Education and Extinction

Mass female education is not compatible with motherhood

Women will not be able to solve the problem of women choosing against marriage and children. Even when they recognize the problem, they are too solipsistic to accept what the statistics very strongly indicate is the solution:

By all available data—including data from studies presented by Miller herself—“most” young women do not want to have children. Most women will not “probably” have babies by age 45. Meanwhile, as the birth rate hits all-time lows, the left continues to glorify childlessness.

So what do we do?

For one, dump the trad-wife messaging. While the right’s reaction to the left’s anti-natalism is understandable, no woman wants to feel as if her sole purpose on this planet is to bear children—especially not in a society that places so much value on professional achievement. Women who were already raised with traditional values, furthermore, gain nothing from having their views reinforced, and college-educated women unsure about having children only drift farther to the left after seeing women with few intellectual auspices and limited ambitions laud the stay-at-home mom lifestyle. After all, it is college-educated women who are having the fewest number of kids, and it is college-educated women who need the most persuading.

The answer, then, is to propose a middle ground: a woman can derive fulfillment both from her career and her family. If anything, we need more college-educated women raising the next generation of change-makers because these women are best equipped to instill the values of ambition, intellectual achievement, and professional success in their own children. The problem, however, is that our college system promotes lopsided messaging, accounting for the fact that a greater number of men than women say they want to have children in the future. While men are told that they must achieve professional success in order to provide for their families, women are told that professional success and motherhood are at odds with one another. In their early twenties, furthermore, women are repeatedly encouraged to focus on their careers and to not worry about marriage and children (I cannot tell you, for instance, how many times I heard such platitudes from friends and family members after each of my failed college relationships); as a result, by the time these women would otherwise be ready—in a more sane society, at least—to plan for motherhood, they have no marriage prospects and have never once thought about what their lives would look like with kids and a family. It’s no wonder that such a life-altering decision will feel uncomfortable: the topic of childbirth is seldom broached positively to women—not until it is often too late, that is.

One possible solution is to stop with the “focus on work and school” messaging—or at least to dial it back a notch. Professional success is not mutually exclusive with having children, and if we introduced the idea of motherhood earlier, it would feel far less daunting by the time many women are ready to settle down. Yes, women should focus on work and school—but that does not mean that relationships, marriage, and family should take a backseat. It is not revolutionary knowledge that the two can coexist harmoniously.

The cultural angle cannot be the solution because the situation is cross-cultural, indeed, it may well be completely trans-cultural. The fact of the matter is that in every society where the average female education exceeds eight years, the birth rate drops below replacement level.

And since both societies and civilizations depend upon women being willing to become wives and mothers, the logic dictates that any society that wishes to survive to the end of the 21st century will have to seriously restrict female education beyond the replacement-level line.

Years ago, I was falsely accused of supporting the Taliban’s attack on the young champion of female education, Nobel Peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai. The accusation was false because I did not support the attack, I merely pointed out a statement that the attack was “irrational” was incorrect because the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational given their rejection of Western liberalism and their objective of defending their traditional society.

Now, somewhat against my expectations, it appears that the Taliban’s attempt to silence advocates of female education were not only rational, but that their concerns about the iniquitous effects of that education are not unfounded. This doesn’t justify throwing acid on anyone, but it does mean that the Taliban’s society is, ironically, much more likely to survive over time than the more-educated societies that consider it backward.

Progressives and feminists like to imagine that science will somehow rescue women from the demands of biology, but perhaps they should think more deeply about the additional consequences of those possibilities, for as we’ve seen with contraception and so-called emancipation, the unanticipated consequences of change may be far worse than what was believed to be the original problem.

For example, sex slavery is already a tremendous problem around the world, as the primary value of the victims is seen solely in the sexual services they can provide. So, contemplate what is likely to happen to the entire female sex if they are no longer required for the continued survival of the species?

Many years ago, I wrote a mildly notorious column called “The Brothel or the Burqah?” I may have been too optimistic there, as over an even longer timeframe, the range of viable choices would appear to be Elementary Education, Extinction, or Sex Slavery.

The real question, therefore, is if liberal democracy and universal suffrage are capable of surviving true women’s liberation when women vote for societal extinction.