Pop Squad and the Rise of Post-Birth Abortion
How Far will the Anti-natalists Go?
Progressive media has been quick to dismiss recent accusations by high-ranking Republicans like former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that Democrats support “post-birth” abortion. Debunking DeSantis, an article from the fact-checking website Politifact notes that no U.S. state, not even those with the most permissive abortion laws, allows for the killing of newborn infants, and that the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act already confers legal personhood upon any infant born alive after a failed abortion. MSNBC contributor Steve Benen finds it beyond belief that “Republicans like Trump…seriously expect voters to believe that there are women, medical professionals, and Democratic policymakers who ‘want abortion literally when the child is coming out of the birth canal.’ That’s insane. There are no such people.”
Assuming that were true, one nonetheless wonders why these rebuttals never state that post-birth abortion is morally wrong. They merely point out that abortionists are prohibited by law from dispatching infants once they are born, in which case Republicans are attacking a non-issue. Perhaps to affirmatively denounce infanticide would play into the hands of the enemy, many of whom use the term to refer to abortion at any stage in a pregnancy.
Briefly setting aside the question of what abortion advocates actually think about infanticide, let us imagine a world in which the slaughter of children—not fetuses in utero—is not only legal but mandatory. Such a world is the setting for “Pop Squad,” a 2006 short story by science fiction author Paolo Bacigalupi. A cinematic adaption has since appeared on the popular streaming service Netflix as an episode of Love, Death & Robots, an anthology series consisting of animated short films. As absurd as “Pop Squad” may seem, closer inspection reveals that its premise has already been taken for granted by much of modern society.
Following George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, “Pop Squad” continues the “banality of evil” trope by casting as its protagonist a bureaucratic enforcer of a ruthless regime. The film centers around Officer Briggs. He raids an apartment where the inhabitants are illegally raising children. In the original story, Briggs recounts with sheer disgust what he witnessed upon entry: “I squeeze my finger over my nose and breathe through my mouth, fighting off nausea… The shit smell thickens, eggy and humid. The nosecap barely holds it off. Old peas and bits of cereal crunch under my feet. They squish with the spaghetti, the geological layers of past feedings.” He discovers a “brood” of children from whom emanates an endless cacophony of “howls” and “shrieks.” The mother is dragged away, kicking and screaming, and Briggs aims his pistol, ready to “pop” the children. He pulls the trigger just as a boy offers him a green stuffed dinosaur.
Why are kids being put to death? Does the human race not need the little vermin to replenish itself? It turns out that affordable rejuvenation (“rejoo”) treatments enable individuals to live on indefinitely. Desperate to halt environmental degradation, the state has made rejoo mandatory, as it causes infertility. Any children born to people who refuse rejoo are summarily executed. In Briggs’ words, “we can’t keep letting people into this party if no one ever leaves.”
The scene cuts to Briggs’ self-driving police cruiser escaping the rundown neighborhood. It soars through the clouds and approaches a futuristic spire where Briggs attends a symphony. His romantic partner, Alice, performs a majestic solo. At a ceremony afterwards, Alice, described in the story as “perfectly slim” and “well curved,” remarks that she “can’t imagine stopping the rejoo treatment just like that.” “Why give all this up?”, she asks, standing atop a balcony outside the dazzling art deco concert hall, the city glimmering in the backdrop. “So not having kids seems a small price to pay for getting to live forever!” Briggs teases that he would marry Alice had they not been immortal. Alice, alluding to her upcoming rejoo session, responds that “if we weren’t gonna live forever, I’d let you get me pregnant.”
Intentional or not, Alice is a caricature of those who identify as DINKs, or “Dual Income, No Kids.” To quote one journalist, DINKs “present themselves as permanent adolescents with a lot more money and time to spend on themselves.” “We don’t have kids to feed, but we’ve got lots of money to spend on goodies,” says one woman in a TikTok video showing her and her husband purchasing $252.88 of mostly processed foods. For her, marriage appears to be a never-ending streak of fun dates: “You cannot tell me that grocery shopping and a fresh slice of Costco pizza isn’t a good date night.” Aside from perhaps a shared income, the marriage resembles a non-marital relationship, and just like Alice and Briggs, many DINKs are indeed unmarried and will never marry. If given access to rejoo, DINKs will no doubt choose it. For now, many make the most of their finite youth by sterilizing themselves.
Not all DINKs spend their childless lives going on Costco shopping trips. Alice, for one thing, spent 20 years (or 15 years in the story) perfecting her solo. Briggs recalls her practice routine: “[S]he practiced on the balcony, testing herself, working again and again against the limitations of her self. Disciplining her fingers and hands, forcing them to accept [the instructor’s] demands, the ones that years ago she had called impossible and which now run so cleanly through the audience.”
Historian Christopher Lasch observes that the elite in Western societies live a highly regimented lifestyle consisting of private schools, extracurriculars, and social events, all to inculcate delayed gratification. This attitude of command and control extends to the corporeal. In 2022, American households earning at least $125,000 a year spent over $200 billion on wellness-related products. “It is as though the white-collar class thinks of the body as a machine to be preserved and kept in perfect functioning condition, whether through prosthetic devices, rehabilitation, cosmetic surgery, or perpetual treatment.” They express “an impatience with biological constraints of any kind,…a belief that modern technology has liberated humanity from those constraints…”
Through immaculate self-discipline and obsession with youth, Alice betrays herself as a typical elite. In the “Why give all this up?” scene, a large humanoid statue serving as a pillar looms in the background, a veritable Atlas. The Greek god responsible for shouldering the heavens above is often associated with objectivism, which Ayn Rand identifies as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
The elite-objectivist ideology sometimes produces an unyielding hatred of children. It despises not just the act of having children—“All these women throw it away,” Alice says of mothers whose little ones hold back their otherwise unbridled will-to-power—but children in and of themselves. Briggs, in his account of the apartment raid, speaks for all who could not stand the immense din of toddlers and the filth in which they often find themselves. “I basely, emphatically, viscerally hate children,” proclaims one Alanna Weissman, a graduate of the prestigious Columbia University. “On a recent outing to the Bronx Zoo, a small child mistakenly grabbed my hand instead of her mother’s, and I instinctively recoiled as if the toddler’s touch had sent 10,000 volts of electricity coursing through my body.” Another woman calls a six-year old “a snot-nosed germ factory and life/financial drain…”
At this point, one might ask why anti-natalism, whatever its faults, should lead to infanticide. Do baby haters hate babies so much that they are willing to kill them? Not according to the haters. “I don’t wish children ill,” Weissman insists. “I just want them to stay the hell away from me.” Paradoxically, while contempt at best fosters an indifference towards those caught in the crosshairs—if Weissman, who admits to being “born without the nurturing gene,” is to oppose at all the ritual sacrifice of children in Africa, she is unlikely to do so out of concern for the children as such—it is mercy that pulls the trigger.
At the rejoo clinic, Alice again asks why some women have children. The film unfortunately leaves out this crucial dialogue. “‘If people made sense, we wouldn’t have psychologists.’ And we wouldn’t buy dinosaur toys for kids who were never going to make it anyway,” Briggs sighed. “[T]hey make babies they don’t know how to take care of, they live in shitty apartments in the dark…these dumb women tease their dumb terminal kids like that; treat them like they aren’t going to end up as compost.” The odds are stacked against junior, so why bother?
Poor “quality of life” has been used to justify the abortion of not just the clumps of cells whose parents are mentally or financially unprepared to raise them, but also those diagnosed with a lethal condition, “kids who were never going to make it anyway.” The Washington Post offered its condolences to a Florida woman who, despite carrying a child with Potter Syndrome, was denied an abortion under the state’s 6-week gestational limit. The woman, eager to abort, is also depicted as having a deep love for the child. She even named him “Milo,” cementing his status as more than mere fetal tissue. How despicable it is that her ability to put her son out of his misery, the greatest gift a mother can give, “was thwarted by politicians she has never met and who are not experts about obstetrics.” For another woman whose child was diagnosed with Trisomy 18, and who testified before the Nebraska legislature in favor of adding fetal anomaly exceptions to the state’s abortion ban, abortion is “a healthcare option for those who want a child, but nature gave them the short end of the stick.”
In some countries, “abortions” are allowed post-birth. Just as the Spartans allegedly vetted their offspring for deformities and tossed the unfit into a chasm, for it was, in the words of Plutarch, “neither for the good of the child itself, nor for the public interest, that it should be brought up,” the Groningen Protocol helps doctors in the Netherlands decide if they can euthanize disabled newborn infants. “[W]e accept that adults can indicate when their suffering is unbearable,” one medical journal declares. Prominent bioethicists like Peter Singer and Francesca Minerva also endorse child euthanasia. They argue that “a member of the species Homo sapiens” only becomes “human,” and thus earning the right to life, once it has acquired “characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness,” and infants with “irreversible intellectual disabilities…will never be rational self-conscious beings.”
Support for mercy killing is the logical conclusion of what Christopher Lasch describes as a social Darwinist mindset whereby “it is irresponsible to bring children into the world when they cannot be provided with the full range of material and cultural assets essential to successful competition.” To the status-hungry elite, “an unwillingness to grant [disabled or unwanted] children’s ‘right not to be born’ might itself be considered evidence of unfitness for parenthood.” “Stupid mothers,” Briggs scoffs as green rejoo fluid is pumped into Alice’s veins.
Some will protest that the aforementioned procedures are done on a voluntary basis, which sets them apart from the state-sponsored violence in “Pop Squad.” Moreover, the killings are said to have come from genuine compassion, contra Briggs’ mere pessimism. Whatever truth there is to these claims, it will evaporate should a society pursue in earnest what many birth control proponents see as the dire need to stave off impending ecological ruin. Those who wish to save the planet but maintain that family planning must be freely chosen must grapple with the fact that some individuals will always choose not to partake in it. Ecologist Garrett Hardin, known for popularizing the term “tragedy of the commons,” writes that “[i]f everyone would restrain himself, all would be well; but it takes only one less than everyone to ruin a system of voluntary restraint. In a crowded world of less than perfect human beings, mutual ruin is inevitable if there are no controls.” Coincidentally, the world of “Pop Squad” is also near-uninhabitable.
It remains to be seen if liberal democracies will fall for the lure of centralized population control. What is certain is that Alice, Briggs, Hardin, and most people who support abortion out of concern for overpopulation all agree that “[e]very human born constitutes a draft on all aspects of the environment: food, air, water, forests, beaches, wildlife, scenery and solitude.” In a dying world, why should useless eaters get to live? The abortionist, while affirming the desirability of mercy killing, fears that its less-than-voluntary implementation might be weaponized against people of color. Hence, the need to reflect on how reproductive control has been “employed in the service of racist, sexist, colonialist agendas.”
Later in the story, Briggs, having mistakenly shot a mother when his orders are to shoot only her children, alludes to how the progressive left does not want its policies to hurt favored groups: “Keep the feminists off us for only bagging the women.” Is commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” the last line of defense against a child holocaust? What if it does benefit the marginalized? Some, like psychologist Toni Falbo of the University of Texas, already praise China’s One-Child Policy for its purported success in boosting girls’ self-esteem. The policy that had led millions of infants to be killed or abandoned had “opened up opportunities for girls, which created a positive effect for female only children.”
Despite loathing all things juvenile, Briggs kept thinking about the stuffed dinosaur held by the boy he had killed earlier, for Alice had received an identical one as an award. Briggs recovers the toy and spots a label with the name of the antique store where it had originated. Visiting the store, he notices a young woman buying a toy train. “As she wanders the aisles, I spy a stain on her shoulder. It’s small but obvious if you know what to look for, a light streak of green on a creamy blouse. The kind of thing that never happens to anyone except women with children.” Motherhood is a messy job.
Briggs follows the woman to an old house. As he enters the kitchen, gun in hand, the woman immediately wraps her arms around her child. The film never shows Briggs taking aim. In the story, however, Briggs rests his gun on the table only after he realizes that he could not get a clear shot: “It’ll rip right through and take out the mom.” The mother’s willingness to die alongside her child bought time for a conversation in which she unravels the sadistic logic of her world, and ours. What happens next is best summarized by George Orwell: “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles.”
“Why do you do it?”, Briggs demands to know. “Why do people like you keep having these kids?” “Why?”, the mother responds. “Because I’m not so in love with myself that I just want to live forever and ever.” To her, the upper-class penchant for unfettered choice and productivity is but a sorry excuse for selfishness. Like John the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, she will not yield to elite social engineers who aim to remake her in their likeness. She embraces her mortality. In doing so, she becomes a giver of life, while they remain sterile, if not dead. “Look in the mirror. You’ve all got dead eyes,” mocks the mother in the original story.
“And this is living?”, Briggs presses on. “Here? Keeping it locked…” “Her!” The mother interrupts, resisting the dehumanization of her daughter. “Her name is Melanie!” Unconditional love cares not that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) regards “unborn child” as a “clinically inaccurate” term, or that bioethicists classify some infants as just “member[s] of the species Homo sapiens.” “I love seeing things through her little eyes. They’re so bright. They’re so full of life…,” the mother explains as Melanie plays with her toy train. “I remember her first steps. I remember her first laugh. I remember the first time she called me mommy. I remember all these moments because I know I won’t have many.”
For the first time, Briggs smiles: “She’s cute.” “You feel something, don’t you?”, the mother asks. Briggs hands Melanie his hat. “She wants to put it on your head. It’s a game she plays,” says the mother. Just as Briggs lowers his head, and nearly his guard, the mother lunges at his gun. Briggs swiftly pins her onto the table. He snatches the gun from her hand, sights trained on the now wailing child. “Please. Don’t shoot her,” the mother begs. “Shoot me instead. I’ll make room. Do it. Do it!”
The camera zooms in on Briggs’ sullen face as the cries intensified. He relents. The mother rushed to embrace her daughter. As Briggs exits the home, he sees his raiding partner, Officer Pentle. She has the eyes of a predator ready to pounce on its prey. Briggs unloads his gun onto Pentle. She returns fire but is cut down. A wounded Briggs limps off the porch and into a nearby jungle, baptizing himself in the rain.
Earlier, Briggs boasts that “I’m glad I’ve got a job where forgetting is the most important part. Working on the pop squad means your brain takes a vacation and your hands do the work.” Yet, “as I look down at my hands, I’m surprised to find pinpricks of blood all over them. A fine spray… My fingers smell of rust.”
“Pop Squad” offers a rare window into the mind of an abortionist. It also hints at a path for his redemption.
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