The Eastern world could use more children, but creating babies by any means necessary, as French President Emmanuel Macron just suggested, is not a lasting solution.
France, like several European and North American states, suffers lagging replacement costs that threaten to destroy the world’s structure and culture. To combat this alarming trend, the French government, at the behest of Macron, started formulating a policy plan earlier this year that would further subsidize assisted reproductive technology ( ART ) to replenish the country’s flailing fertility.
Anyone who wants a child can now receive full funding from France’s generally socialized health care system. As a result, more than 4 percent of the world’s babies are born after vision in a test tubes.
Macron hopes that “relaunching” France’s birth rate will encourage the population to procreate wherever they can by using the means available, including free fertility tests and more taxpayer-funded in vitro fertilization ( IVF ).
” Until recently, we were a country for which this was a strength ]… ] It’s been less true in recent years”, Macron admitted in January after learning that his country saw a 6.6 percent drop in births from 2022 to 2023.
Macron’s program may appeal to the , rising number of rich, famous, and social who believe that science and technology solely may revive birth rates and improve on society’s natural limitations. There is, however, a darker side to his argument.
Every year, on the taxpayer’s dime, France’s sponsor of test-tube babies sends at least 150,000 embryos to their deaths, and it is responsible for creating thousands of childless and childless intentionally. The plan fails because it neglects to tackle the causes of the nation’s birth rates, despite years of efforts to positively affect the country’s birth rates.
The Means Do No Justify the Means
As The Federalist’s David Harsanyi noted next month, there is a myriad of reasons for low birth rates, including “loss of religiosity”, pregnancy, “widespread availability of birth control”, and perhaps even fearmongering about climate change.
According to Harsanyi,” the main reason we’ve seen declining birth rates is undoubtedly the fact that women have entered the workforce and delayed marriage and so families.” ” This is obvious. People are living longer, but biology does n’t calibrate itself to your cultural expectations”.
World leaders are frequently drawn to the idea that IVF will win them political points and solve their nations ‘ problems, as evidenced by Macron’s plans and even U.S. Democrats ‘ policies defending Big Fertility.
But, IVF is far from a flawless way , to guarantee parenthood. The only thing it does guarantee is more excuses to postpone marriage and the commodification of human existence.
ART makes the best decisions about preventing relationship and reproduction for younger people who have the best chances of obviously procreating falsely secure. Instead of settling down, they use their most fertile years on commercial jobs or dating because technology that claims they can beat their biological clock is so easily available to them.
Regardless of their marriage status or natural ability to reproduce, they may request a child when the need arises. This causes a rise in Frankensteined individuals, which has a direct impact on birth rates.
Fertility Without Family Is a Loss
The moment the fractured people model offered by ART ( with its egg buying, sperm selling, IVF, and surrogacy ) becomes the focus is the time our drop drives.
Federalist Contributor Georgi Boorman once wrote,” We do n’t want a world where children are spawned in artificial wombs and raised unlovingly.” ” They are people, and how they are cultivated and by whom things deeply”.
Children who grow up without their engaged, biological mother and father have clear , physical, emotional, and academic disadvantages that do not consistently influence their peers in steady nuclear community situations. Boys specifically who spend their key years in fatherless homes, like the ones ART enables and its proponents promote, are  , less likely , to graduate and more prone to criminal acts and violence.
Additionally, children who are raised in divorce- and broken-relationship-filled families are more likely than adults to experience the same outcomes.
The strong, prosperous society we know comes from a generation of people who are haunted by these consequences does n’t suggest that the indispensable nuclear family is present today. Instead, it all but guarantees that birth rates will continue to decline as Western culture shifts away from God and turns to demons like abortion and climate change alarmism.
Similar to paying for people to have children, encouraging and even funding reproductive technology as a solution for nations ‘ fertility issues wo n’t work. Yes, babies are good. Yes, there might be more of them in the West. Making ART the foundation of that strategy is like applying Band-Aid to a gaping, bleeding wound, though.
Jordan Boyd is a co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour and a staff writer for The Federalist. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordanian completed her political science major at Baylor University and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
