“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

President Trump is going God one better. God told Adam and Eve to start having children. The president is considering adding an incentive — paying couples $5,000 to begat.

The fertility rate in the U.S. has been declining for the last decade. In 2023 it dropped to 1.6 births per woman, the lowest in a century.

There are many reasons. The most obvious is abortion. The Pew Research Center sites figures from the CDC: “The last year for which the CDC reported a yearly national total for abortions is 2021. It found there were 625,978 abortions in the District of Columbia and the 46 states with available data that year, up from 597,355 in those states and D.C. in 2020. The corresponding figure for 2019 was 607,720.” Stopping or severely restricting abortions would go a long way toward solving the birth dearth.

Absent that possibility we are down to the reasons people can’t, or won’t, have children. Can’t is usually biological. Won’t is more likely psychological. Perhaps the most frequent reason given by won’t couples includes the expense of having children, the supposed restrictions on parents’ travel, general freedom, the disappointments and pain that can come when kids rebel against their parents, or the consequences should parents divorce.

I have suffered from rebellious children, even the death of an adult child. None of it cancels the joy of holding a baby in my arms that I helped produce, hearing that child later tell me he or she loves me, and seeing even the spiritually truant come back to faith and set their lives aright.

Deciding not to have children, for some, creates the pain of regret. Never will they have descendants with their DNA, their values and a set of accomplishments that will make them proud. Never will they know what their children might have become, or contributed to the world. Their family tree will lack branches. Having a pet is not the same.

Parenting is more than biological. It’s not like Elon Musk, who has at least 14 children by four different women. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Musk has warned: “‘civilization is going to crumble’ if people don’t start having more children, a view popularized as pronatalism in right-wing circles. The pronatalism movement is composed of people concerned about the birthrate and eager to implement policy and cultural solutions to the problem.”

Musk wants to populate this planet and possibly Mars with children of high intelligence. He even thinks babies should be born by caesarean section so they will have larger brains.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Musk is not the first to think this way. It is an outgrowth of a worldview that is materialistic and places humans in the place of God.

In his novel “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley begins by explaining the scientific and compartmentalized nature of his fictional society, beginning at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, “where children are created outside the womb and cloned in order to increase the population. The reader is then introduced to the class system of this world, where citizens are sorted as embryos to be of a certain class. "The Matrix” film franchise is a modern metaphor that pits inherent human worth against soul-less technology.

President Trump’s suggestion that $5,000 payments would help produce more children reduces the value of a child to materialistic levels. An appeal made on the level of more important things (see above) might work better, producing not only more babies, but even good parents and a healthier society.

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