The first divine blessing recorded in Scripture carries the force of a command: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” Its order is instructive. Generation precedes dominion. Before we accumulate wealth, establish governments, or exercise mastery over the Earth, there must be men. Civilization presupposes children. Statesmanship presupposes mothers and fathers. Government by the people presupposes the existence and renewal of a people.

Biblical teaching here accords with natural reason. Living things seek, according to their respective natures, to perpetuate their kind. Among men, generation includes far more than the biological act of reproduction. Children must be reared and educated. They enter both life and a way of life. Generation reaches its human fulfillment through education, by which a child acquires the habits and opinions needed to govern liberty through reason.

The family is natural in two related senses: It continues human life and forms human character. Its priority to civil society is chronological, moral, and necessary. The regime may regulate families, protect them, weaken them, or try to assume their functions. Nevertheless, it cannot abolish the family without destroying the very conditions of its own survival.

Egg freezing may appear to complicate this appeal to nature because the procedure is artificial. Yet artifice and unnaturalness are not identical. Medicine is an art whose proper purpose is to assist the body’s natural powers. Like every art, it may serve nature or seek to master it. The decisive question concerns the end governing the intervention. Does science remain the servant of a natural human good, or does it begin to dictate what human beings should desire?

A surgeon employs artificial instruments in pursuit of health. Agriculture alters the earth in pursuit of nourishment. Written law is a human construction ordered toward justice, whose claims arise from enduring features of human nature. Fertility medicine can likewise serve a good that no laboratory invented, and no technical revolution can make obsolete. Technology retains its proper rank when it helps preserve the possibility of motherhood. It exceeds that rank when it reduces motherhood to one lifestyle option among countless equivalent preferences.

This distinction matters greatly in an age that boasts of conquering nature while quietly submitting human life to the demands of science. We construct instruments in the name of liberation, then reorganize our lives around said instruments. An abundance of choices gives us little guidance about which choices are worthy. Technology enlarges the sphere of human power while remaining silent about the purposes power should serve. It supplies methods but never final reasons.

In this case, technology is directed toward an intelligible human good. Egg freezing offers no guarantee of motherhood, and responsible discussion should acknowledge its medical uncertainties, declining success rates with age, costs, and burdens. The procedure can also encourage the illusion that science has overcome the limits imposed by time and nature. Still, Ocasio-Cortez’s declared purpose is to preserve an opportunity for maternity that might otherwise narrow or disappear. Motherhood supplies the end. Reproductive technology offers an uncertain and imperfect means of keeping that end within reach.

Her decision also contains a paradox that conservatives should recognize without turning it into an occasion for cruelty. Ocasio-Cortez advocates a radical leftism and feminism frequently suspicious of sex, nature, and family. In truth, it treats nature as raw material awaiting the commands of the autonomous will. On this account, liberty grows as men escape identities, obligations, and limits they neither choose nor invent.

And yet, a liberty defined by emancipation from every natural necessity eventually rebels against human nature. Such a rebellion can never succeed. Ideology may obscure nature, reinterpret it, or encourage us to resent it. But ideology can never repeal it. A desire for motherhood settles no broader controversy about sex, family, or politics, and no woman’s worth should be reduced to whether she becomes a mother. Yet this desire illuminates a truth neglected by accounts of fulfillment centered exclusively on independence. Men seek completion through bonds they neither create nor control entirely: love, family, friendship, and the succession of generations.

Ocasio-Cortez’s choice, therefore, allows nature to speak through action more clearly than it often speaks through political doctrine. Deeds can disclose convictions that abstract arguments conceal. By preserving the possibility of motherhood, she acknowledges a good that professional success, political celebrity, and ideological consistency cannot replace.

Motherhood also bears directly upon republican government. Liberal democracy proclaims that man is free and equal by nature. Yet, every person begins life in utter dependence. The infant who will someday claim rights first receives life and love as gifts. Long before the future citizen understands liberty as a way of life, he learns — or fails to learn — the habits that make liberty possible.

The mother is the child’s first educator. From her, the child receives the moral language necessary for the elementary distinctions on which political life depends: good and bad, just and unjust, noble and base. These distinctions first arrive through praise and blame, command and example, affection and correction. Love gives them their earliest authority.

The family, therefore, constitutes the first regime because it provides the first authoritative ordering of human relations. There, the child learns that freedom requires the government of appetite and that legitimate authority can command without becoming tyrannical. The mother often mediates the child’s relation to the father and, more broadly, to authority beyond the self. The father’s contribution is indispensable, though it is not simply interchangeable with the mother. Equality in natural rights neither erases sexual difference nor renders the forms of parental care identical. In fact, political equality loses its coherence when it is made to depend upon declaring every human distinction meaningless.

A republic consequently relies upon virtues that legislation alone cannot produce. Statutes cannot summon the affection through which a child first learns trust. Bureaucracies cannot reproduce the sacrifices by which parents teach responsibility. Governments may establish schools, but the moral foundations of education must arise elsewhere. As families weaken, the regime inherits responsibilities that administrative rules and coercive power are poorly equipped to discharge.

For this reason, motherhood should command particular reverence from conservatives. A regime that hopes to preserve itself must honor the women who bear and raise its children, just as it must honor the fathers who protect, provide, and educate alongside them. The family requires both motherhood and fatherhood because continuity involves more than producing new individuals. It requires forming persons capable of the love, belief, and reason required for citizenship. Conservatism abandons one of its central purposes when partisan hostility makes motherhood an object of ridicule.

That ridicule also carries a greater danger. Much of the contemporary West suffers from a quiet nihilism: waning confidence that life is good, that the future deserves sacrifice, or that anything worthy can be handed down. Such nihilism rarely announces itself through explicit doctrines of despair. It appears more often as sterility of aspiration: the assumption that comfort outweighs continuity, that inherited goods possess no authority, and that posterity has no claim upon the living.

The hope of motherhood answers that despair through action. To seek a child is to wager that life remains worthy of continuation, that the future can contain goods worth serving, and that love, truth, and virtue can still be transmitted. Every generation confronts suffering and uncertainty. The decision to welcome another generation expresses confidence that these burdens do not exhaust the meaning of existence. In an anxious and often self-repudiating civilization, preserving the possibility of motherhood becomes an act of defiance against nihilism.

PRESIDENT AOC? THAT’S A SCARY THOUGHT — HERE’S THE KEY TO CONTAINING THE THREAT

Ocasio-Cortez has neither become a conservative nor renounced her political ideology. Her private hope provides no basis for inventing a broader political agreement. It nevertheless bears witness to a truth that conservatism exists to defend: Freedom and equality depend upon nature and the family, while civilization depends upon men and women willing to believe that life is worth continuing.

Conservatives should therefore wish her well. Fidelity to our own principles requires it.

Dimpee Brar is a Fellow for Religious Freedom with The Democracy Fund. She is a writer and commentator whose work may be found in the Washington Examiner, Daily Wire, The Federalist, American Spectator, and the Western Standard.