The End of Men(81)
“No,” I say simply. “That would be irresponsible. Age, health, proven ability to look after a child. Those are not the criteria of a mad dictator ruining lives. Those are sensible pieces of information that have to be used to ensure the highest chance of success of demographic recovery.”
“It just doesn’t seem fair.” Gillian sighs and I’m reminded, yet again, of why she is a politician and I’m not.
“None of this is fair,” I reply in as patient a tone as I can muster. “There are many more women who wish to have children than men and donated sperm. It will never be fair. The goal is not to be fair. The goal is population recovery with minimal civil unrest. The US government and the UK government have almost complete control over who within those countries have children. Almost no baby is an accident now. We all have to get used to that idea.”
“But the prioritization of people in long-term relationships? Surely that’s unfair.”
“As the only person in this room who has actually raised a child alone, I’m fairly well placed to say that raising a child as a single parent is very difficult. We can remove the prioritization of women in relationships if it makes you feel better, but don’t delude yourself about what having a child alone, in this world, will take.”
Zara and Gillian look at me in stunned silence and I suppress the urge to sigh. I rarely bring up my personal life and this is why. Once you develop a reputation as someone who is professional, competent and private, any information about your personal life is treated with the same care and awe as a nervous breakdown.
“If only for the public perception, I think we should take out the required prioritization of people in long-term relationships. We can allow councils to apply relationship criteria as they see fit,” Gillian says.
We spend the next few hours changing the plans and running the public statement through the various communications people who need to approve it. Finally, finally, it’s ready to go to the prime minister for her approval.
Gillian goes on her merry way and Zara and I sit in the meeting room, exhausted.
“Did you ever think,” she says, “when you decided to do this job, that you and I would have a meeting about which women are allowed donor sperm?”
I shake my head. “Weirdly enough, no. It never crossed my mind.”
CATHERINE
London, United Kingdom (England and Wales)
Day 1,500
A few hours before I’m due to meet Libby and her brother, Peter, for “pre-Christmas” drinks, Nadine Johnson’s memo and the surrounding furor hits the internet with a velocity that leaves much of the world reeling. It’s the impossible question the world needs to answer: How will we repopulate? Who gets to have a baby?
I meet Libby and Peter in a bar in the city. I rarely venture here to this land of glass skyscrapers and well-dressed women with smart handbags, heads bowed over their phones. Each time I’m here, though, I’m struck by the vast difference from before. Before it was mainly men with some women. Now the few men stand out, their suits glaring against the dresses and skirts.
Sometimes I wonder how Libby and I are friends. She is hugely, indubitably cooler than me. There’s no way around it. Today she’s wearing a pink jumpsuit that would make me look like a deranged plumber. I turned up at Oxford with a bag full of crocheted cushions and bunting for my room, wearing a cardigan, and she arrived wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt and with a vinyl record player in tow. Despite my shortcomings, she’s a steady, devoted friend and I feel the relief of her presence.
“God it’s good to see you,” I mutter into her hair as I hug her.
“A lot easier to arrange to meet up now that we’re in the same country, huh?”
“Just a bit.”
Libby beams at me, that broad smile that makes me feel like the world is about 20 percent less scary than it was a moment before.
“Have you seen the article?” she asks as she pours me a glass of cider from the bottle on the table.
“Absolutely mad, isn’t it?” I reply.
“Are you going to write a paper on it?” Libby asks, knowing that before the Plague I found the search for research topics painful. “Surely how we’re all having children is pretty high up on the lists of things for anthropologists to study at the moment.”
I nod. “For once there’s too much for me to be studying. I don’t have time to do a paper on this specifically, although I’m teaching a new course, ‘The Ethics of Reproductive Choice in a Post-Plague World,’ in the new year, so I’ll have to write something up on it.”
“That sounds fascinating,” Peter says, his voice practically dripping with longing. “Being an actuary has never seemed like such a bad call.”
“You live in a four-bedroom house in Zone 1, you can walk to work and you have a garden,” Libby says with an eye roll. “Being an actuary pays.”
“What else are you going to include in the course?” Peter asks, and I remember that part of the reason I like him so much is that he’s one of the four people I’ve ever met outside of academic circles who’s seemed genuinely interested in my work.
“In the first lecture I’m covering New Zealand and the ethics of their whole ‘taking children and putting them in isolation’ thing. Some of the parents have posted videos online of the children being released once they’d been vaccinated and you’d have to be heartless not to cry at that.”