Having kids is bad for the environment.

Or is it the deficit? Or wait, no, it’s selfish because the world has gone to hell. Whichever one you choose, the important thing to remember is that, according to a growing number of liberals, reproducing the species is the equivalent of buying a McMansion and running the A/C with all the windows open.

Or maybe having babies is more like, say, pouring the concrete on an illegal Israeli settlement? “The egoism of child-bearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country,” says the narrator of Sheila Heti’s critically acclaimed novel Motherhood. “How assaulted I feel when I hear that a person has had three children, four, five, more. . . . It feels greedy, overbearing, rude.”