Opinion: Dear Baby Boomers, Stop Booming Our Babies!

Baby Boomers have been taking a lot of flack lately. And while criticizing people for having regressive, outdated opinions has its merits, we have long ignored their most disturbing offense: booming babies.

Let’s look at their name: Baby Boomers. Merriam-Webster defines the word “boomer” as “one that booms.” And based on the qualifier “baby” that precedes “boomer,” it is apparent that these boomers in particular are booming Babies. They’re booming our fucking babies.

Let’s do some quick math, shall we? 

• Wikipedia purports that “Baby Boomers” are the generation born between 1946 and 1964. We can assume that to be a Baby Boomer, one must have boomed at least one (1) baby in their lifetime.
• According to Statista.com, there are approximately 72.8 million Baby Boomers alive today in the United States. Therefore, over the past few generations, we have lost a minimum of 72.8 million babies to these cruel boomings.
• Statista.com also says that there are about 74.6 million women in the United States from ages 15-49: the prime age of childbearing.
• It takes approximately 9 months to birth a baby, or 0.75 years, so if every woman who is able to bear children is continually having babies, the maximum baby-output of our nation is 99.5 million babies per year (bpy), or about 3.15 babies per second (bps).
• Based on our original assumption, we’ve lost 72.8 million babies due to Boomers over the past 5 decades, but if we gain 99.5 million babies every year, this number is negligible!
• Unfortunately, we as a nation do not reproduce this efficiently, and the numbers I used were if Baby Boomers boomed only the minimum number of babies. The actual statistics show that a baby in the United States is born only every 8 seconds (vs. every 0.3 seconds in the ideal model) totaling about 3.9 million bpy. We as a nation are reproducing at only 4% capacity.
• Thus, the absolute minimum damage done is 18.6 years worth of babies boomed. If it were a real person, the totality of boomed babies could vote!

The numbers are astounding! I honestly do not understand how we let them get away with this for so long! It’s about damn time for us newer generations to put an end to the boomer’s Reign of Terror.

-BD ’22