David Brooks discovers that education does make women infertile

I wish they would just fire that sniveling turd from the NY Times, and I wish I had a front row seat to watch. I cannot believe that Brooks is polishing up arguments from the Civil War era against feminism, coming dangerously close to stating that education weakens women's uteruses and that it is race suicide for white people not to reproduce at higher rates. Because that's the argument that is lurking behind his typical low-on-evidence, high-on-conjecture editorial today.

Over the past 30 years, the fraction of women over 40 who have no children has nearly doubled, to about a fifth. According to the Gallup Organization, 70 percent of these women regret that they have no kids.

It's possible that some of these women regret not having children in the way they regret not taking more time off after college. But for others, this longing for the kids they did not have is a profound, soul-encompassing sadness.

As we all know, the only women who are morally slack enough not to have children must be the same class of people that Brooks is always sniping at--people wealthy enough, for instance, not only to go to college but to take time off afterwards instead of getting a job to pay off student loans. The rest of us are tediously uneducated but morally pure super-uteruses.

For example, consider a common life sequence for an educated woman. She grows up and goes to college. Perhaps she goes to graduate school. Then, during her most fertile years, when she has the most energy for child-rearing, she gets a job. Then, sometime after age 30, she marries. Then, in her mid-30's, when she has acquired the maturity and character to make intelligent career choices, she takes time off to raise her kids.

After all, the delicate women of the upper classes cannot be expected to do what most women everywhere else, college-educated or no, do--have the kids and put them in day care to go back to work, because they can't afford to take time off from work.

This is not necessarily the sequence she would choose if she were starting from scratch. For example, it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children. Then, if she, rather than her spouse, wants to stay home, she could raise children from age 25 to 35. Then at 35 (now that she knows herself better) she could select a flexible graduate program specifically designed for parents.

Yep, and as we all know, such a graduate program that was completely stocked with well-off white women who were housewives after college would surely be regarded with the same amount of prestige that other graduate programs are regarded with. And of course there would be no problems whatsoever for women who spent their 20s as housewives losing their means of support, aka their husbands, through divorce before they had a chance to restart their education and careers.

Gosh, let's help women out even more by banning them from universities that push their students into careers right out of college, universities like Harvard and Yale, and set up a series of women-only colleges that are oriented more towards training their students to be the wives of the men that are going to Harvard and Yale. Why hasn't anyone had such a brillant idea before?

I suspect that if more people had the chance to focus exclusively on child-rearing before training for and launching a career, fertility rates would rise. That would be good for the country, for as Phillip Longman, author of "The Empty Cradle," has argued, we are consuming more human capital than we are producing - or to put it another way, we don't have enough young people to support our old people. (That's what the current Social Security debate and the coming Medicare debate are all about.)

There you have it, folks. Feminists caused the Social Security crisis. Now these selfish, over-educated white women that aren't having enough babies are going to force the country to do something like open up its borders to more immigration to increase the number of people in the workforce, which is something that would make Brooks positively swoon in fear. So stop taking the pill, women that Brooks knows!

Next week: Brooks implies that feminism causes global warming, if it does in fact exist.