There’s a fantasy meme out here that somehow if the white birth rate increased Red Owl, Rexall, and the Five and Dime would return to Main Street and every thing will be hunky dory like in the 1950s again. Most of the holders of this flawed fantasy rely on an Old McDonald’s Farm understanding of reproduction and assume a barnyard overrun with too many critters is a sure sign of prosperity.
Anyone with a basic understanding of animal agriculture will tell you it ain’t that simple- From gestation all the way to the supermarket shelves they need a steady and predictable supply and flow of livestock to keep the system working- Look at how just some shifts from food service to supermarket consumption resulted in empty shelves during the pandemic! A drop in the reproduction rate wastes capacity and leads to food shortages and runaway prices. Worse yet, a significant increase in the reproductive rate will produce more livestock than the grazing land, feedlots, barns, feed supply, packing houses, and transportation can handle. As we saw during the pandemic, that leads to flocks and herds having to be killed en mass lest they suffer starvation and their carcassess feed another pandemic. That’s why livestock reproduction is much more tightly controlled than our own.
Make the stupid mistake of radically forcing human reproduction increases has even more tragic consequences because while livestock’s life cycle ranges from a few months to a couple years, it take about two decades to conceive, birth, and raise a human to the point where they become productive. And while livestock may tolerate cold pastures, confined barns, and a rough ride to their death… We humans are a lot fussier.
About 20% of pregnancies end in abortion, so banning them will give us about 25% more babies every year, so with childcare already in short supply even more parents will leave the workforce… And we’re chronicly short of workers too! While those newborn’s cribs will fit just about anywhere, they quickly outgrow them and we’ve had a shortage of two and more bedroom housing for years and it’s getting worse. After five years these poor government mandated children will start school, and the small town school of the republican’s dreams has long ago collapsed, been repurposed, or just plain torn down. My school district finally consolidated three schools with three kitchens, three gyms, three heating plants, etc. down to one with a huge increase in efficiency… And now the republicans already want us taxpayers to expand it to accommodate the children of their forced pregnancy fantasies!
It gets worse- We replaced the failing water system in my town but the huge rural water systems that supply us have no more capacity and funding for increased capacity is taking decades. Funding that system was a stretch and a sewer system would be even harder to justify, so we’ve got septic systems. The common standard for those is at most 8 for every 40 acres, our town is about 40 acres and with 16 systems we’re exceeding that and a sewer system would cost millions given that we’d have to run over a mile of pipe to a safe discharge point- Yup, adding just a few kids in my town could cost us millions. The story is the same across rural America- A half century ago thanks to population loss and overbuilding we had excess capacity in our schools, clinics, and Main Streets, but not now. And I haven’t even figured in yet the effects of the party of forced reproduction’s next goal of banning birth control and the loss of women parents and workers who will die from easily treatable birth complications that the republicans will ban.
The republicans are free to enjoy their 1950s fantasies of runaway reproduction… But they have no right to force us to live in their fantasies of forced reproduction that even the dumbest livestock farmer wouldn’t try!
Sassy Democrat 