I rarely have that empty feeling.

I eat too much ice cream for that. And my brainpan is too full of metaphor ingredients to make room for bleakness. Evidently, though, I should be experiencing a pervading sense of purposelessness. For I am no good to the world unless I have pushed out a new little human.

There’s a shortage, you know. My goodness, there are still a few places left with humanage insufficient to destroy the environment, and it is up to us women to make sure the planet is ever more thickly pasted with people. It takes all of us working together, because only a blessed few of us are able to produce litters, and many hands make light work. Which is instructive, because I have never really understood how light works.

It is truly a miracle how an entirely new human can arise inside a woman without her even intending it. In fact, that happens a lot. She doesn’t even have to be conscious, truth be told. And it’s a good thing, too, because if women could choose when or if to have children, and how many to produce, there wouldn’t be as many children, and the women would go on to lead miserable, pointless lives.

No one wants that.

JD Vance has suggested that spawning prowess is so vital to the nation that mothers should have more votes than childless women. He reasons that people without children have no investment in the future, whereas the fabulously fertile can be counted on to vote for unsustainable fossil fuel consumption, expensive health care, and no social safety net, and maybe he’s right. It’s hard to think straight when you’re knee-deep in rug rats.

Anyway, it’s a great idea. A woman with five children gets six votes. Conceivably, a man could get 300 million votes per ejaculation. Sometimes he just creams his shorts with those votes, though, so let’s knock that down to a slim million or so.

Dave and I should probably have our votes withdrawn retroactively. We are not only childless, but avoided having children in manner some people might term aggressive. We felt there was far too much danger our offspring would turn out something like us, and besides, as Dave always said, you can’t make babies with spit.

Mr. Vance also contends that there is still some value to the post-menopausal woman because she can take care of grandchildren. Of course, she’d already have contributed to the population to get grandchildren out of the deal, so it’s a relief that he does not believe she should be summarily executed once her womanliness peters out. Besides, she still has value to the incontinence-pad industry. I imagine that even those of us afflicted with voluntary barrenness could be recruited to take care of other people’s children, although that is often not an activity high on the list of women who choose not to procreate.

If the full measure of a citizen’s worth is found in her uterus, what is a man worth? Not much, I’m thinking. Unless he devotes himself to taking care of all the children. It would give him purpose, and it only seems fair.