Aw, does Moloch have a hungry? Poor little false god!
This started out as a comment on a New York Times post: “Are Men the Overlooked Reason for the Fertility Decline?”. It’s not necessarily because of sperm counts. If there is in fact a fertility decline, I surely did my part, and I had my reasons.
I never wanted kids, but if my wife and I had some I would have done my best to raise them to be good (but not necessarily obedient) people. However, I’m glad that didn’t work out for us. The easiest way to break cycles of generational abuse or emotional neglect is to not have kids yourself.
My father knocked my mother up when he was 18. She was a few years his senior. Neither of them wanted to have kids. She was on the pill and he was wearing a condom, but nevertheless they got stuck with me.
My birth altered the trajectories of both their lives, and not necessarily for the better. My father dropped out of college and spent his life working menial jobs to support my mother, me, and eventually my brother. He didn’t even live long enough to retire.
All the while he told me to avoid repeating his mistakes. So I didn’t date in high school. I didn’t date in college, either. I avoided sex because between unplanned pregnancy or HIV I could be staring at a life sentence of parenthood or a death sentence from AIDS.
I did eventually marry, but I married a woman with PCOS. She was ambivalent about having children, and I never made any bones about not particularly wanting children myself – though I was willing to step up and do my best if we did have kids.
However, we haven’t, and we’re mostly OK with that for different reasons. For my part, I don’t feel obligated to bring innocent lives into this world and raise them to become wage slaves like my father and I were. If the world falls apart because of men like me, I’ll happily accept my share of the blame.
The destruction of a corrupt social order is a thankless job, but somebody’s got to do it. If all I had to do to do my part was keep it in my pants, then it’s the easiest job I’ve ever had.
Frankly, a lot of the performative concern over decreasing birth rates from the richest among us and their propagandists sounds like people complaining because they never expected the leopards to eat their faces. They created the conditions under which we must try to live, and dare to complain that we don’t exactly breed well in captivity?