Episode 13 reading list

What happens to the world without children?

The episode in which we discuss this text is now available!

On being for our children

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Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made:  Thou art God from everlasting, and world without end. Thou turnest man to destruction: again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.
—Anglican burial service, Psalm 90

What if human fertility disappeared — not in a slow downward trend, and not the tanking of industrialized countries only  — but globally, over the course of one single year? What would a world without any children be like, decade after decade? What would be the character of the youngest generation — the last to be born? How would our desires, our morals, our sex lives, and our societies change, if childbearing was a distant memory? What would death mean to us without new life coming on its heels?

These are the questions that acclaimed mystery author P.D. James explores in her novel The Children of Men (written in 1992, set in 2021). James said in an interview,

When I began The Children of Men, I didn’t set out to write a Christian book. I set out to deal with the idea I had. What would happen to society with the end of the human race? At the end of it, I realized I had written a Christian fable. It was quite a traumatic book to write.

The Children of Men is a dystopian story, one that hits close to home. James imagines a world where men’s sperm counts drop to zero seemingly overnight. According to scientist Shanna Swan in her book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, unregulated endocrine disrupting chemicals and microplastics saturate our environment and enter our bodies, interfering with normal sexual development, reproductive health, and fertility. This has made sperm counts plummet to half what they were in the 1970s, and the rate of decline is worsening.

And as we’ve discussed many times before on ReadFems, it’s not only environmental factors that are destroying the birth rate, but also cultural and economic factors. For understandable reasons, many women delay marriage past prime fertility years, and it’s increasingly hard for men and women to find suitable partners and form long-term bonds that lead to marriage and family formation. Even the lucky ones who wed and have kids find it hard to afford more than two (you can’t fit three car seats in the back of a sedan). We are being hit on many fronts — physical, psychological, social, economic. 

P.D. James’s book was traumatic for her to write; hopefully it won’t be traumatic for you to read. The fact that she ended up writing a Christian parable without intending to should tell us something: when groping our way forward towards a future that looks dark and unfixable and hopeless, there are certain old stories that keep the porch light on for us. 

If you’re more of a listener than a reader, you’re in luck: there’s a high-quality, free audio version of The Children of Men on YouTube. There’s also the movie version from 2006 starring Clive Owen, which is excellent in its own right, but no substitute. It takes her premise and creates a starkly different story, painting a less psychologically fascinating (but more violent) picture of the world than the novel does. Do yourself a favor and buy a copy you can scribble in.

This was my second time reading it; I doubt it will be my last.