Reactionaries are suddenly in a tizzy about the birth rate. Should we take their concern at face value?
No, because of the limits on it. They still don’t want immigrant children. They don’t support IVF. And they certainly don’t want teenagers to start having sex and kids out of wedlock. Those children are a burden on society–that is to say, on their wallets.
The great birth rate panic is really a proxy for the desire for the Godly Society, as I described it in a previous post. Trump has upended the old rules and made fundamental change in American society look possible again. It is now imaginable to the right that the federal government could use its power to force people to live in the sexual world of the 1950s again. More children–the right kind of children–would be the inevitable result.