“But what about immortality?” ten-year-old Alison asks. I suspect that she, like Woody Allen, would have said that she didn’t want to achieve immortality through her children, she wanted to achieve it through not dying. Failing that, though, children aren’t bad. One of the worst things about writing about the importance of children is that practically everything you say turns out to sound like a greeting card. Still, clichés often get to be clichés because they’re true, and the cliché that children are our future is no more than simple, literal truth.
