Fertility rates are dominating global news, as we witness historic shifts in demography. Data are driving governments to incentivise people to have children, from cash rewards for larger families in India to tax breaks for low-income families in Greece. But, what is missing from the headlines and numbers are the human stories behind them, especially in future projections. So, we asked award-winning writer OluTimehin Kukoyi to craft a fictional essay about a future world with little-to-no births.
2080, 19 April: The Mother
Rocco is in the back yard, sweeping leaves. The morning is bright, thin clouds skimming across an unusually clear sky as if to say, even if only today, life is perfectly beautiful. In the kitchen, Dad is making pancakes in the shape of snowmen. It hasn’t snowed in decades, but the twins love the idea and ask for winter stories all the time. I still can’t believe they’re real. But they are, and they’re ours to love, raise, and protect.
Congratulations, Cassie. The embryo has taken. You’re three weeks pregnant. The moment that changed my life happened almost four years ago, but it feels like yesterday. Of more than 17,000 inseminations in my cohort, only 280 had taken. And only one pregnancy – mine – produced twins.
In the bathtub, Nino and Nayeerah are splashing each other, squealing. They’ve been awake and bouncing off the walls since dawn.
“Alright, monsters!” I dunk both of them in the fruitscented water, laughing. “Towel time!” I don’t have to say it twice. They scramble out of the tub, jostling dangerously to be first. Their third birthday has officially begun.
Rocco pokes in at the door. He’s so tall now, it makes my heart ache. He grabs a squirmy Nino under his arm while I scoop Nayeerah up and plant kisses all over her face.
“Remember when you were three?,” I ask my baby brother, feeling sentimental. His newly low-toned laugh joins the giggling pinging off the light brown tiles.
Rocco shakes his head as Nino chimes in. “When were you three, Roc? Was mama three too?”
“Your mama was three once, NinoNinja. A very long time ago.” Our laughter feels endless.
“What’s going on back there?” Dad yells.
“Your favourite genetic anomalies think you’re old, Dad,” I yell back.
“Uh, no?” Rocco interjects. “They think you’re old, Cass!”
“Mama’s not old!” Nayeerah lunges towards Rocco, slips on her PoohBear towel, and sits down hard with a yelp. Sudden silence. Then Nino sits down hard for no reason, and we collapse into helpless laughter again. Dad’s head comes poking around the corner, his mouth full of pancake.
“What on earth …?”
Things haven’t always been like this. Even now, with the riots, civil strikes, shortages and shutdowns, I still fear for myself and my family. But today’s a day to remember we’ve been blessed with the miracle of life. All the darkness outside can wait.
2075, 8 March: The Woman
“Thank you for coming in today, Ms Bering. Please sit while I process you for Intake.” Where’s the regular lady?, I wonder. I return the unfamiliar receptionist’s smile with a nervous grimace. My chest feels heavy and tight, just like on Arrival Day. They had snuck us into the Research Hospital through an underground entrance, huddled in the back of a cramped omnibus that smelled of pee and desperation. My group had twelve other young women, all of us sweating and silent. I never saw any of them again.
We joined four other groups to wait in an over-bright, under-furnished lobby, and I couldn’t get the angry crowds outside out of my head. I shivered. I used to be in those crowds once, back when I first dropped out of college and didn’t know what to do next. The squad from back then might burn me alive if they knew I’d signed up.
Have you ever been pregnant?
Are you having reproduction-friendly sex?
Do you experience social support from family or a close network of friends?
Have you ever had a period?
When was your last period?
Do you consent to being entered into the long-term reproductive monitoring programme?
I look around the room, shocked I’m doing this. There haven’t been any natural births in a decade. When Involuntary Infertility first started to spread, we all thought it was hilarious. No more babies on planes! No awkward conversations about kids at your wedding! No crazy skincare products for toddlers! Both the pro-life and pro-abortion parties agreed for the first time, which was extremely weird. Babies are too important to discard. Let our bodies decide! All my friends owned those oversized “burning earth, burning uterus” t-shirts at some point. Most countries had stopped testing for microplastics in our food or trace poisons in our water years prior. The babies stopped coming, and it felt like we were getting what we wanted; maybe even what we deserved.
2062, 3 January: The Girl
“Make a wish, Cassie!” My candles are red and pink, wavy little stick girls lined up in two rows of six with a shiny gold sparkler with “13” all over it as the star of the show. I picked them out myself. I close my eyes tight and wish, deep in the back of my mind. Please let me marry Rory, have four kids, and move to a beach house where the sun always shines and no one can find us. Except Dad. Maybe Dad.
Ida and Gary smile tightly at me from across the table. Her smile looks as painful as the way he holds her hand. Dad winks at me from the doorway, hat still on. His new girlfriend had poked her head in to say hello, then vanished. She seemed nice though. I smile back at my foster parents and blow out the sluggishly melting candles. “Thanks, Ida.” She’d stayed up late baking, with Gary complaining the whole time.
Ida heads to the kitchen for paper plates, and Gary yells over his shoulder, looking straight at me, “Kid’s getting a bit old for candles, dontcha think?”
I get up and go over to Dad.
“Happy birthday, Cass.” I feel like Dad’s getting shorter, but I know it’s me growing. I let him hug me for a long time, longer than twelve heartbeats. I don’t bother to ask if he’s leaving already.
“What’d you get me?” I bite my lip and cross my arms in front of my chest. For months now it has been painful, swelling with two hard buds that bump into everything. Dad leans back with a slow grin.
“You’re gonna be a sister.”
A warm sensation washes over me; my eyebrows rise to my hairline. Something clatters to the kitchen floor. A car honks from across the street. Dad chucks me under my chin.
“You happy about this, kiddo?” I blink slowly as he hugs me again, this time for five or six heartbeats. A baby. Whoa.
“Yeah, Dad.” I can hear myself thinking. “Best birthday present ever.” I check inside my chest to be sure I’m telling the truth. I am. A baby to love. Whoa. I squeeze Dad tight as the car honks again.
“See you next weekend, babysmoke.” Dad hasn’t called me that in a long time. I watch him disappear into the car. Next weekend might be next year.
Maybe when the baby comes, Dad’ll come get me to live with him. I feel hope unfurl inside my chest. Maybe we’ll be a family again.
2063, 12 June: The Sister
Ida is standing at the door, frowning. Gary is behind her, definitely smiling. I think Ida might be sad, but I can’t hear what she and Dad are saying. Sometimes I struggle to believe Ida and Gary are siblings, they’re always so awkward around each other.
When Gary first told me at my seventh birthday that he and Ida weren’t my parents, my life finally made sense.
“Bren’s your dad. It’s time we stopped waiting for him to tell ya.” He gave a long speech with lots of throat clearing. The whole time, Ida hovered in the background and refused to look at me. Gary, meanwhile, looked like he was waiting for me to cry. I made sure I didn’t. My insides crumpled into a quiet, more solid order. Nobody else I knew called their mum and dad by their names. Ida brought me to all my doctors’ visits and Learning Appointments, and she let everyone call her my mum except me.
“Oh.” I could feel him staring. “Thanks, Gary.”
We never lit the candles on my seventh birthday cake. On my eighth and ninth birthdays I wished for Dad to take me away. On my tenth, I finally just asked him. He hugged me so tight I didn’t know when I started to cry.
“I live in the Smoke, kiddo. There’s barely any kids down there. No kids, no sunlight, no trees. You’d hate it.” He squeezed me harder. “Shoot, I hate it.”
I bunched my hands into fists in his shirt and wouldn’t let go.
“I’m working on it, kid. I’m getting out of there. Don’t worry. I’m gonna come get you soon. Don’t you worry.”
I’m in the car, bags piled on the sidewalk, waiting. Did Dad know when he made me that promise that “soon” would be four years and a whole new family later. Rocco is beside me in his SafeSeat. We’ve met once before, when he was still sort of brand new and breakable. Cynthia let me hold him that day. He fell asleep while I held him. It made me cry.
2080, 20 April: The Mother
It isn’t quite dawn yet. I wince awake to an uncomfortable coldness under my left hip; Nino has wet the bed. To my right, Nayeerah is curled up in a ball, hair falling over her face. They have their own room, but apart from afternoon naps they never sleep in it. I no longer worry that I’m too attached. From treating diaper rashes, accidentally triggering allergies, and even that time when Ni broke his toe running to me, I know things will go wrong sometimes. Despite our best intentions, we’ve already made so many mistakes.
This isn’t the life that any of us envisioned; when I joined the Programme, my highest hope was that I would test Fertile and get hired as a surrogate for some wealthy family. Dad and I were both working Greener Earth jobs, but between Cynthia’s cancer treatments and Roc’s special needs, we never seemed to have enough.
Staring at the ceiling with its hand-painted stars, I remember the roller coaster of the Programme days. The endless testing to confirm if I was fertile enough to risk an Embryo Investment. Failing at my first two inseminations, knowing the third would be my last before I got deselected. Confirming pregnancy and crying over the first cheque from my Hiring Family. Discovering six weeks in that the foetus had split and the pregnancy had to be reported to the government.
The day I got the letter telling me that the Family had let me go, Dad had to take his entire shift off to hold my shivering, shaking body. Heritage laws didn’t have room for multiple children, speak less of multiples in one birth.
“Thank you for your generous willingness to help keep our Family going. We wish you all the best in your future endeavours.” All the money from the first cheque was already spent, and far too much of it had gone towards burying Cyn. There were two strangers living inside my body, and everything was falling apart.
Four years since that letter, things have turned out far better than any birthday wish I could have ever made. Instead of authorising a Termination, the government invited me and my Family to accept Protected Status. Instead of carrying strangers I would never meet for a Family whose world I could never belong in, I got to become a mother in a world with motherhood on the brink of extinction. And instead of my children being taken from me to be raised in a Research Centre, they get to experience the deep love and family care I never enjoyed in my own childhood.
There’s a cold patch spreading on my fresh sheets and a warm feeling in my heart. The world might be at war with itself outside, but here, in this place, the sun is slowly rising on me and two young human beings. I close my eyes again, letting that threatening tear finally fall down the side of my face, and pull my wildest dreams as close as possible to my grateful, rested body.
