Eventually, Sarah met Mark who felt as passionately about the perils of children as she did. Together, they decided that Mark should undergo voluntary sterilization—in his case, a vasectomy.

They see their actions as part of their commitment to living “as green a life a possible”: recycling, using low-energy light bulbs, eating “organic, locally produced food,” and having themselves sterilized.

While these are extreme cases, the beliefs driving them are anything-but-fringe, especially among environmental activists. Much of their rhetoric depicts the relationship between man and the rest of creation as a “zero-sum game,” in which what is good for people is, by definition, bad for the planet.

It is not uncommon to read about an environmentalist saying that what the planet needs is a good catastrophe to “cull” the human herd. An award-winning scientist said just that last year.

While most people reject that kind of extremism, the basic idea—that large families are “irresponsible”—has spread to much of Western culture. People with large families are looked on as freaks, and complete strangers do not hesitate to tell them so.

However widespread this misanthropic worldview may be, it is folly, as the demographic crisis in Europe and East Asia demonstrate. Societies that view children as a burden find themselves facing extinction. That, in turn, leaves the future of our civilization, and of life itself, in the hands of the fruitful, those who believe that man, created in God’s image, is the crown of creation, not the curse.