I cannot count the number of times I have been out in public with my children and a fellow American comments, “Wow, you have your hands full.” I receive this comment even when out with less than half of my brood of nine. I have various replies in reserve, depending on my mood. When I’m feeling chipper and saucy, which is most of the time, I reply, “Just doing my part to save Western civilization.”
Yet, anecdotally, I have noticed something of a shift in the consumer commentariat. To give just one example, I went to Sherwin-Williams to pick up some paint with a couple kids recently, and the young clerk commented kindly about how I must be a busy man. When I replied, “Yep, nine kids will do that,” he was astonished. “Nine!? Wow, that is awesome!” A couple weeks later, I returned for more paint and the same clerk recognized me: “You’re that guy with all the kids!” He continued to comment on how people need to have more babies for civilization to continue. Now I was astonished. My saving-the-West quip had been preempted?
Whereas the “hands full” comments come off as patronizing, the latter comments betrayed a genuine curiosity and positive attitude toward pronatalism. It is perhaps indicative of a larger cultural shift.
The pronatalist “movement,” such as it is, has rocketed in the public square, fueled by what we might call the Technonatal Right. The most prominent representative of this group, Elon Musk, has pointed out correctly for years that overpopulation is a myth and that civilization needs babies. Only recently after a lover’s spat went public was it revealed that Musk—reportedly the father of fourteen children by four women—has been seeking to spread his seed via IVF to surrogates to reach “legion-level” to ward off an impending apocalypse. Musk’s vision embraces positive eugenics. He “really wants smart people to have kids”—so much so that, reportedly, a certain high-profile Japanese woman requested a sperm donation from him, and he obliged.
Musk is only the most prominent of the pronatalist, eugenicist Technonatal Right. The pronatalist subculture has spread beyond Silicon Valley and is normalizing eugenics. This is evident in a recent profile in the UK Telegraph of a prominent power couple of the Technonatal Right, Malcolm and Simone Collins. The Collinses advocate for eugenics in embryo selection. They selected their daughter when other embryos they conceived tested higher for “estimated risks of traits such as obesity, migraines and anxiety.”
While the Antinatal Left and Technonatal Right would both forswear belief in eugenics, they actually both affirm the same underlying philosophical anthropology that leads to it.
Members of the Technonatal Right see themselves as reacting against the Antinatal Left. The thought of the Antinatal Left is largely the legacy of second-wave feminism’s call for sexual liberation, women’s bodily “autonomy” (and therefore abortion on demand), as well as the neo-Malthusian musings of Paul Ehrlich, the false prophet of overpopulation. Even though the Technonatal Right is having a moment, it would be a mistake to assume the Antinatal Left is in decline. The cultural and political power of the Antinatal Left was on display in one of Joe Biden’s last actions as president: awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the poster child of the Antinatal Left and longtime former president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards. Planned Parenthood has long sought to peddle and export contraception and abortion as conducive to individual freedom and happiness, as well as a form of population control. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood advocates for IVF as an aspect of “reproductive freedom,” framing children as a positive entitlement, if the autonomous self so desires.
On the surface, the Technonatal Right and the Antinatal Left seem at loggerheads. But in reality, they both share a fundamental philosophical assumption associated with modernity: the primacy of the human will over nature and the human body.
Modernity grew in part out of the scientific revolution’s desire for man to master nature. Francis Bacon compared the scientific process to “torture”—an exertion of will to force nature to reveal its secrets and to facilitate “the relief of man’s estate.” The Technonatal Right and the Antinatal Left share the basic Baconian conception of technological mastery over nature combined with a form of body-self dualism—an idea with philosophical roots in the thought of René Descartes—in which the body is seen as a vehicle that the self/will occupies, rather than as an intrinsic aspect of a human person. The body on the dualist view becomes an intrinsically meaningless stuff that is rightly subject to the will’s manipulations for its own ends. This peculiar bend of Baconian and Cartesian philosophy underlies the practice of IVF and the eugenicism that saturates the industry.
In the early twentieth century, eugenics was a fashionable and widespread belief among the American cultural, scientific, and political elites that included some of the most prominent figures in American society. One elite exponent of eugenics was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in an 8–1 Supreme Court decision in 1927 upheld a Virginia law forcing sterilization of the “feebleminded” Carrie Buck: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Holmes famously wrote. The Court’s decision was cheered on by a scion of the Antinatal Left and founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, a leading eugenicist who advocated birth control as a method of negative eugenics to cull from the body politic the “feebleminded” and people thought to have heritable traits disposing them to pauperism and criminality.
The negative eugenics upheld in Buck v. Bell, the reduction of the population of “undesirables” through methods like forced sterilization, is sometimes contrasted with positive eugenics: selective breeding for desirable traits. Yet, while forcibly sterilizing citizens has certainly fallen out of fashion, it simply isn’t true that negative eugenics is dead. The IVF industry’s profitability is predicated on the creation of more embryos than can be implanted and brought to term in any one pregnancy. Typically, up to twenty eggs are harvested in the process of hyperstimulation of ovulation (which itself can be seriously dangerous for women, as vividly documented in the film Eggsploitation) and five to ten embryos are created in a round of IVF treatment. And, while IVF patients usually choose to store their “leftover” embryos in a kind of frozen limbo—it is estimated that as many as ten million embryos are currently in storage—studies have shown that most people ultimately choose to “discard” their unborn children.
So, while the Antinatal Left and Technonatal Right would both forswear belief in eugenics, they actually both affirm the same underlying philosophical anthropology that leads to it. They both affirm the autonomy of the will to sever procreation from the marital union and to “rationalize” child production into a scientific process overseen by lab coats to identify children with desired traits and eliminate those without. Even if a form of positive eugenics in a broad sense can be morally neutral—e.g., marrying a man with red hair because you find red hair beautiful and want your kids to be gingers, say—clearly IVF does not fall into this category.
Hence, the Catholic must reject both of these factions and their false philosophy. Why? The reason is rooted in the immemorial teachings of the faith, the goodness of which is knowable and known even by unaided reason: “Two shall become one flesh.”
This coming together, marriage, was instituted by God for many reasons. It was instituted in part for the children who are its natural product, because they have a right to be lovingly raised by their biological mother and father. This right resists the technification of procreation and commodification of embryonic children, which supposes that the natural linkage between biological parents and biological children is an arbitrary imposition of nature that can be conquered and safely discarded. Contrary to the stance of the Antinatal Left, a child can never be an “entitlement” to a would-be parent because, from the moment of conception, the child is a person possessed of immeasurable dignity and worth, not property. This also means that, contrary to the Technonatal Right, neither can the child be a social “entitlement” of the species, as if he were an instrumental cog in an interplanetary legion to save humanity from the apocalypse.
On the one hand, infertility is a terrible cross to bear—and the emotional desire for children is deeply human and understandable. Marriage is supposed to be a bond that can itself help bear the pain of infertility. And an infertile marriage can be and is an instrument of grace when, in a broken and sinful world, it takes in a child who cannot be raised by his biological parents and needs to be fostered or adopted. On the other hand, the societal effects of population decline—fewer young workers with more elderly to support, shrinking tax bases and insolvent social safety net programs, less innovation and vivacity, and increased narcissistic individualism are just some—are devastating. But the solution to population decline is not eugenics and mass seeding of surrogates for the same reason IVF is not the proper solution for the infertile. A desire for something, even a good thing, does not entitle one to that thing by any means necessary.
One could object that the traditional Catholic understanding of sexual morality does not poll well. Granted. But would the American people not begin to be persuaded that the old moral rules restricting the means by which we pursue the good of children had a bit of wisdom, if they were told the truth that jettisoning these rules has resulted in the legalized enslavement of millions of people in a frozen prison and the callous killing of countless more? And, if indeed the ethics of sexual liberation is to be our guide, then on what basis could any of the Elon-haters on the Antinatal Left gainsay his consensual but obviously disordered Technonatal harem?
If we want to forestall and lessen the suffering of infertility and population decline, let us return to the old tried and true ways and foster a pro-marriage culture as the infrastructure in which pronatalism naturally flourishes: Get married, stay married, be open to life and the children that God may bless you with, including his children in need of foster care and adoption.