There are two ways in which to think about humanity: as unique human persons or as aggregate masses. When we humans start to speak of groups of people, it almost always leads to dismissing each group member’s humanity, even if only slightly. “Fans of that football team,” “drivers in this town,” “everyone who voted for the other side”—these are probably not meant to be denials of shared humanity, but when we talk about humans as anything other than individuals, we can open ourselves up to the horrors that have followed countless times in history when one group’s existence was declared obnoxious by another.

Tech mogul, entrepreneur, and political activist Elon Musk has been warning for several years now about population decline, even collapse. Musk says that low birth rates spell doom for the human species, and that we must increase fertility rates or face extinction. To many, this may sound like a pro-life position. More babies would certainly be a wonderful thing. I agree with him wholeheartedly that there should be more members of the human family. Well said.

But I also think there is a significant difference between what Musk is saying and what prolifers are fighting for. The tragedy of population decline is a personal one. An expectant mother who has no family support, no economic wherewithal, no one to help her out of an abusive relationship, walks into an abortion clinic feeling desperately alone. But if she sees her baby on an ultrasound machine or receives pro-life counseling from a brave volunteer standing outside the clinic, then the same woman might decide to keep her child. If she does so, then prolifers rejoice. Not because the population has increased, but because a human person, unique and with infinite dignity and worth, has been saved.

In the same way, we humans love individuals, not “the population” in general. We care for family members as human persons, not as population statistics. Parents make sacrifices for their children because they love their children, not an abstract number in a census report. The choice is always about whether to accept the other as an individual human person. Population changes are merely pale reflections of the ways in which actual human beings love one another—or do not.

Recently, Musk speculated that Optimus, a humanoid robot produced by Tesla, will be sold in numbers “ten times bigger than the next biggest product ever made.” If Musk is talking about electronics, he could be comparing Optimus to iPhones. Apple has sold almost two billion iPhones since 2007, so maybe he envisions 20 billion humanoid robots. Whatever the “next biggest product” Musk has in mind, he clearly intends for there to be many, many Optimuses in the world. He has also said that he envisions the robots doing human jobs, even chores like babysitting and cutting the grass. The problem with this way of thinking is evident. Musk apparently doesn’t see human beings as individuals, but as aggregate masses, the same way he sees robots and other products. He wants to get and keep his numbers up, whether he’s talking about units sold or humans born. He understands things as statistical trends and is keen on making the trendlines bend upward. The problem is that once one sees people as numbers, it is just as easy to argue that the numbers should go down as well as up. And just as easy to ignore the real-world consequences of how that game of numbers plays out in the lives of individual human beings.

Prolifers have always fought a very different kind of fight. When it comes to the one and the many, we tend very much to look at the one. The irreplaceable baby, his or her equally irreplaceable mother and father and grandparents and siblings, the unfillable hole left in each of our hearts if any of them is lost. As population problems and mass-production take center stage in our political vision, let us never be distracted from what matters more than anything else: this child, this mother, this life, this unrepeatable joy and mystery that cannot be categorized as anything other than an infinitely valuable human being.