The Case for Kids - Christianity Today Magazine

And it's an excellent case, and a stark one. Consider this, all you Malthusians who think the planet can do without your children:

Even after considering the cost of education, a typical child in the U.S. consumes 28 percent less than the typical working-age adult, while elders consumer 27 percent more, mostly in health-related expenses...How do we order and feed such a top-heavy, resource-consuming society of elders—a demographic of which most who read this article are a part? Who will produce the goods needed to keep the nation's engines and industries running? When our self-reliance wears out, when our self-authenticated minds and our spiritually unfettered and independent souls grow dim with age, who will feed and sustain us? Who will wheel us into surgery, deliver our packages, grow our food, research and formulate the medications that enable us to live longer and better? In an overburdened medical system, who will decide whether or not our lives still have value when our medical costs outweigh our economic worth? In all of this, we will depend on the actions and judgments of other peoples' children.

Happily, according to this, those "other people's children" will be there. I see just one problem, though: if the Lord tarries, the children of those large families (that seem to be coming back) will find themselves fighting a shooting war with the children of all those wailing abbaya-clad women we see on Al-Jazeera TV.