Status Updates From I figli degli uomini

… sufficient young to maintain their economic structures. But as I remember it, no one suggested that the fertility the human race was dramatically changing. When Omega came, it came with drastic suddenness It was received with incredulity. Overnight, it seemed the human race had lost its power to breed. The discovery of July 1994 that even the frozen sperm stored for experiment and artificial insemination….

Some European countries began to pursue a vigorous campaign to encourage the birth of children, but most of us thought the fall was desirable even necessary. We were polluting the planet with our numbers if we were breeding less, it was welcomed. Most of the concern was less about a fall population that about the wish of nations to maintain their own people their own culture, their own race to breed sufficient….

We thought we knew the reasons, that the fall was deliberate, result of more liberal attitudes towards birth control and abortion, the postponement of pregnancy by professional women pursuing their careers, the worship of families for a higher standard of living. And the fall and population was complicated by the spread of AIDS, particularly in Africa.

20 years ago, when the world was already half convinced that our species had lost forever, the power to reproduce the search to find the last known human birth became a universal Obsession, elevated to a matter of national pride, and international contest is ultimately pointless as it was fierce and acrimonious.

this is so slooow rn