"The city�s birthrate is steadily declining, but not among the affluent, and that rise is changing the feel of the city."

So says the teaser on the front page of the NYT that takes us to "Baby Boom Among New York�s Affluent," which is illustrated by this startling ad � anti-birth propaganda from the city:



"What happens to me?" = words the government puts in the mouth of the unborn child, who presumably has the opinion that she should not be born. And try to wade through the race-and-class politics of this:

Between 2004 and 2013, of all the racial groups that the city�s Health Department measures, birthrates increased only among whites. Beginning around 2010, as birthrates among whites started steadily to climb up, birthrates among blacks began to go down. In 2013, blacks had a birthrate of 12.7, the lowest of any group in the city, with the abortion rate four times as high among black women as among white women...

For decades there were factions on the right worried about poor minorities �overbreeding� and taxing the city�s resources. Historically, there has been far less panic about the affluent having a lot of children, and yet they change the feel of the city, driving family-size S.U.V.s and generating a more suburban sensibility. The main complaints have come from well-off people themselves, as they worry about overcrowding in affluent school districts and rising numbers of children attending private school, making admission even more impossible....

So the affluent white people end up sick even of themselves � or especially of themselves � and the NYT tries to amuse its affluent-white-female readership with this kicker:

Perhaps those ads could be recast and targeted at TriBeCa mothers with small children, warning them of the tough realities: �You may think you want a fourth child. But what if your husband never buys you that four-bedroom apartment and never says yes to the weekend nanny?�

ADDED: Two things:

1. Why pick on "factions on the right" who worried about "poor minorities" breeding when you've got an ad that plainly reveals that the city government � liberals � were actively fighting exactly that?

2. It's quite politically incorrect to portray a woman as looking to her husband to buy her a home and and a servant. Don't these upscale, affluent types have egalitarian marriages these days? I would have thought that TriBeCa mothers are equal partners in decisionmaking within their marriages. Why did that sexist stereotype suddenly appear? When does the NYT let its guard down?