The concept for my story is the struggle between the upper and lower class population growth. The upper class struggle with infertility (still searching for a reason) and face extinction, while the lower class has a slightly higher rate of birth. So, basically the lower class will dominate the upper class. So, my trouble is why would the upper class even care? If they are slowly dying off, why bother. What might motivate them to find a cure. And if the cure might be found in the lower class, that has more births per year, how could they experiment with that?
I'd question whether the upper class folks are concerned about the 'purity' of their class. If not, would they just 'import' babies from the lower class to raise as their own?
So my thought (and don't take it as gospel truth, just my POV) is self-preservation which is natural in humans. The Upper Class is going to want to preserve themselves and keep going, it's just natural, even if it's a losing battle. Hope.... Give incentives to the lower class to help with the experimentation or some form of manipulation, I.E. Increase in benefits. etc.
One of the best books I've read that's dealt with infertility and extinction was Children of Men and in that book it didn't actually give a reason. It was pretty much the driving point of the novel, but left as some big mystery, it actually made for a far darker, uncertain ending. This has literally been all of humanity. I'm not 100% on the numbers, but I think right now in the west it's somewhere around 10% upper class to the 90% everyone else. I know this sounds obvious, but the question I'm asking is why would a smaller amount of people holding the same amount of financial power cause that power to be threatened? Forcibly inseminating people in various experiments or stealing baby making parts from the poor and selling them to the rich?
There is a few historic examples of this. For example, within the roman empire (during only a certain time), there was rather extreme age differences between marriage. Usually, a 45+ year old man would marry about a 16-20 year old woman. This results in poor fertility rate and possible higher mortality (arguable). That was largely off-set by the practice of large-scale adoption within the roman empire. Many families would adopt sons/daughters in their own and it was common done (if not expected). This, when compounded with the fact that the nobles formed the majority of the cavalry of the earlier roman times and similarly had much lower fertility rates (by default) then the lower classes, it resulted in large scale dilution of the noble families, resulting in new blood coming in and replacing old ones. There are many others, but this one i think is particularly good as it gives three major reasons: 1) Social etiquette and structure. 2) warfare and 3)large age-gap difference in parents. There are many other examples. For instance, your society could value purity to the point of fantatism. And the upper classes never involve themselves in such 'crude' behaviour. If it is a more biological level. Then a common example can be taken from europe. The vaste majority of european royalty and nobility married within their own bloodlines or related bloodlines. As times continued, and over centuries (especially in certain families who became very strict on this - to keep the family 'pure' or keep the 'power' within the family) the fertility levels dropped and mortality rates increased. By the 19th century, it was not uncommon for a noble to have 12+ children, of which only 2-3 would make it to adulthood. The others all being stillborn, or died in infancy. Mind you, they lacked proper knowledge and medicinal understanding of genetics to see the errors in their ways. A good example of this is the House of Habsburg, a noble house of swiss origin, this house married with their cousins very often in attempt to consolidate the power within the family. The spanish habsburg did this to the extreme and Charles II "The Bewitched" had some many similarities in his genetic code that the majority of his ancestors where the same. In this case Philip I of Castile and Joana. Charles II parents were niece-uncle. his maternal grandparents where cousins, his great-grandparents where cousins as well. and so where his great-grandparents (all maternal side). Charles II's paternal side was somewhat better, with only another niece-uncle and a 2nd cousin marriage. Charles the II is a sad and rather tragic story in my opinion. he was sterile, had so many medical problems that I could not list them all even if I knew them all. Also, he had the mind of a child but still understood his duty as king - not that it helped.
This happens in real life. Ancient Rome, early days: The city had a massive gender gap. The majority of the Roman citizens were men, so they were not able to sustain their own population. The traded with women from nearby uncivilized groups (which could be analogous to your lower class.) Europe, middle ages: Dynastic rules had run the place for hundreds of years by this point and the upper class families were long established. There was only so many combinations of marriage that they could go through before inbreeding literally caused sterility among nobility. Again, marrying outside of that group was the only way to fix it, and some monarchies (like England) still have this problem. Pennsylvania Dutch, now: The small religious community only interacts with itself. Some people leave the group, but nobody ever joins. This has again caused a problem with the fact that there are only so many marriage combinations and eventually inbreeding causes problems. The Amish do not seem interested in solving this problem for themselves.
The upper class doesn't have to struggle with infertility, historically, as one becomes wealthier, they tend to have less children overall. The poor always outbreed the wealthy. Just look at statistics today. The real problem in most wealthy societies is class warfare, that the poor will rise up due to superior numbers and take out the rich. That's not to say that you can't have some disease to which the wealthy have no immunity, but it's really hard to justify things like that because the wealthy will have superior medical technology too.
I'm the OP. I have evolved the plot a bit. My "world" is post-pandemic where only the vaccine to an outbreak was sold to those who could afford it and they live secluded from the lower class. The lower class could not afford the vaccine and a lot died. The irony of it is that the vaccine made the women infertile, so the upper class use the lower class as baby makers? I don't know. Just a thought.
Because they're not dead yet. They have All The Stuff, and they don't want to give it up. And if they have any chance of having children, they'll want those theoretical possible children to have All The Stuff. The lower class will always be much, much bigger than the upper class. That's how lower/upper class work, whether you play with birth rate or not.
Reason: Food. They could have compounds/ additives to their food because they are exspensive. Things that the poor wouldn't have. Lots of modern additives are estrogen mimickers which would reduce sperm viability, and does actually reduce egg viability too. These are often called Xenoestrogens. Flax seed and oil have high concentrations of Xenoestrogens. And Flax oil (also known as Linseed Oil) is common in varnish and oil paints. Perhaps if the rich drank water tinted with linseed oil, and ate with oil painted utensils? Private water source that has lots of linseed oil, oooh. A shadow group that deliberately does this to cause the class struggle. Why care: The rich would always care because they want to leave their wealth to their children. And they prefer that it stays in the family (father to son). How they could experiment: They would have find out what of their many ammenities is the cause of their infertility. Unless they post 1950's tech, it might take a few generations for the legacy effects of the Xenoestrogens to wear off, even after cessation of exposure.
OP, can you say what is the difference between the upper class and the lower class? If we would look at a naked and washed upper class man and a naked and washed lower class man, would we be able to tell which is which?
So, great suggestions aside, what is the source of conflict in this story? Who are the protagonists and who are the villains? Because if the upper class were the bad guys, they could just kidnap people for experimentation. But that's entirely your call.
My solution would be to split your enemy and use them in your favor (old military concepts.) you could challenge the lower class to a contest among themselves, the top ten or twenty percent to be admitted into a new lower higher class classification. The contest would be designed to deny that classification to the most intelligent of the contestant. That way the lower class would be smaller, with ten or twenty percent of their AVERAGE citizens in the middle classification. It would give the lower class hope for advancing over their peers, while ensuring the high class that the new middle class will not be a threat to their own survival. With the middle class as a buffer, the most intelligent and maybe dangerous lower class will have a harder time in overthrowing the high class. The new middle class would be happy to be advanced and jealous of their new position, while beating down any change that threatened themselves. Policing would be by the middle class. Charlie -- hvysmker.