OPINION
Not many people have 10 children, but Elon Musk does. “If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble,” he declared dramatically in 2021. Musk, it seems, is worried about the labour force declining. Low birth rates and a worldwide decline in fertility concern many others besides Musk but he has the money to pay for the IVF treatments which produced his twins and triplets, and for a surrogate to produce a second child with Grimes. Is this a model we should aspire to?
Miriam Cates MP sounded a similar alarm at the National Conservatism conference, claiming that our falling birth rate was a bigger threat to the West than Russia, China or climate change. She blamed “liberal individualism” for failing to deliver enough babies. She then went on about cultural Marxism as such people do, as it is more important to hold on to a fantasy about why people are having fewer children than get to grips with the reality.
Are the “OMG! I forgot to have children” generation selfish women who have been stripped of hope by destructive left-wing ideology, or are they in fact making decisions based on much more mundane stuff? Stuff like not being able to afford a home of their own, the huge cost of childcare, the shortage of men who want to parent with them.
Tories such as Cates and Daniel Hannan who are voicing these concerns are echoing those of far-right leaders such as Italy’s Georgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who are explicit about the need to replace their populations. A certain number of babies have to be born in order to support an ageing population. If this doesn’t happen and it is not happening here, we need immigrants to help us manage. That is a hard thing for the right to acknowledge, but in the UK we would need the average woman to have 2.1 kids, and the figure is currently 1.58 in England and Wales and 1.29 in Scotland.