It used to be that people wanted to make babies. Women, especially, but also men. That was a healthy young person’s default position, and our existence depended on it. We wanted to do other things, of course, and the great post-feminist challenge was how to have it all…But now, for an increasing number, the question isn’t how to have it all. It’s: why do it at all? 

Rachel Diamond looks like most of the moms at the Park Slope café where we meet. She’s wearing a green t-shirt under a black corduroy jumper, sensible shoes and carries a smart, leather bag. She sips a four dollar iced chai. Except the 31-year-old isn’t a mom. And she never will be. “You know,” Diamond says cheerily, “I never expected to be the poster child of sterilization.”
On the aspiring actor’s TikTok, one finds short funny videos about Diamond’s job working the register at a cafe near Union Square and updates on her rescue pitbull, Rue, who has anemia. Mixed in are the clips extolling her child-free life. They have titles like “Sterilization Attempt #3” and “Being Childfree: We DO Know What We’re Missing.” It’s been five months since she had her fallopian tubes cut—not tied—and she has 64,000 followers.
Growing up near Hershey, Penn., Diamond always assumed she’d have a family of her own. Then came college at Arcadia University; her political awakening, away from her conservative roots, and towards progressivism; and a therapist who she found online a few months after graduation who made her realize that being spanked as a child was deeply traumatic, and that it made her fear authority figures like her father. She decided that she never wanted to be one herself. Never ever ever.
“Looking back, I never pretended that my American Girl dolls were children, they were always my sisters,” she says. “There were little things showing that I wasn’t preparing myself for motherhood. I think for me, it’s as innate as saying, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a mom.’”
Diamond is hardly an outlier. Americans are making fewer babies than we’ve made since we started keeping track in the 1930s. And some women, like Diamond, are not just putting off pregnancy but eliminating the possibility of it altogether.
Last year, the number of deaths exceeded that of births in 25 states—up from five the year before. The marriage rate is also at an all-time low, at 6.5 marriages per 1,000 people. Millennials are the first generation where a majority are unmarried (about 56%). They are also more likely to live with their own parents, according to Pew, than previous generations were in their twenties and thirties.
They also aren’t having sex. The number of young men (ages 18 to 30) who admit they have had no sex in the past year tripled between 2008 and 2018. Cities like New York, where young, secular Americans flock to to build their lives, are increasingly childless. In San Francisco, there are more dogs than children.
It used to be that people wanted to make babies. Women, especially, but also men. That was a healthy young person’s default position, and our existence depended on it. We wanted to do other things, of course, and the great post-feminist challenge was how to have it all—the proper work-life balance, the career and the baby, the supportive husband and the adventurous life.
But now, for an increasing number, the question isn’t how to have it all. It’s: why do it at all?
This psychological reversal didn’t just happen. It took place inside the hurricane of spiritual, cultural and environmental forces swirling around us. But the message from this young cohort is clear: Life is already exhausting enough. And the world is broken and burning. Who would want to bring new, innocent life into a criminally unequal society situated on a planet with catastrophically rising sea levels?
The Rapture—sorry, the end—is upon us, and this is no time for onesies. So says The New Yorker and NPR and AOC. According to a new poll, 39% of Gen Zers are hesitant to procreate for fear of the climate apocalypse. A nationally representative study of adults in Michigan found that over a quarter of adults there are child-free by choice. And new research by the Institute of Family Studies found that the desire to have a child among adults decreased by 17% since the onset of the pandemic.
“I think it’s morally wrong to bring a child into the world,” said Isabel, 28, a self proclaimed anti-natalist who lives in southwestern Texas and did not want her last name in print. “No matter how good someone has it, they will suffer.”
Texas’s new, highly restrictive abortion law has led her to take action sooner instead of later. “I was going to wait until I was thirty to get the procedure done,” Isabel said, “but, with the Heartbeat Bill in place, I can’t take the risk of getting pregnant and not being able to abort.”
Last week, she was approved for The Operation—aka laparoscopic bilateral salpingectomy. (Many surgeons won’t sterilize young, childless women because studies indicate high rates of regret, so it can take time to lock one down.) During the procedure, which she hopes will take place in the next few months depending on Covid and the hospital’s capacity to perform elective surgeries, Isabel’s surgeon will make three incisions: two near her abdomen and one just above her belly button. This will allow the surgeon to insert cameras and then remove her fallopian tubes.
Isabel is planning a “sterilization celebration” at a local sushi joint. There will be lots of booze, a smattering of friends, and her brother and his husband, who are also child-free. “I don’t want to work my life away,” says Isabel, who hopes to retire in her fifties or earlier.
Darlene Nickell, 31, in Denver, Colo., had her tubes removed eight months ago. “My generation is very aware of the ways that our parents traumatized us,” she tells me. “My mom smoked a lot of weed and did her own thing, and my dad was away a lot for work.” She says her parents’ marriage improved after they became empty nesters.
She first set out to get sterilized at the age of 21 and was told by her doctor that she needed written consent from her male partner or to have already had two kids. Meantime, her childless male friend from high school had successfully gotten his vasectomy a year before. “That felt like an attack on me.”
Read More

[Your] body is not a defensive castle over which the sovereign “self” rules against the incursions of others, but a site owned by God, where he is to be served and glorified—a temple.

It seems to me there’s nothing more counter-cultural we can teach our children at the moment than the statement:

It’s not your body!

We’re (rightly) eager to teach our children the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touch. We don’t want them to be abused or to abuse others. But how do we arm them intellectually to resist such abuse? Western culture tells them to oppose abuse “because it’s your body”. In other words, what makes “abuse” so terrible is that it’s an invasion of the sovereignty of the self. But the Bible teaches exactly the opposite premise: “Don’t let people abuse you, because it’s not your body”. Your body belongs to God—as your Creator, and as your Redeemer (Gen 1:26; 1 Cor 6:19). “Abuse” is wicked not because it’s an attack on the sovereignty of the self, but on the sovereignty of God. That raises the stakes on abuse considerably—think millstones round the neck, and being thrown into the sea (Matt 18:6).
It’s important to see that these aren’t just two equal and equivalent ways of tackling the same problem; one is untrue and destructive. The other is true and, therefore, wholesome.
The Problem
Firstly, there’s the problem that the underlying logic of what our children are told is false. For example, you’ll often see the slogan “My Body My Choice” on placards at pro-abortion rallies; Amnesty International also use it. But the slogan simply isn’t true. When someone says: “You can’t tell me what to do with my body!”, the simple answer is: “Yes, we can!”. Every time you put on a seat-belt you’re showing that it’s not your body. Every person who puts on a seat-belt is recognising everyone else’s responsibility for your body. No one seriously believes the body is a strip of sovereign territory over which no politician can rule. The body is still very well policed in the UK. The body is political; it always has been and always will be. There is lots of legislation which says what you can and can’t do with your body. Try walking out of your house with no clothes on and it will quickly prove the point! So, firstly, the mantra that’s “it’s your body” is far too simplistic.
Read More

The fact that this church exists at all is proof that God chooses foolish things over wise things, so that nobody might boast before him. You are not wise, righteous, holy and redeemed because of your backgrounds, Paul points out to them, but because you are “in Christ Jesus”. You were foolish people who heard a foolish message preached in a foolish way—and God has demonstrated his wisdom in you so powerfully that the smartest people on earth are left scratching their heads and wondering how he did it. So if you’re going to boast about anything, you should boast in the Lord.

In our preaching and witnessing, our message and our very existence show we are foolish, weak and lowly. So if we are going to blow our trumpets about anything, it had better not be ourselves or any human leaders. Rather, “let the one who boasts boast in the Lord” (1:31).
Paul writes about this in his first letter to the Corinthians, skewering human pride. He does this by drawing a series of contrasts—wise/foolish, strong/weak, influential/ lowly—and showing how the gospel puts us on the “wrong” side of all of them.
Foolish method
Christian preaching is fundamentally foolish, at least in the eyes of the world. The world, in Paul’s day, had all sorts of wonderful techniques to make its messages more acceptable: wisdom, eloquence, intelligence, legal reasoning, philosophy.
Our generation has added the power of advertising, popular music, newspapers, movies, websites and television shows which push a particular vision of the true, the good or the beautiful, and by presenting it well make it seem more plausible. Meanwhile the church is stuck with a method that looked foolish in ancient Corinth and looks even more foolish now: preaching. Not with tricks or stunts. Not with high-budget special effects or virtual-reality immersive experiences. Not with wisdom or eloquence, “lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power”. Just proclaiming what God has done in Christ and trusting that God will use that message to turn people’s lives the right way up.
Hopefully this is obvious, but this is not an argument for long, dull, rambling, monotone, unimaginative sermons. I have sat through a few of those, and they have nothing to do with Paul’s point here. In this very letter, Paul proves himself a master of punchy, witty, direct, well-illustrated, concise, rhetorical, funny and incisive communication (and I spend a good deal of my time trying to communicate like that myself).
Read More