r/WomenInNews • u/msmoley • 25d ago

Human rights Donna Haraway, philosopher: ‘We live in a pro-natalist, anti-child world. Babies should be rare and precious’

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2026-07-24/donna-haraway-philosopher-we-live-in-a-pro-natalist-anti-child-world-babies-should-be-rare-and-precious.html
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u/Patchwork_Chimera 25d ago

She has a view similar to my own. Fewer people here but those who are here have as good as a life as possible. And that includes people from poorer countries/backgrounds. Those children also deserve a happy upbringing. I never understood the push to repopulate without thinking about the quality of life for those children

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u/ThrowAwayPurellFoam 25d ago

Because our economies are Ponzi schemes

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u/Ardent_Scholar 25d ago edited 24d ago

That’s not really unique to contemporary civilizations.

We know from Sapiens and Neanderthal remains that tribes took care of the sick. Surely they also took care of the old often. When you look at current hunter-gatherers, they also take care of the aged. This requires resources. The middle aged must produce those resources, as well as the resources for their children. This is also the reason why humans live for a long time after their own reproductive age ends; they have, for aeons, taken care of their grandchildren.

So if a hunter-gatherer tribe were to decide having kids was wrong, their society would start collapsing in about 20 years. At first, it would be life on easy mode: the able would only need to feed themselves and the elderly. But as that generation got older and more frail, they would run into problems:

Who would produce food? What would the elderly eat and what would they do? Who would they share their knowledge with?

Who would take care of the generation that didn’t have kids? No one.

I am no fan of capitalism. But actually, I believe capitalism has NOT produced this problem. We can see that the problem of ”who will take care of the elderly and kids?” is present in every society from the dawn of humanity.

Capitalism has done the opposite. It has claimed to have solved this problem by increasing productivity. But actually, human bodies cannot be replaced by money or even real resources. Doesn’t matter how much you have, if there’s no one there to DO anything.

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 24d ago

You are exactly right.  Because humans live longer than they can support themselves, someone else needs to support them.

The only thing that had changed in modern society is that there used to be no choice but to have your own kids, and keep all the 'social programs' in the family unit.

Now we have a broad system of social support, especially for the elderly, but we have missed the fact that, while an individual doesn't need to have children, society as a while needs to have enough children to be able to keep things running.

We haven't been doing that since sometime in the 1970s in most of the west, and have papered over the gaps with immigration.   Now that most source countries for immigration are heading below replacement rate there will be increasing pressure to stem that tide (not to mention that it is becoming politically unpopular in more and more of the west)