Imaginary infants as beacons of hope

Other demographers aren't convinced. They argue that one study about a hurricane can't be relied upon for proof that a 9/11 baby boom is on the way. "Sept. 11 was a watershed event for our sense of security about the world -- but not for births," says Gerson at NYU. No one-day event, including Sept. 11, she argues, is likely to affect the birthrate.

Others experts, like Kathleen Tierney, director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, see the 9/11 baby boom as part of American myth-making, yet another urban legend wrought by wishful thinking. We need evidence of our ability to perpetuate the species, to survive, grow, and to move on, regardless of the adversity we face. Celebration of conception and birth is a life-affirming reaction to death.

"We want to think that death is accompanied by the renewal of life, that the grave is not in the end victorious," says John Lachs, a philosopher at Vanderbilt University. "This is the native optimism of the living, energetic animal."

In Americans, this buoyant optimism is especially pronounced, Lachs says, "because we have powerful drives and have attained greater control over disease and death than perhaps any other nation in history."

A baby boom also satisfies our desire for closure -- and a happy ending. It invites us, or our family members or friends -- anyone who is pregnant -- to become part of the 9/11 story. We've already made family angst and social stigma the tickets to fame and fortune. Now, with the myth of the baby boom, we're making terrorism and its effects a desirable commodity, a lock on collective immortality. We want to be hurt, affected, altered down to our sexual souls -- and warmly remembered -- forever. This will make us, we believe perhaps correctly, more interesting -- and if the facts don't cooperate, we ignore them.

Of course there may be nothing wrong or harmful in all of this self-centered spin. What's wrong with wanting to be involved in a pivotal moment of our nation's history? Isn't belief in a baby boom, as experts like Rindfuss argue, a harmless form of comfort?

Perhaps.

But if we falsely trust that we've already changed, that the outcome of the attacks is literal renewal and replacement, we are less willing to admit or believe that more needs to be done. The government, we stress, ought to crack down on terrorism, and do a better job protecting its citizens. Find Osama. Make the world a safer place. We have already responded, we have done our part, we say. We've changed! We're better! Haven't you been to the nursery? Didn't you see all the beautiful, perfect babies?

Gerson, for one, fears that a form of complacent logic has already taken root. We don't want to bother with the heavy lifting of political or social change, she argues. And by focusing on the sheer quantity of children born, we're giving ourselves a pass -- the freedom to overlook the quality of the world they are entering.

Especially silly and sad, she argues, is the belief that the baby boom is somehow a measure of Sept. 11's significance. Even if there are no more babies born, in New York or elsewhere in the wake of 9/11, the disaster will be remembered as meaningful, and in many ways, life-changing. We're mistaken when we forget that "[Sept. 11] is important without overestimating its consequences," Gerson says. The day is horrific, tragic and significant no matter what -- "even if it doesn't necessarily change everything."

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