Encouraging White Women to Have More Children is a Dangerous Right-Wing Development. Apparently
SALLUST
In a piece for the Telegraph, ‘Should white people really stop having children?’, Michael Deacon introduces readers to a German academic anti-natalist feminist called Dr Vera Brunschweiger.
She writes books urging women to remain “child-free”, like her. In an interview at the weekend with a leading Australian news website, she claimed that Right-wing Western politicians “want women to have more and more white babies” so that they can use it as an excuse to turn away refugees from “the global south” (formerly known as the Third World). In her opinion, this is “a really dangerous development”. Instead, she declares, Western countries have a “moral duty” to take in as many refugees as possible – and stop having children of their own.
If you feel so inclined, you can watch Brunschweiger expounding some of her views to news.com.au on YouTube and here. She says that Right-wingers like Musk and Trump wanting women to have “more and more white babies” is a “dangerous development”. This explains how she equates having white babies with unacceptable “Right-wing” views.
She’s delighted by Australian women choosing not to have children because it shows their concern for “female empowerment” and the environment.
Brunschweiger’s own website features the usual glamour photography of herself that feminist commentators often seem to consider an essential ingredient of self-promotion. She features a list of publications, interviews and articles. One from 2023 says that ‘Women are Complete Without Children’ and includes the observation that not having children makes men and women much more interesting people:
Childfree women are generally more interesting than mothers, simply because they have more time to develop their own personalities. This also goes for fathers – give me a childfree man over a daddy anytime! He’ll probably have way more fascinating stories to tell.
The blurring of her political views with childbearing becomes even clearer with:
It’s sad and shocking though that Eastern Europe is overwhelmingly extremely pro-natalist and Right-wing. Also, Italy has a female head of state who is against abortion! So I have two main fears: more and more countries drifting in the wrong direction politically and life on Earth running out of time.
In a more recent article, she amplifies her views about how much more environmentally responsible it is not to have children:
In 2017, I found the famous study by Kimberly Nicholas at Lund University in Sweden. She and her team compared the impact of different actions and surprise! By far the biggest ultimate impact is having one fewer child, which the researchers calculated equated to a reduction of 58 tons of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life. And we’re talking about sources from Europe, North America and Japan. … They found getting rid of a car saved only 2.4 tons a year, avoiding a return transatlantic flight saved 1.6 tons and becoming vegetarian saved 0.8 tons a year. This was my eureka moment as I’m trying hard to keep my ecological footprint as small as possible.
But her real point in that piece is to claim that childfree women are far happier than other women:
As the childfree also have time and money enough to enjoy their lives, they usually are way more cultivated and inspiring. This not only heightens their sex appeal, but makes them more sensitive as well as open and imaginative. If you focus totally on the beloved person in bed with you (or wherever) and not on your genes or the act of reproduction, you reach a level of exclusive, intense intimacy unknown to those who are just keen on producing a mini-me and shockingly often consider their partner only as means to an end.
Oblivious to her own narcissism, Brunschgweiger castigates people for the narcissistic desire to have children in order to create “mini-mes” and “to have beautiful blue eyes”, in her most recent Australian interview. It’s “completely selfish”, she says, especially as the world is “dying”. People like her are much more “considerate”. For not to have children is “the responsible choice”.
Naturally, Brunschweiger has her fans. Among them is Peace Akinyode, who wrote a glowing review of Brunschweiger’s book Do Childfree People Have Better Sex? It was an epiphany for Akinyode (despite her reservations about Brunschweiger’s criticism of Greta Thunberg as one of the “teenagers posting sentimental stories”):
Till I read Dr Verena Brunschweiger‘s Do Childfree People Have Better Sex? I never clearly captured childbirth as arguably the greatest facilitator of climate change and other chaos currently besieging the Earth. Dr Brunschweiger’s book intelligently painted this idea into something I can simply summarise as this sentence: more people means more digging into nature’s finite goodybox, and consequently more conflict for these resources.
In terms of politics, Dr Brunschweiger draws a connection between Right-wing extremism and the aggressive campaign to continue birthing. The crazy need to populate the world with your own kind in the name of nationalism.
Since Brunschweiger is German, one cannot help but wonder if the origins of her views lie in Germany’s 20th century history – note her jibe at parents wanting “blue-eyed” children above. In Mein Kampf, this passage appears, attributing the nation’s degeneration to “Judaising”:
For instead of strong, healthy children, blessed with natural feelings, we shall see miserable specimens of humanity resulting from economic calculation. For economic considerations are becoming more and more the foundations of marriage and the sole preliminary condition of it. And love looks for an outlet elsewhere.
And so indeed, that turns out to be the case as Brunschweiger explains here:
Being German, I also have to mention the darkest chapter in our history.
Women who gave birth to four or more children were awarded a special cross by the Nazis – the ‘mother cross’. Nowadays we also have to endure statesmen who are openly anti-feminist and celebrate similar concepts.
Of course every party is pro-natalist. They want the parents’ votes and as most adults are parents… every politician has to be ostentatiously child-friendly, they must flatter all parents, otherwise the career in question will never really take off. It also helps if you have kids yourself, as parents usually prefer other parents over those stone-cold childfree people.
So, there you have it: white women being encouraged to have children is a form of neo-fascism and anti-feminism.
But as Deacon observes:
After all, if Westerners stop having children, and thus in due course become extinct, who’s going to pay the taxes needed to fund welfare and accommodation for future refugees?
If anything, Dr Brunschweiger should be telling Westerners to have more children. Meanwhile, she should furiously berate any Westerner who remains childless.
The Telegraph’s piece is worth reading in full, as are the links cited, if only to leave one staggered at the indulgent self-loathing and narcissistic love of self-destruction that rules much of the Left.
