When I became a pediatrician, I envisioned helping parents take care of sick children. I never figured I’d be spending so much time teaching adults how a diaper works. Yet as fewer and fewer of us have children, sometimes the first baby a 30-something encounters up close is her own.
What used to be fodder for ’80s comedies about clueless single men or frigid career women is now the lived experience of the few children who escape the infertility-spreading medical establishment. These kids face an uphill battle: life with fewer friends, fewer siblings, and fewer child-friendly spaces. And that’s just the half of it: If current birth rate trends hold up, they might be facing the end of civilization as we know it.
Last week Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and award-winning novelist, penned the first in a promised series about dropping birth rates around the world — because, as he puts it, “nothing less than the future of humanity is at stake.” In response to an email I sent, Berenson said the worrisome effects of the Covid mRNA vaccine on fertility piqued his interest in the matter. Yet he said the matter speaks to something globally far more pressing than polarizing immigration or vaccine debates: “Humanity’s faith in itself is at stake.”
Demographers and pundits have been blaring alarm bells about this for decades, and that future is finally here. Mark Steyn had a birthrate bestseller nearly 20 years ago with America Alone. When Christopher
