The infertility event in Children of Men is a MacGuffin—it justifies the premise, then gets almost entirely out of the way.

What the film actually shows us, what Cuarón bathes in those long, unflinching single-takes, is a world that has already stopped functioning because nobody has skin in tomorrow.

Watch the scene where Kee first appears at the refugee camp. The camera doesn't linger on her belly but rather on the guards' faces, and they see a walking prophecy and feel nothing—no instinct to protect it, no calculation about lineage or legacy, no fracture in the hierarchy.

That's the film's diagnosis: fertility was never the currency that mattered. Intergenerational obligation was. The state pension system, the property market, the political class's ability to promise future voters something—all of it depends on a constant incoming class of people who'll be forced to service the debts of their predecessors. Remove that pressure and the whole apparatus stops pretending to care about succession, stops legitimizing itself through claims about "securing a better future for our children," and becomes purely extractive. The Fishes don't want Kee's baby for hope but rather for proof that hope *should* exist as a weapon to delegitimize the government. The government wants her for the same reason in reverse. Nobody in this film makes a single decision based on what's good for children—they make decisions based on what happens when you admit there won't be any. That's the real calculation Cuarón buried in the production design: no nurseries, no schools, no playgrounds, just repurposed bureaucracy and concrete.

The absence of fertility didn't break society. The abandonment of reproductive obligation did.