Born into this vast technopoly, today's child understands her world primarily through mass media. Thanks to media's total-disclosure nature, she will be a world-weary 72-year-old by the time she reaches 12, but won't have the maturity of a medieval 12-year-old until about age 36. Ages 12 to 22 will be spent in mandatory survival training called higher education. Regardless of her primary course of study, her secondary course, undertaken when she is biologically fittest and physically strongest to raise children, will be the ironic but ironclad dogma that she must never consider having a child until she is economically, psychologically, and spiritually a fully realized autonomous self. If, after a decade of ingesting this dogma, she still has the desire to become a mother, she can only have at most two children.
If life's most meaningful work for couples is raising children, then it's a cynical system that requires the false choice between having children young, when a large family is physically possible but financially hard, or waiting until they can afford a large family, when fertility has dropped. Technology, it turns out, is a harsher taskmaster than biology, offering a world where the best form of birth control is economics, the best predictor of income is education, and the best deterrent to having children is guilt over failing to give them the very best a consumer society offers.
Meanwhile, the ocean of sorrow continues to fill with the tears of those who are childless or heartbroken by the lie that tells a woman she is free to be anything she wants, so long as she's a man about it.
Read Mercer Schuchardt, Christianity Today
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