How To Make Babies
Why we stopped making babies and why it's not what you think.
In our wayward teenage years, we played a game known colloquially as Council Estate Roulette. The ancients called it coitus interruptus. This haphazard method of contraception features in the biblical story of Onan.
Of course, Onan was not subject to sex education in school. Onan wasn’t implored to stretch a condom over a banana as the white faces of one’s classmates blared tabloid red. Onan, who had taken to sleeping with his brother’s wife, had little notion of teenage pregnancy, nor how to avoid such a perilous fate. But Onan paid for his sins. His name will forever tie up with ‘onanist.’ A starchy term for what we British call a ‘wanker.’
In the mid-2000s, breathless talk shows still feigned a consensual morality. Emblazoned across the ticker tape were words like ‘teen’ and ‘pregnant’ set before liberal applications of the exclamation mark. Dr Phil, the stentorian Texan, made his grain by lambasting teens who’d flouted the warnings imprinted upon their heads in Sex Ed.
MTV helpfully laid out what befell those foolish enough to ignore their teachers and parents.
Reality shows such as Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant depicted the Dickensian lives of those suffering with a chronic and life-shattering condition which we council-estate kids called up the duff. The mewling and the screaming and the sleeplessness and the helplessness didn’t seem big nor clever.
Excuse the teenage vulgarity. I’ve spared you the more potent phrases to describe being up the duff. The coarseness was the point. To get another pregnant was to ruin one’s life and possibly that of two others. 16 and Pregnant sketched a nightmare without end. Those grainy Al Qaeda hostage videos, which ping-ponged between our phones at lunchtime, offered a preferable fate.
We didn’t need revved-up reality TV shows painting perilous pictures of pregnant teens. Real life conjured plenty of case studies in how not to fuck up your life.
Nobody, it seemed, escaped the terror latent in just six words. After all, both the truthful and the manipulative could simply send a text, I think I might be pregnant. Those six words guaranteed not just a breathless reply but weeks of Pavlovian obedience.
The very phrase stalked us all like cultural polio. And if you caught the bug, you could count on your mates to make you feel eminently worse. They’d glory in your patent horror. Your life is ruined! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ruined! Inside every teenage boy lurks the semi-feral instinct to glory in the misfortunes of their closest friends.
The senders of such world-spinning texts were often economical with the biological facts. That did not matter. As soon as those six words appeared, a sleepless terror dissolved the next four weeks.
Desperate, the afflicted sought the advice of older boys. These menstrual mystics toggled between ancient faith-healer and modern podcast bro. Shrouded in a shamanic air; they’d scratch their chins learnedly:
“So, you say the incident happened on a Friday evening?”
“Yes… why? Is that bad? Is Friday bad?!”
“Hmmm. Well, it’s not good. More pregnancies occur on Fridays than on Mondays. Everyone knows that.”
“They do? Really?! Oh, fuck. Fuck!”
The social lubricant of such peril was a fearsome cider called White Lightning, known to devotees as Quite Frightening.
Just a few quid secured a lavender three-litre flagon weighing in at a meaty 7.5% ABV—enough to tranquilise a rampaging elephant. That lunatic soup fathered more teen pregnancies than all other alcoholic drinks combined.
The terror sparked by those six words stretched for weeks until the author of doom recovered their monthly schedule. Of course, that was a time for celebration. Two bottles of White Lightning, please.
How times change. Aside from our former prime minister, Boris Johnson, nobody appears to be fathering children. From South Korea to South Africa, the baby bust colours the globe a shade of grey. The United Nations said recently that global fertility rates were mired in “unprecedented decline.”
Swivel-eyed commentators cast scorn upon my generation, the Millennials. We’re too busy slathering avocado on toast and starting up tiresome podcasts to sire a few sprogs. Not quite. Across the globe, most people surveyed in that UN report said they wanted two or more children but couldn’t afford to do so.
I suspect there’s more to it than money. We are living through what some have dubbed a ‘polycrisis’. Since the financial meltdown of 2008, things have been less than agreeable. A quick scroll on your phone vomits up war and crisis and falling wages and rising rents and the acrid sense that nothing works—if it ever did.
The polycrisis theory reminds me of the sociologist Robert K. Merton’s theory of strain. In a nutshell, strain occurs when the gap between socially ascribed goals (i.e. settle down and have children) stretches too far from the structural means to achieve them (housing, good jobs, stability.) The result is social instability, a quality of which we are not in short supply.
After all, to have children is to vote for the future. As recently as 2010, the birth rate sat at a healthy 2.1. Historical crises often shut off the baby tap.
I don’t pretend to have the answers. My hunch is that our baby bust will transform into a baby boom once the modern world emerges from its decades-long self-indulgent freak-out.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. If you dig into the numbers, you’ll glean that anti-teen pregnancy campaigns have, over the last few decades, enjoyed rampaging success. Between 1991 and 2023, teen pregnancies dropped by 75 percent. Logically speaking, much of the current baby bust stems from this riotous success.
If you look closer, you’ll see that the decline in teen pregnancies is particularly steep from around 2010. Ironically, in that very same year, White Lightning succumbed to the forces of social disapproval and was cleared from shop shelves—never to be seen again.
Reader, I merely note the historical correlation between the two.
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I read all 987 words with due care and attention and I still don't know how to make babies. Boooo!
Interesting correlation...I wonder if there was a similar incident in the US that correlates with the "baby bust." Maybe when the federal govmint forced all the states to raise their drinking ages to 21?🤔
As the product of a teen pregnancy I'm not sure I 100% disapprove...except for the removal of White Lightning, of course...