Population is a subject that everybody knows a bit about, and procreation supposedly so. The problem with the “common sense” knowledge about population facts and dynamics is like the one with “common sense” in economics: it is not common sense at all, but the trickling down of liberal (and increasingly, neoliberal) theories and ideologies from high schools, colleges, universities, and therefore media and politics. And they serve a purpose: the Weltanschauung that these ideologies promote is the political economy that serves to sustain and advance the ruling class, the owners of the means of production through their control of transnational companies’ stock, in this social system called capitalism or, as Immanuel Wallerstein started to theorize following the suggestions of Fernand Braudel, in the capitalist world-economy.

Everybody knows that the problem with the poor and with poor nations is that they multiply themselves. Everybody knows that the greater the numbers of the human species, the more we devour Earth's and Nature's resources. Everybody knows that China has decreased its population through the draconian measure of the one-child policy and that in the mid- nineteenth century the Irish suffered a horrendous famine because they were simply too many of them. Everybody knows that there has been a “demographic transition,” replicated or on its way in every country. Everybody knows that reproduction and procreation are synonymous, though the word “reproduction” started to be used only in the eighteenth century, modeling procreation on the industrial “production” process, which by the way is where the masters of artificial reproduction techniques (clinics, researchers, biologists, gynecologists, and also pharmaceutical companies and politicians funding research), including gene editing, would like to bring all human procreation. Everybody knows that sex is natural, and that the instinct to procreate is part of our animal nature, perhaps justifying the dominance of the husband over the wife, as mandated by the irate God of Genesis. The notion that procreative sex is natural is increasingly questioned, but also from postmodernist viewpoints that deny even its reality (and the general concept of “reality”) attributing the sexual difference entirely to language and culture.