Are We Allowed To Talk About The Baby Bust?

A Free Speech Warrior Joins the Subterranean Discussion

Please check out my latest at The Federalist this morning - and do share it, if you like it. Twitter/X link here, Facebook here - thank you!

How it begins:

“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.”

Please head on over to read the rest, then come back here for exclusive extra content only for subscribers, below. (Am I doing this whole used car salesman act well or what?)

I wanted to expand on a couple things that had to be cut for length. The first is that if you’re interested in children, their mental health, and crazy college campus gender ideology at all, please don’t miss this conversation I link to in the piece between Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia. The whole discussion is as interesting as you’d expect with those two, but please pay particular attention to the points they bring up starting at the 1 hour mark, pretty much through to the end, as they discuss family size. The professors address the profound psychological and developmental benefits to children – and to the parents themselves – of having young parents and many siblings (these latter are deemed by Peterson to be “primary socialization agents”). As I mention in the Federalist piece, Paglia lays the blame for the shrinking family on the chaos of the sexual revolution. It has become “heresy” for women to put children ahead of their career, she explains, as the feminist movement has enshrined abortion and denigrated motherhood. Thanks to feminism’s obsession with the professional woman, the lessons that mothers learn from their elders have been lost. Yes, that includes the intricacies of diapering, but goes much deeper: the tenderness, the forgiveness, the understanding, the grace between the sexes is lost as boys grow up without sisters and girls without brothers. As Paglia and Peterson agree, today’s college gender madness would be laughed off campus if more mothers were in the classroom. I would add that the mass drugging of American children for various mental illnesses would also cease if teachers and doctors had larger families and thus discovered what normal children are like (hint: they don’t all sit still) – not to mention that the children themselves would suffer far less mood-destroying loneliness (and far more opportunities for all important free play!). Yet, if Paglia and Peterson are right, these and other benefits of family growth remain forbidden topics as long as liberal feminists and their allies control our cultural conversation.

The reason I think it’s a big deal that Berenson is writing about this is that it shows in a way how powerful the anti-child narrative is - and how that power may finally be coming to an end. That Berenson now joins Steyn and Peterson in having the bravery to buck polite society and broach the birth rate is especially remarkable as all three men face lengthy legal battles over their right to think and speak freely. Steyn, who already defeated Canadian speech police tribunals, is now being targeted by the UK’s censorship apparatus over sharing official Covid vaccine statistics, at the same time he’s being sued in America for daring to mock highly mockable global warming science. Peterson famously fought Canadian speech codes years ago only to now find himself fighting for free speech again against a new batch of censorious Canadians. Berenson is also waging a lengthy, expensive legal battle as a David against the government Goliath intent on censoring his Covid views.

Does being censored by wannabe tyrants somehow make one particularly passionate about international birth rates? No – but it gives us a sense of how strong the prevailing narrative is that only a few pariahs from polite society, with a remarkable track record of being boldly unafraid to speak the truth when the world is pressuring them to peddle lies, are brave enough to speak out against it. We owe it to their courage to at the least keep the demographic discussion from being silenced.

If you’d like to support Steyn in his free speech battles, join the Steyn club (or order a special edition hockey stick or anything else from his store…). Similarly, you can support Berenson’s legal battle here.

Finally, as I conclude in the piece, I do disagree with Berenson - I do not think it is a case of humanity losing faith in itself, but of us having faith only in ourselves. Children are an heritage of the Lord; turn your back on Him, worship yourself and your fleeting pleasure instead, and your civilization will inherit only the wind. Someone who remembered that heritage was that most brilliant poet, Edmund Spenser. You have likely heard of The Faerie Queene (for parents of young children, this is a fantastic, beautiful kid’s book, one of our boys’ favs, it inspired their St. George and the Dragon costumes last night). Spenser also wrote an immortal ode to his bride, Epithalamion, which I quote briefly in the piece. I thought it would be fitting to end with a longer excerpt from the ending, as he prays that the heavens “chast wombe informe with timely seed,/That may our comfort breed”:

Poure out your blessing on us plentiously,

And happy influence upon us raine,

That we may raise a large posterity,

Which from the earth, which they may long possesse,

With lasting happinesse,

Up to your haughty pallaces may mount,

And for the guerdon of theyr glorious merit

May heavenly tabernacles there inherit,

Of blessed Saints for to increase the count.

So let us rest, sweet love, in hope of this,

And cease till then our tymely joyes to sing,

The woods no more us answer, nor our eccho ring.

Thank you for reading, I pray that if able you do get busy making and raising saints, and have a wonderful day!