I grow a bit of food in the garden. This year, our raspberries did very well. During summer and autumn we harvested a lot of these berries. Of course, as the weather got colder, the yield declined. However, I was not aware that these plants just keep producing berries until nature puts a stop to it. I had thought that there is simply a period where pollination happens, followed by berries developing. Then you pluck them, and the year after, this repeats. Instead, this process just goes on and on until winter puts a hard stop to it.

In the first week of December, we had subzero temperatures. Yet, when I went into the garden I noticed that there were still some raspberries waiting to be plucked. They were frozen. I plucked them, and as I did so, I could not help but think of the will to survive and the drive to procreate. You are obviously aware that women, in particularly childless women, in their 30s get baby rabies. They either want a kid, or another kid, no matter what. Older childless women even try to one-up nature by getting IVF treatment. This is how nature works. In the end, plants, and people, want to procreate, no matter how difficult the circumstances may be. Our raspberry plants invested energy in growing some more berries, as berries carry seeds, regardless of how many berries they had already grown this year.

You may also know that plants grow towards the sun, leading sometimes to rather unexpected twists and turns in their stems and branches. Normally, you constrain this by binding your plants to a pole, or pruning bigger plants. Arguably, in such a controlled environment, the yield is below the maximum. It is certainly below the maximum of some plants who could otherwise capture more light, for instance. I do not constrain our plants very much, and I am sometimes amazed by the struggle of these plants. There is one stem of a raspberry plant that grows along the ground, almost in parallel, just to get out of the shadow that is cast by an older, bigger plant.

With humans, we see the same. We constrain human fertility by limiting the options of females in life. In the past, women were actively encouraged to be homemakers, but they could also go into some professions. Today, they get told that the only option is to pursue a career. The outcome is of course that they will have children later in life, and many fewer children than they otherwise would have had. Still, the drive is there and nature will make itself heard, and just like raspberry plants try to grow fruit in winter, so do older women try to get pregnant when it is almost too late.