism for social norms that impair ”reproductive autonomy,” i.e. abortion and birth control. Son bias, which is preference for a son over a daughter, did not correlate.

Whether feminism caused this or not, the conclusion is as inescapable as it is obvious: if you keep 'em pregnant you'll get a population increase. We can pretend that was caused by economic factors, but the real cause was the “patriarchy,” in which women were fully responsible for raising children. If you want to take credit for eliminating the “always pregnant” part you can't say you're not responsible for the “not pregnant often enough” part. A better approach is to admit the real problem and help search for a solution, preferably one that doesn't involve giving the baby to the government and demanding taxpayer-funded daycare.

That would be a dangerous increase in government power. It would be one more piece in place that could eventually give the government control over our entire life cycle from fertilization via IVF to death. It's a continuation of a long trend: make something so uneconomical the people stop doing it. Then government happily takes the responsibility, leaving the people more dependent and powerless than before.

Artificial wombs and sexbots

The question we ought to be asking is: if the humans are at the edge of a demographic cliff, what are they going to do about it? The answer is that they will invent sexbots and artificial wombs. Both elicit similar concerns: first, a species that uses technology for survival will risk becoming utterly dependent on the continued existence of a technologically sophis­ticat­ed infrastructure. And second, people deprived of maternal bonding could have impaired neuronal development ^[7] and will suffer from poor quality caregiving.

High-profile fiascos like Google's Gemini chatbot have dampened the earlier hysteria about AI and sexbots. There's only one scientific paper on the topic so far this year ^[8], which reported a survey about whether people thought it was wrong to sexually assault a robot, and hysteria about deepfakes seems to have taken its place. The idea of a robot saying “I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that” is now mostly a source of amusement.

But while researchers are keeping a low profile about artificial wombs, the technology is advancing. In addition to benefiting women who are unable to have children, in a worst-case scenario they could someday be mankind's only hope for survival.

Van Haren et al. give a much-needed depoliticized review ^[9] of the emerging artificial placenta and artificial womb technology (APAW, also called EXTEND for extrauterine environment for neonatal development therapy) and the challenges it faces, such as improving sterility and the need to prevent neonatal transition, which is when the fetus begins breathing air as a result of exposure to air during the procedure before its organs are sufficiently developed.

Infection during embryo transfer is still a problem, but the authors remind us that the uterus itself is not a sterile environment and chorioamnionitis is responsible for half of preterm births. Early onset sepsis from group B streptococcus is one of the primary causes of neonatal morbidity.^[10]

The risk of seeing everything in terms of rights instead of opportunities is that research on the basic phenomena that determine fertility must hide behind paywalls and obscure itself in inscrutable acronyms. Feminists could play a positive role by ending their claim that males have no right to participate in these discussions.

apr 15 2024, 7:52 am. updated apr 16 2024, 4:22 am