Feminists for Voluntarily Going Extinct

Amanda Marcotte often seems reasonable to me, but then she writes this piece in which she advocates population control in the US because Americans are polluting resource hogs who should just go ahead and die out. The most disturbing proposition is that coercion to achieve this should not be off the table:

“First of all, dismissing coercion out of hand in a situation as dire as ours concerns me. Not that one should conclude that coercion is the best bet, but desperate times should at least allow for the consideration of desperate measures.”

I don’t know that I would characterize the risk that Americans might continue to exist as “dire”, but I suppose that I should at least be grateful that Ms Marcotte thinks coercion is a “desperate measure” and not the first resort.

Ms Marcotte sees other difficulties with coercion:

“First of all, it’s best not to make an assault on human dignity right out of the gate without trying other measures. Coercion is unlikely to work, anyway, since people would rebel and create all sorts of nasty problems. You just don’t want to go there if you can at all help it.”

That said, she reckons that voluntary population control would be the best bet. For some reason, Ms Marcotte thinks that there is tremendous social pressure to have lots of babies. Perhaps she is relating her own personal experience, because I have found the opposite to be true. The perfect family size is two children, a boy and a girl. One child is perfectly acceptable, and the childfree lifestyle is more cromulent than ever. Three kids are ok if your first two are the same sex, but more than that is going to raise eyebrows. The Duggars, that family with the 17 kids, were newsworthy not because they are admired for their fecundity but because they are freaks.

Our population growth, factoring out immigration, is negative already, so Ms Marcotte may eventually get her wish and anticipate the extinction of Homo americanus.

The “voluntary” plan:

“We could make contraception and abortion free, and have bike messengers hand out condoms and emergency contraception like they do in France. We could restructure our tax system so that being childless or even sticking to one gets you a tax credit. The government could run ads…to drive home the message that having children is something you should only do if you’ve put a lot of thought into it.”

It’s coercive in the sense that it takes resources from citizens in order to propagandize them into having fewer children, but she is at least not suggesting direct use of force to limit family size. Frankly, this is a nonstarter. What government would advocate the extinction of its own subjects?

I don't see what's feminist about this idea, either. Wouldn't it be a more feminist position to advocate complete reproductive freedom so that women could have as many or few kids as they liked without let or hindrance? I probably just don't get it.

Ms Marcotte and I seem to live in two different realities. She sees America as extremely pro-natalist, and I see it as the opposite. I would prefer that the government do nothing to influence family size and that we all just mind our own business about other people's reproductive choices.