In the Next Life, Canto III, stanzas 92-96

No one disturbed their once-robotic host.
The compound-dwellers’ superstitious fear
was amplified by subtly playing ghost.
No other outside humans e’er came near.

Their values were the kind that tend to last.
They lived as they would live, which was their goal.
Their code through many generations passed…
until they reinvented birth control.

Do you have children? If so, what’s it worth?
Is there a quantifiable reward
to weigh against the pain of giving birth?
The time and money you can ill afford?

If you were rational in the extreme—
completely selfish—would you procreate?
I know it’s hard to know how it would seem,
but I think you’d think twice, then hesitate.

What motive would you have? Posterity?
What’s it to you who’s living when you’ve died?
Support in your old age? Well, I can’t see
how all that sacrifice is justified.

As they would live: See Darna’s first remark to Ciral. The Objectivists’ focus on ‘nature’, as in a set of more or less fixed traits, makes them sound deterministic, and Merrimac’s focus on this aspect of their belief system and on their work ethic sounds like an effort to paint them as Calvinists, despite their gleeful mockery of religion.
Rational in the extreme: This sounds oxymoronic, doesn’t it? Merrimac is saying here that Objectivism is unsustainable over multiple generations. He appears to believe it will go the way of Shakerism for essentially the same reason. Indeed, Rand and most or all of her close disciples were childless.
Support in your old age: He glosses over this one pretty quickly. Could there not have been a period between the advent of the family unit and that of the ability to accumulate wealth during which the return would have outweighed the investment? Is there not such a situation in some parts of the world even now? Undoubtedly Merrimac would counter that a selfish parent’s offspring can be presumed to have a similar level of selfishness. Since children cannot be expected to sign a contract with the providers of their food and shelter, they can have no enforceable obligation to return the favor. That children do support their parents is due to religion, or at least to some ethical structure, rather than to rational or innate behavior.

©2010 Louis A. Merrimac