Nota Behn-eh II: Welcome to the League of Extraordinary Birthing Gentlemen

Tennessee voters have only seven days remaining to choose wisely in the TN-07 special election. May as well ride those out by shining a spotlight on the crank Democrats chose to run in the R+10 congressional district.

So far, Aftyn Behn has made quite a name for herself as the Democrat nominee. The state legislator has had to fend off a cornucopia of unearthed statements, tweets, and videos from the past few years that paint her, as David wrote earlier, as something of a sociopath. That might have been a bonus for a political career, had it been married to an intellect that could take advantage of an utter lack of conscience. However, Behn has come across as someone who acts less out of intellect and more from regurgitation of progressive clichés woven into word salads that would make Kamala Harris jealous enough to run through an entire box of wine.

Frankly, this statement from 2020 about “birthers” and unionization needs all the alcohol it can get, emphasis mine:

2020 video of Tennessee State Rep. Aftyn Behn resurfaces:

“I think we have as birthers… men and women who can give birth… we can maybe leverage that as collective bargaining.”pic.twitter.com/9fpfPUsMib

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) November 25, 2025

BEHN: I think, as an organizer and as an activist, like, we really have an opportunity here in this country to talk about what kind of policy – progressive policies we want to see as young women. And I think we have, as birthers, as women who can give birth, men and women who can give birth, we can maybe leverage that as collective bargaining. That is the basis of this book that I’m not – I’ve just started reading called Birthstrike, and how we can really leverage collective bargaining when it comes to having children in this country. And so, for example, like, I’m not going to give birth until the United States government concedes A, B, C, D. What do you think about that?

Q: Hmmm. Seems a little much.

BEHN: Really?

How much insanity can one politician pack into 45 seconds of conversation? Let us count the cray-crays. First off, does Behn understand that the term “birthers” means something else politically in the US? Does she really want to associate herself with that?

Second: men cannot give birth. Let me state that one more time, with feeling: men cannot give birth. Females give birth. It doesn’t get much more basic in biology than this fact. It does not matter what feelings men and women have; biology dictates reproductive function. If Behn doesn’t know that, she’s too ignorant for public office. If she does know that, then she’s too interested in pandering to progressive activists to represent the voters of TN-07, who are primarily social conservatives, except for a small portion of Nashville added to the district in the 2020 redistricting.

And we all know how Behn feels about Nashville. 

Next: Who in their right mind would think that the collective fertility of a league of extraordinary birthing gentlemen would have leverage over “the United States government”? We have a Congress to set policy, as well as a president elected by the states. That’s the position Behn wants now, in fact, and that is how constitutional republics work, not through social-justice extortion. Despite Behn’s inflated sense of self – part of the sociopathy David notes – no one really cares whether hyperventilating radicals procreate. In fact, a strike on the fertility front by the hard Left might provide some benefits. 

Speaking of hyperventilation, the 2019 book Birth Strike focuses on using fertility for leverage over “the hidden fight over women’s work.” That certainly seems to be at odds with Behn’s weird inclusion of men as “birthers,” given the blurb on Amazon. However, the broader “birthstrike” movement is actually a climate-change protest strategy, which emerged before the book got published:

Pepino believes that there will be an “ecological Armageddon” and founded BirthStrike at the end of 2018. BirthStrike is a group of people who are declaring their decision not to have kids because of “the severity of the ecological crisis.” …

The BirthStrikers have decided they can’t bring children into a world facing an ecological breakdown, and where scientists predict climate change will bring bigger wildfires, more droughts, and food shortages for millions of people.

In 2018, the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned the planet only has 11 years to prevent catastrophic climate change.

“You are gambling with someone else’s life,” said Cody Harrison, a 29-year-old who recently joined the group. “If things don’t go well, that human is not going to have a very good life.”

“When climate change gets worse, it multiplies other things. It’s like dominoes that are falling,” said Lori Day, another member of BirthStrike. “It goes beyond sea level rise and storms. It affects food production, migration, resources and war.”

BirthStrike is one of a number of groups around the world that are questioning the ethics of having children in a warming world. Conceivable Future, a network of women in America, was founded in 2015 to bring awareness to “the threat climate change poses to reproductive justice,” although that group’s members haven’t discounted having children.

This is the same Malthusian obsession that has gripped the Left since the publication of The Population Bomb in 1968. The Smithsonian’s magazine revisited Paul Ehrlich’s book fifty years later, just as the Birthstrike movement began. The review recalled the book’s hyperbolic predictions, and worse yet, how it drove “human rights abuses around the world”:

Driving the criticism of The Population Bomb were its arresting, graphic descriptions of the potential consequences of overpopulation: famine, pollution, social and ecological collapse. Ehrlich says he saw these as “scenarios,” illustrations of possible outcomes, and he expresses frustration that they are instead “continually quoted as predictions”—as stark inevitabilities. If he had the ability to go back in time, he said, he would not put them in the book.

It is true that in the book Ehrlich exhorted readers to remember that his scenarios “are just possibilities, not predictions.” But it is also true that he slipped into the language of prediction occasionally in the book, and more often in other settings. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” he promised in a 1969 magazine article. “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” Ehrlich told CBS News a year later. “And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

Such statements contributed to a wave of population alarm then sweeping the world. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the Hugh Moore-backed Association for Voluntary Sterilization and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places. “The results were horrific,” says Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, a classic 1987 exposé of the anti-population crusade. Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh. 

In the 1970s and ’80s, India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. (“At long last,” World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, “India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”) For its part, China adopted a “one-child” policy that led to huge numbers—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions, often in poor conditions contributing to infection, sterility and even death. Millions of forced sterilizations occurred.

Behn’s not just an idiot. She’s not just a potential sociopath. She’s a dangerous crank, if a mildly entertaining one. Republicans need to turn out in TN-07 hard to keep this seat out of the hands of a radical nut. We can find entertainment elsewhere after next Tuesday. 

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