The world of Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film, is one of fear and sorrow. The year is 2027. Humans are infertile. No babies have been born in 18 years. Populations have collapsed, economies crashed, political borders closed. England, where the film takes place, is in permanent crisis. When bombs explode in neighborhood stores, it’s not clear if the perpetrators are terrorists or the government trying to maintain a state of emergency. Police barely control a refugee crisis through imprisonment, deportation, or execution. Headlines announce “borders will remain closed… the deportation of illegal immigrants will continue… all foreigners now illegal.”

Not that the Brits themselves are free. While a privileged minority are permitted to picnic in Hyde Park with pet zebras and camels, the populace lives in litter-strewn tower blocks under what appears to be martial law.

This childless world of a disappearing humanity is also awash in sorrow. Miriam, a former midwife, explains: “As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in.” To regulate the population, government rations include anti-depressants. State television promotes “Quietus,” a government-sanctioned suicide kit for older adults, with the grimly empowering tagline “You decide when.” This same state that wants older Brits to extinguish themselves and refugees to disappear also desperately wants British babies born. Hoping to identify a fertile native, the state announces that “Avoiding fertility tests is a crime.”

There are those, like the Fishes, a refugee-rights group, who still have an ember of passion left to fight totalitarianism. But many resemble the protagonist Theo Faron, a former rebel turned cynical bureaucrat who drifts, a numb ghost, through London’s gray mayhem. Until, that is, the Fishes, led by Theo’s estranged wife Julian, pay him to accompany Kee, a Black and visibly pregnant refugee, to the East Sussex coast. Here, a boat will take Kee to alleged safety in the Azores, where a fertility research group, the Human Project, is supposedly based. Kee’s pregnancy seems miraculous in a world of unexplained infertility, but her race and nationality criminalize her very presence in England and imperil her escape.

Dystopian films don’t need to be correct about the future to be powerful. Yet two decades after its release and one year before it is set, the prescience of Children of Men is striking. In 2006, the violent, polluted, militarized world that the film depicts bleakly foreshadowed a future two decades away, devoid of the sleek gadgets and humans populating early science fiction films. Critics at the time noted the connections between the film’s arrangement of visual elements—its mise-en-scène—and early 2000s news footage of the second Iraq war (Dargis 2006). Today, its cinematography—the dark colors, the long takes, and the claustrophobic handheld shots—are common cinematic tools. Its diegesis—the fictional world in which the film’s narrative events take place, including the militarized police, caged immigrants, and nationalistic pronatalism—also feels achingly familiar.

In all its frenetic energy, Children of Men is an enactment of something we in the West see more today than we did 20 years ago: state power unleashed on human bodies that have been stripped of political affiliation and moral worth. This is a film in which reproduction, psychopharmacology, and euthanasia collide with biopolitical control of whole populations, whether through policing fertility or criminalizing global mobility. The question of the value of a human life, whether a newborn, a worker, an older adult, or an immigrant, is central to the film’s aesthetic, as well as its ethical concerns.

Where have all the children gone?

On the fertility issue, the parallels with our world’s comparatively modest decline in birth rates are imperfect. Yet the response—the regressive exertion of state control over reproductive choice—echoes today’s pronatalism.

Unlike in the fictional world of Children of Men, in the real world, humanity is not sterile. While sperm counts and concentrations do appear to be dropping worldwide and more people are using assisted reproductive technologies than ever before, plenty of us are biologically able to reproduce without assistance or delay. We simply choose not to—and if we do reproduce, we have fewer babies than our parents and grandparents. In 1950, the average woman had four or five children. Today, nearly two-thirds of people live in countries with total fertility rates below the so-called “replacement threshold” of 2.1 births per woman. In 2024, the United States had a total fertility rate of 1.6. In the European Union, the average was 1.3. In Singapore and South Korea, total fertility rates have dropped below 1.0. Since people are living longer, the world’s overall population is still growing—it is predicted to peak at just over 10 billion towards the end of this century—but the ratios of young to old are shifting significantly.

Also unlike Children of Men, we know why our world has fewer children. Many people of childbearing age do not believe they can afford to have more than one or two children, if any (UNFPA 2025). The costs of both housing and childcare are high in many countries, while job insecurity is rife. Some people are not confident that they will be able to raise children and continue careers into which they have invested time and money, especially if they live in countries where the expectation is still that women stay home to raise children. Others simply do not want to become parents, or have been unable to find a suitable partner—or, like members of the UK’s BirthStrike Collective, don’t see the point of having children in the face of climate change (BirthStrike 2026).

This is not the mysterious, precipitous decline depicted in Children of Men. Some analysts calmly argue that lower birth rates are manageable with technological innovation and policy adjustments that will reduce reliance on younger workers to fund public goods like pension schemes and healthcare systems. To the extent that birth rates do not reflect people’s actual preferences about whether (and how many) children to have, these analysts urge nations to address the cost of childcare and housing, and innovate against stubborn gender norms. Such changes are unlikely to return a country to high birth rates, but they can level-off decline and improve well-being, as decades of family policy in Sweden have shown (Andersson 2020).

Yet some world leaders appear panicked. In 2018, Japan’s then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called his country’s diminishing birth rate “a national crisis.” In 2020, Italian President Sergio Mattarella said declining fertility rates were “a problem that concerns the very existence of our country. ” And in 2022, entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Musk is also a proponent of the so-called “great replacement conspiracy theory,” which holds that white people are being deliberately replaced by non-white people. For subscribers to this view—including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, France’s Marine Le Pen, and America’s Tucker Carlson—the concern over low birth rates is less that the human race will become extinct than that white people will lose their dominance.

When birth rates are framed this way—as an existential threat to nations, races, or all of humanity—far more draconian interventions can seem warranted (Johnston 2025). Trump’s proposed “motherhood medals” and “baby bonuses” might seem benign (Demissie and Faulders  2025), but existing and proposed pro-natalist policies also include prohibiting state distribution of contraception, banning abortion, and outlawing voluntary sterilization. JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment is milder but not wildly different from far-right blogger Charles Haywood’s belief that “generally, women should not have careers” and if they do “they should be socially stigmatized” (Hagan 2025). Pronatalism is not benign or family friendly—it is a particular theory of gender and race that returns us to Children of Men territory (and echoes the world imagined in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). In 1992, when PD James published her book on which the film is loosely based—and in 2006,  when the film version was released—concerns about declining birth rates were already being raised. James—like Atwood in her 1985 book—guessed that nations could turn despotic in the face of low or no fertility. The state sees the reproductive potential of its people as an asset to be owned and exploited.

The Border Zone

The film’s most harrowing scenes occur in Bexhill, a fortified detention camp for refugees (or “fugees”). In scenes that foreshadow Trump’s marauding ICE agents of Minneapolis in 2026, Theo and Kee must battle through here to escape Britain and rendezvous with the Human Project at sea. Kee’s body is as contested as the borders she’s crossed to arrive in England. She is at once a symbol of the life the state craves and a symbol of the life it wants to expel.

In her beautiful meditation on migration, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, scholar Gloria Anzaldúa describes the Mexican-American border as an “open wound where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds,” where two worlds combine to “form a third country. …” (Anzaldúa 1987). Anzaldúa might be describing any of the borders approached by world’s 117.3 million displaced persons, 36.4 million of whom are refugees, and at least 4.4 million of whom are stateless.

In Cuarón’s London, any pretense of tolerating these sans-papiers has vanished. Theo’s friend Jasper explains that migrants escape atrocity only to be “hunted down like cockroaches” in England. Once captured, they are not disappeared to a convenient Guantánamo. Instead, they are crammed into cages for passersby to witness. After the cages, the next stop is Bexhill, a sprawling ghetto where refugees have reluctantly founded their “third country,” an exclusion zone inside but separate from the body politic. Immediately within the gates, refugees are stripped, hooded, beaten, sometimes shot. The dead are blanketed. If there is any doubt as to what kind of place this is, “Arbeit Macht Frei” by the Libertines is the underscore.

If Bexhill seemed alien to filmgoers in 2006, the refugee ghetto should be familiar 20 years on, from such places as the “Center of Temporary Permanence” on the Italian isle of Lampedusa, where asylum seekers are contained in an overcrowded caged zone, and Australia’s unfortunately named “Pacific Solution,” which diverted refugees to detention centers on Manus and Nauru Islands. In the United States, Donald Trump has resuscitated the Nazi metaphor of the nation as the “people’s body” or Volkskörper, suggesting to an attentive media that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Instead of Bexhill, Trump’s America has ICE detention centers, where detainees are held in cold, crowded rooms, fed once a day, and forced to share a single toilet with 70 other people. Last year, 32 migrants died in ICE facilities. The Trump administration has also embraced a third-country deportation policy, sending migrants to detainment in, for example, El Salvador, Rwanda, and Ghana. Unsurprisingly, under Trump the US Citizenship and Immigration Services has updated its mission statement to remove “nation of immigrants.”

The right to have rights

Children of Men asks us to consider what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “Perplexities of the Rights of Man” in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt, herself a stateless refugee for 18 years, interrogates what a “right” and what a “human” are, two concepts that migration puts to the test (Arendt 1951). If, she asks, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 promises us that “All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” then why do we still persecute “illegal” immigrants and detain refugees?

The problem, she says, is that human rights don’t protect anyone unless the individual belongs to a political community: “The question is not to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong,” Arendt writes. Being a human is not enough because it doesn’t give you the “right to have rights”—for that, you need to be in a country that recognizes you as a rights holder. Even a criminal who is a citizen has recourse to a legal system. As Arendt puts it, “…the right of every individual to belong to humanity should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible.”

Reduced to the human, refugees are outside the law, their mere existence a crime. (Of course, if you’re rich enough you can buy your right to have rights. US tech billionaire Peter Thiel purchased New Zealand citizenship after just 12 days in the country, some splashy investments, and a donation to the Christchurch earthquake relief fund. (Applicants normally must have lived in New Zealand as a permanent resident for at least 1,350 days in the five years before an application. [Roy 2017])

Arendt’s intellectual heir, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, says the refugee “marks the crisis of the concept of the human.” He refers to the refugee as a homo sacer—in Roman law, a person whom a citizen could kill with impunity because this individual existed outside the political community. The homo sacer, like the refugee, is bare life stripped of political existence, beyond human and divine law—someone who is protected by no one—what Agamben calls “a living dead man” (Agamben, 1998).

Cuarón’s film complicates the refugee through the figure of Kee. On the one hand, she is a Black refugee, a life not worth having, a “living dead” person. On the other hand, she is pregnant, which means she carries a baby, life worth possessing. The Fishes have a raucous argument about where Kee should give birth. If she has the baby in a hospital, says one, “The government will take her baby and parade a posh Black English lady as the mother!” Another admits, “We all know this government would never acknowledge the first human birth in 18 years from a fugee.” One of the Fishes argues the baby should be born in the safe house because “This baby is the flag that could unite us [the resistance movement] all!” Another naively responds, “We said we’d never use this baby for political purposes.” Most naïve of all is Theo, who argues a baby is beyond politics: “Whatever your political ideas are, it’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter.” In a pro-natalist, anti-immigrant nation, the baby has no choice but to be biopolitical.

All of which lends the quasi-mythical Human Project ambivalent resonances. The group is meant to inspire hope and represent resistance against the state. It might welcome refugees and even have a cure for infertility. However, Theo doesn’t think the Human Project even exists. Others, like Kee and the Fishes, desperately believe the research group (which emerges in the film’s last moments on a ship called the Tomorrow) will let her keep her baby and restore human rights to a brutalized world. Everything hinges on the Human Project, the project of the human. But Cuarón’s film screams that being human is not enough.