Are Children Worth It?
We are supposed to believe that abortion
by Jennifer Roback Morse
Let us state it at once: Revolutionary
Road is a bad movie, despite the awards
it garnered from its Hollywood peers. The
story is Hollywood's fantasy of the
stultifying life in the 1950's suburbs.
Unbelievable storyline, unsympathetic
characters, and a socially irresponsible
message: evidently these are the
requirements for Hollywood awards.
The storyline: April (Kate Winslet) and
Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) are
living meaningless, hopeless lives in the
suburbs. He goes to a pointless job he
hates. She raises two children whom we
don't see enough of to care about. She
proposes that they sell their house and
move to Paris. She will support the family
by working in a government secretarial
pool and he will do something meaningful
and find himself. He agrees. Then he gets
a promotion he wants and she gets
pregnant. He backs out of the plan to go
to Europe. She gives herself an abortion
and dies. Why? Don't ask me. There is no
particular reason for any of these
characters to do any of the things they do.
The characters are not only unbelievable,
but completely unsympathetic. Leonardo
DiCaprio has an affair with a brainless girl
in the secretarial pool. Kate Winslet has
sex in the car with a neighbor. When the
main characters quarrel, we can't figure
out whom to root for: they are both self-
absorbed and narcissistic. Throughout, the
one and only consistent motivation for
these characters is their desire to feel
"special" and that they are somehow not
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse • 663 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road Suite 222 San Marcos CA 92078
www.jennifer-roback-morse.com • email: drj@jennifer-roback-morse.com • 760/295-9278
©2007 No part of this document may be reproduced or disseminated in any way without the expressed written consent of the
Ruth Institute.
like everyone else.
should be legal so that women like April
are not so desperate that they kill
themselves through self-induced abortion.
The scene in which she plans her abortion
is so overwrought, I couldn't bring myself
to care about her. I considered
abandoning my disapproval of euthanasia:
please, put this character out of her
misery so we can end this movie.
But what makes this movie so bad is not
just the hackneyed storyline, but the
socially irresponsible message the movie
conveys. I am talking about the thinly
veiled hostility to children, combined with
the nauseating narcissism of the adults. In
an era of demographic decline, the
message that children are the problem
and abortion is the solution is grotesque.
And the story itself doesn't even
accurately portray what it seems to
portray.
There are no real children in this movie,
even though the protagonists have
children. The children are mere props in
the story. There are no bicycles in the
driveway, no swing sets in the backyard,
no screen doors slamming, no children
careening through the house with a half
dozen other kids from the neighborhood.
The aborted child bears the full weight of
the adults' disappointments. April blames
the child for her frustration that the family
is not moving to Paris after all. But the
child is not really to blame: Frank would
have refused to go to Europe even if his
wife weren't pregnant. The abortion solves
none of her problems. She still is living
with a husband she doesn't like very
much. Her husband wants his promotion.
She is still living in the suburbs. And
above all, she is still normal. There is
nothing special about her.
In the meantime, society has moved on
since the Dreaded Fifties. Hollywood may
not have noticed, but the birth rate
among college educated white women,
like the characters in Revolutionary
Road, is down around 1.7 babies per
woman. The modern problem is not too
many children, but too few. The modern
problem is not that society forces women
to stay home in the suburbs to raise
children, but that society makes it almost
impossible for them to do so. Between
financial pressures, career goals, social
attitudes and government policy, many
women have fewer children than they
want, and spend less time at home with
them than they want.
In contrast to this glitzy Hollywood
production, Demographic Winter is an
independently produced film describing
the consequences of the population
collapse of industrialized countries. The
film argues that falling population will
mean a diminished quality of life for the
aging generation and for future
generations. For instance, pensions, both
private and public, have to be paid for.
When the retired population is too high
relative to the working population, paying
the promised pensions becomes an
enormous burden. Either the young pay
crushing taxes, or the elderly will not get
what they expected, or both.
Consumer spending keeps the economy
humming and the stock market climbing.
When population shrinks, the demand for
goods and services of all kinds shrinks. I
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse • 663 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road Suite 222 San Marcos CA 92078
www.jennifer-roback-morse.com • email: drj@jennifer-roback-morse.com • 760/295-9278
©2007 No part of this document may be reproduced or disseminated in any way without the expressed written consent of the
Ruth Institute.
have been thinking about demographic
decline while I drive through my San
Diego neighborhood. Out of forty-two
homes, we have four foreclosures. Yes,
the housing prices ballooned up and
people took on mortgages they couldn't
pay. But there is more to the story than
the credit crunch: there simply are not
enough people at the right age, with
enough income, to afford these houses.
Because the Baby Boomers didn't replace
themselves, there are not enough people
to buy their homes. Falling demand
translates into falling home prices.
The Chattering Classes can not bring
themselves to take the Demographic
Winter thesis seriously. The Left
dismisses it as a hysterical racist rant. The
Libertarian Right wants to talk about how
the modern world has given men and
women more choices, which is a good
thing. And Hollywood keeps dishing up a
very thin fantasy of Life in the Fifties,
dreamed up out of a screen writer's
hallucinations of Betty Friedan's version of
hell.
Yet demography really will be destiny. We
are placing our children in a bind, from
which they may not be able to extricate
themselves.
Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is an
economist and the Founder and President of
the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit educational
organization devoted to bringing hope and
encouragement for lifelong married love.
She is also the author of Love and
Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a
Village and Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long
Love in a Hook-Up World.