When women are free to choose

It’s entirely possible that if women are free to avoid domesticity and limit their fecundity to below replacement level they will as a group decide to do just that.

Certainly they are doing it in modern Europe and North America, right now.

I don’t know very much about elsewhere.

It could be that societies in which all or most women are free in these respects will just shrink, perhaps even to a point at which there are too few people to support the diversity of knowledge and skills essential to modern civilization.

Race politics in America and pretend-race politics in Europe currently prevent the whites of Western Europe and America from facing this situation squarely and deciding what, if anything, they want to do about it.

What they are in fact doing by choice of their elites and under the pressure of paralyzing taboos deftly wielded by their political left is importing surplus non-whites from parts of the planet where women do not have such choices, to prevent population decline.

On its face, not an unreasonable option, were it not for the adverse political effects we see in Europe and may yet see in America, due in Europe primarily to religious conflict and in the US, eventually, to racial conflict.

Still, that's the route we're taking and it might work out without too much trouble.

It may never actually happen, but suppose women all over the planet at some point gain the same freedom to reject domesticity and motherhood modern women of European or American society already have.

Very soon, humans will face the need for conscious political choices as to whether and how to perpetuate themselves and their societies.

The family may disappear as a social institution, or at any rate lose its unique role in keeping the species, and our several societies, in existence.

Responsibility for the production and rearing of young may fall in large part to government.

And given technological trends government will be making interesting decisions about the genetic endowments of such young.

You and I won’t live to see it.

But it could happen, eventually.

Afterthought.

In America and Europe, this development is a consequence of advances in reproductive technology the Christian churches have not been able to keep unavailable for general use.

Enabled by these advances, the sexual revolution has at every step required and powered liberation from the ability of the Christian clergy to control the law and through it the sexual lives of moderns of both sexes, and in particular of women.

In other parts of the world, this aspect of the sexual revolution will go differently as its progress is resisted by other religions or cultural factors, not all of which will be equally challenged by these changes and not all of which would be equally able to resist if they wanted to.

And that makes me wonder, in particular, about the case of China, where society and state face the opposite problem, the people still being for whatever reasons culturally committed to a level of fecundity causing population growth when that is not at all wanted.

One of those things that make you want to live another hundred years, or so, just to see how it all plays out.