Apostles of the No-Kid Movement Are Crafting an Unlivable World
23rd March 2025
The “no-kid” trend—that idea that a woman, to truly flourish and be free, should refrain from having children—has become, in France as elsewhere, a real mania. Young women publish an increasing number of essays, more or less inspired, in which they try to convince themselves and others that the world would be so much better if we did not reproduce. The press piles on, explaining with a lot of statistical arguments why it is not a good idea to have kids. But the muses of navel-gazing, keen to preserve what they think is their own little individual happiness, are not very clear-sighted about the hell they are preparing for us all if everyone decides to follow their dubious advice.
The reasons put forward for not having children are well-known, so much so that they are repeated ad nauseam by the mainstream media, especially the women’s press. The press reminds us with forceful figures that a child is tremendously expensive and that, for the same price, we could have several dogs (eight, to be accurate [sic]). Indeed, you do have to spend money to have children: on a car, housing, school. But why would it be one of the only areas where we would do the math, in the world of unlimited welfare state and public spending?
Having children, they say, also prevents women from having a career and developing professionally—the arguments are starting to get a bit old. More in vogue is the idea that children are anti-environmental: they consume, they produce waste, and the use of washable diapers and recyclable toys will not be enough to stop the cataclysm that is coming to sweep us all away. More ‘intellectual’ and more elaborate is the argument that bearing children is the attitude expected by the dominant patriarchy to keep women in a state of eternal subordination.
The thing is that, long-term, this is a self-correcting problem. Everybody alive today is the descendant of women who had children. If a woman doesn’t have children, her genes are flushed from the gene pool and all that are left are the descendants of women who had children. Natural selection works whether you want it to or not; sure, it takes a while, but evolution has all the time in the world.