No One Born for 30 Years

Dan Savage caused a minor stir by suggesting a “dangerous yet helpful” idea, that abortions should be mandatory for the next 30 years.

Ignoring the practical/ethical implications, what would happen if no one were born for 30 years? (Forget about the abortion angle if it’s troubling; maybe it just so happened that no one got pregnant.) What would the world look like after 1, 5, 10, 20, and 30 babyless years?

Since this requires speculation, let’s move it to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

For the next several years, there would be huge black/gray/legal markets for kids to adopt. Until they all grew up. And then it would be nice and quiet.

There’s a not insignificant portion of the economy tending to the needs of parents and children, a lot of which requires inculcation of the next generation for continuity. After 30 years children’s hospitals would be closed, OBGYNs delivering children would be decades out of work, the educational system would be shut down for decades, retailers would lose a huge chunk of business, the entertainment industry would suffer, etc, and the whole business, science and art of dealing with children would spend half a generation in cold storage. We’d be asking people in their 30s who have literally never laid eyes in a child in their adult lives to deliver babies, attend to them in daycares, educate them in our newly reopened schools, and so on, with no knowledge to build on, no experienced teachers to learn from, and so on. It would ultimately be a disaster.

In 2043, you’d have huge pressure put on women in their thirties and forties to have as many children as possible in order to build the population back up while it was still possible.

And, you’d be asking them to have children, after 3 decades of that being an impossibility on a planetary scale. Imagine if, 30 years from now, somebody took away all the iPads and touchscreens and made everybody go back to keyboards.

Imagine if they even took away the keyboards! Imagine if we all had to go back to doing arithmetic with pencil and paper! :eek: After a 30-year generation gap, who would still remember that? Who would teach the children?

See The Feeling of Power, (PDF) short story by Isaac Asimov, 1958, in which one low-level technician reverse engineers the computers and rediscovers arithmetic!

That too. It’s a seductively easy and simplistic fix to a massive problem, carrying catastrophic results.

Also you’d have an ageing population dependent in various ways on a rapidly shrinking number of workers.

This theme was explored in the 2006 movie Children of Men which was adapted from the 1992 book The Children of Men

I saw the movie and didn’t read the book. I recommend the movie highly. In the movie, after ~20 years of all women in the world suffering from mysterious infertility with no hope in sight, things got bad. Very bad. Society was breaking down all over.

I think he’s making an analogy rather than talking about the literal loss of keyboards. After 30 years of childlessness, humanity’s first hand knowledge and teaching methods of childbirth and childrearing would be greatly damaged. Literally nobody of childbearing years would have any recent firsthand experience with childbirth or children.

Which is a problem with the age distribution we already have. It would be phenomenally bad if literally no children were born for 30 years.

You’d probably see the absolute devastation of human society economically at least(which will lead to mass starvation and political instability and a lot of death), even after kids are being born again there will be a enormous gap of workers. Society would take another thirty years just to stabilize.

I’d expect that after about the first decade, pre-natal and labor & delivery techniques would be taught very little or not at all. So when women did start getting pregnant again, not only would the practitioners be 30 years out of practice, the people with the knowledge would be well past middle age. Certainly there would be some crash courses in college, but nothing to meet the demands of millions of expecting mothers.

Then there’s the whole lack of medical supplies designed specifically for newborns, especially those requiring medical assistance to survive.

Despair. Most people desire to have children and they’re going to be extremely frustrated when some outside force prevents them from doing so. You’re going to have an entire generation of people prevented from having children. Second, if you’re going to have mandatory abortions you’re going to have people who resist quite violently.

So we destroy the education system (and anything else related to children - paediatric medicine, for example), then recreate it again in 30 years? What could possibly go wrong?

Well, more like about 12 years. All the kid-related stuff will still be needed as long as the “last” generation of kids currently or will want them.

Not really - a 30 year hiatus in childbirths means a 30 year break in anything tailored to specific ages. And there’s a lot of that - a whole load of stuff isn’t just ‘kid related’ in a generic sense.

Midwifery isn’t a service people hang on to, likewise neonatal and fetal surgery.

And in education, provision of infant school teaching and support is quite different from teaching in a secondary school, college or university.

And even if it was just 12 years, that’s still too great a discontinuity to just mothball stuff and expect it to all resume again when required.

I didn’t see this when I posted later, but I completely agree on every point. I can’t imagine why anyone would imagine no children for 30 years to be a ‘helpful’ thing. I normally find Dan Savage outspoken, but generally sane - does he just hate children or something?

Where do I sign up? There is no substitute for an actual keyboard no matter how thin and light they make those touchscreen media consumption devices. Without tactile feedback it’s all just jabbing at a chunk of glass.