When I was in my fecund 20s, if Donald Trump had offered me $5,000 to procreate, I’d probably have scheduled an emergency hysterectomy. Not that I couldn’t have used the dough, but any reader of history might justly recoil from government incentives to have - or not have - babies. The only thing more depressing than the president’s still-nascent proposal is the valid reasoning behind it. We humans, having progressively lost interest in childbearing, are risking our very future.

Declining birth rates are nearly everywhere in the modern world. The more advanced we become, it seems, the less interested we are in marriage and children. Women are largely responsible for this shift in attitudes and trends for a simple reason: They bear the brunt of responsibility for this triad of primarily - at least previously considered - female concerns. And, unlike in recent generations, they don’t have to.

In a deeply researched article for “First Things,” Williams College political science professor Darel E. Paul lays out a nearly apocalyptic forecast for human beings. By the 2060s, he writes, the global population growth rate is predicted to reach zero. The growth rate already has dropped more than 60 percent since 1963. Without a replacement generation, everything falls apart. Fewer babies, fewer jobs, less money to care for the sick, disabled and dying, and so on.

Paul considers various socioeconomic explanations for the declining interest in children: Women have more freedom thanks to educational opportunities and financial resources, coupled with a diminishing supply of potential male partners with minimally commensurate qualifications. Women outrank men in college degrees, as well as in some careers, including law and medicine. Once women have invested so many years pursuing advanced degrees, especially in the medical field, it’s understandable that some wouldn’t want to immediately begin having babies, assuming they’ve had time to meet a suitable partner. But why marry at all? Many women simply no longer covet the bride’s life. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that women in the U.S. were less likely than men to think that children are important for a “fulfilling life.”Eighty-five percent of American babies are born to couples, if not all of them married, despite a high number of single-mother births, Paul wrote. I was a single mother for a while. It’s like being a one-armed paper hanger. Everything we’ve worked toward the past three generations is now coming to fruition. Teen birth rates are down; most women can now effectively manage birth control; the patriarchy has been muted. And the baby boomer generation signed up for zero population growth. People like me, who were college students in the 1960s and 1970s, read Stanford biology professor Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” which led to a global antibirth movement.

Ehrlich’s best-selling widely denounced book began: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” owing to too many people taking too much from the Earth. If we didn’t stop procreating, he warned, we’d face “mass starvation” on a “dying planet.” By the end of the book, you were ready to tear out the last page, which was a form to fill out promising to have only one child.

Now what? The problem with doom-filled statistics is that they can never tell the human side of the story. What’s missing from debates about birth rates is the experiential part of parenting. Nowhere in surveys and articles I’ve read does the word “joy” appear. Yet, most parents will use the word pretty quickly in a discussion of what it’s like to be a parent. I’ve heard countless fathers say, “I can stare at our baby all day long.” Sure, smirks Mom. How about stop staring and change his diaper. Kidding aside, there’s no other way to describe what happens to parents when their little bundle arrives. Pure joy. I speak as someone who never wanted to marry or have children. My observations from childhood were far from positive, and I couldn’t see the point in any of it - until I did. Becoming a mother at 33 was THE defining moment of my life. Hard, yes, but what isn’t hard that is worthwhile?

Everything suddenly made sense amid a previously senseless pattern of random events that had me asking postpartum: What in the world have I been doing all these years? Nothing before had mattered. Everything after did. Maybe that’s just me, but I don’t think so. And stop worrying about every eventuality. What about climate change? What about the cost of college tuition? Do you think would-be parents during those times weren’t concerned about the future? Have the baby. Have another. It will all work out.

You can certainly lead a meaningful, purposeful, productive life without children, I hasten to add. Anna Jarvis, the woman who invented Mother’s Day, never married or had children, but she did have a mama, as do we all, and she wanted to honor her. In that spirit, Happy Mother’s Day to all the mamas of everyone reading this. Thanks for giving us your all - and for giving us a shot.

Kathleen Parker is a Washington Post columnist.