Birth rate Ironies
We haven’t touched much in this blog on the causes and consequences of a falling birth rate in the industrial world, but today’s New York Times, with two major stories on the issue, reminds us that the issue will shape the rest of our adult lifetimes and beyond. There’s no shortage of ironies connected to this complex issue. Here’s two.
1. A generation after Paul Ehrlich et al. made fortunes and more appearing on Johnny Carson to promote the coming “population bomb” the fears in the developed world are exactly the opposite. (And here we should include China, where an aging population now terrifies government officials hoping to sustain that country’s extraodinary economic boom.) 2. It’s clear that the emergence of market capitalism in eastern Europe, and the shearing away of large state-subsidized apartments for families, has affected the birth rate. Poland’s birth rate, for example, is now almost the lowest in Europe even as it is probably the most “Catholic” country, certainly in terms of practice, on the continent.
I uncomfortably point out that Pat Buchanan was making this point five years ago. I believe that among his conclusions, was that Europe would become Muslim because of immigration and birth rates patterns.
This is why the Church must enforce all aspects of her pro-life agenda. Many forms of birth control are tantamount to murder, no less than abortion. Pre-marital sex and masturbation are grave sins, no less than homosexuality. We are commanded by God to procreate.
Actually Spengler has been insisting on the demographic disaster in Europe for a while with abundant statistics. It is ironic that France, the Eldest Daughter of the Church, is doing rather better than either Germany of Poland, but I wonder to what extent France is “benefiting” from the Islamic sector of her population in the matter of procreation.
The year is 2020, the Theoplican Party is ahead in the polls and President Joshua Snow appears set to once again retain full command of America’s Homeland Security and Reproductive Armed Forces.
Snow first elected in 2012, on a platform to reverse America’s sliding economic productivity through a program of enforced pro-life legislation found it necessary in his second term to merge the Departments of Defence and Homeland Security to ensure that the governing Theoplican policies were followed to the letter.
America’s great turn around began in 2008, when St. George W. Bush, before he left the political stage appointed his last pro-life Catholic justice to the Supreme Court who in turn during the second and last Clintonian presidency finally reversed Roe- vs. Wade and provided the impetus to restructure the former Republican Party into the Theoplican Party with a platform to pull America out of its six year recession through a program of enforced population growth.
Following his first election, Snow not only amended the Constitution to declare marriage to be exclusively between a man and woman but to be a mandatory feature of society. Laws criminalizing abortion, contraception and the sales of all mechanical and chemical means of conception, stem cell research, and homosexual acts were passed and declared constitutional by the end his first term. Re-elected in 2016, Snow promised to get tough on the dissidents who refused to obey the law. Thus during his second term using technology invented to prevent terrorist infiltration and illegal immigration he established a program of universal surveillance by merging the old departments of Homeland Security and Defence.
With such a system in place, featuring a constant wireless transmission I.D. card system, the Theoplican’s were able to declare that all woman over the age of 18 were to be married and within one year would be with child. Further more sex before marriage was declared a criminal act punishable by one year in a minimum educational/medical facility where it was medically mandatory to be surgically re-virginized and indoctrinated to accept the new role of a “Real” woman.
I could go on but mlj, I think you get the picture of what you just proposed. Your’s is a snow job of the first order.
Just a different angle on this issue:
I was brought up to believe that ZPG was a moral imperative. And there are still a lot of folks around who believe that the ills of the world are that there are just too many people using up resources and polluting.
Those who promote ZPG won’t buy the church’s theological procreation agenda however much it is “enforced,” whatever that means.
But perhaps those who worry about pollution and wasted resources can be persuaded that the problem lies not with large families, but with people who squander their money on senseless, endless “retail therapy.”
The large families I know recycle things and look for ways to stretch their dollars. They are conservationists out of necessity and know how to share.
If Europe becomes Muslim it is because Christians do not live their faith. Or if we think numbers constitute our validity then we are fools indeed.
Encouragement for families to have many children is an empire driven concept so that the monarchy will have enough soldiers to maintain its power.
Meanwhile keep telling the pope how to preserve empire (ours of course). http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=402
This kind of thinking shows the material, power-related thinking of the prolife mentality.
History certainly bears out Bill’s suspicion that worries about the birth rate are almost always linked to imperial anxieties (witness Theodore Roosevelt’s hysteria about the “race suicide” that would ensue from emancipated women). And while John Borst is, I think, somewhat overwrought with his Margaret Atwoodesque scenario, there’s also abundant reason to think that fears about birth rates also reflect anxieties about sex and economic productivity.
“Enforcement” of the Church’s current sexual code — whatever that means — wouldn’t really address the problem. If we “go back to the past,” we’ll get — the present. And harping on what you can’t do is to fall into the very moralism that Benedict himself condemnded in that German TV interview John McG. posted a while back.
Still, it’s curious to me that almost no one yet has engaged John McG’s point that it’s market captialism that seems to be the culprit in the falling birth rate. Jean touches on it when she suggests that it’s consumer capitalism that puts large families “at fault” for their fruitfulness. Why? Because having kids gets in the way of capital accumulation, geographical mobility for promotions (for men or women), and the good life as it’s portrayed in advertising, which is, in effect, the religious iconography of capitlaism.
Pro-life Catholics should search for common ground with lefty Catholics — Catholic Worker types, “Christian socialists” in Britian, etc. — to produce ideas about economic change that would encourage people to have more children. We need an economy of life, not just a culture of life. The current capitalist — and, Bill is right, imperialist — economy is literally an economy of death.
We need bishops ready, willing, and able to procreate, for cryin’ out loud! Perhaps especially in Europe. Lead by example!
Okay, here’s a direct hit on the points John McGreevy quotes:
1. The population of the world continues to increase, but not here or Western Europe. In places where it is increasing, death rates are also quite high. Erlich’s worst-case scenario didn’t count on AIDS, a resurgence of malaria among children, or high cancer rates among relatively young people. In any case, it’s clear we’ll have to import labor to maintain us oldsters when our time comes. That labor may not speak English, and it may not be Christian.
Interestingly, one of my Korean students wrote a short piece for class last year on the dwindling population rates in Korea. There is now a campaign to encourage married women to have three children to maintain the work force.
2. To point the finger at market capitalism and ensuing lost subsidies for families strikes me as a bit facile. But I think Eugene makes some good points. If you look at things at the parish level, you have to wonder just how good a job Catholics are doing at fighting this kind of materialism. Everytime our parish’s senior group takes a trip, it’s to a casino.
This is really weird.
I see somebody is somehow using my username and email. That first comment by “MLJ” was not written by me.
…Although I basically agree with the earlier “MLJ” comments, since they do reflect the teachings of the church (absent a certain nuance, of course).
“That labor may not speak English, and it may not be Christian.”
It is happening already but it is mostly Christian. And that labor is being treated (no pun intended) terribly by the Christians they are treating.
As the native American indian said when he was condemned to death and was offered baptism: “I would not be baptized into a God who has such followers.”
I think there is more than religion vs. capitalism at play in the issue over birth rates. A very interesting case in point is the situation in Iran today. Deborah Campbell in an article titled “Iran’s Quiet Revolution” from the September 2006 issue of The Walrus (http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/international-affairs-irans-quiet-revolution/ ) shares the following:
. . . . .
“Understanding the role and significance of Iranian youth is crucial to developing a complete picture of the forces now shaping Iran. After the revolution, birth control was sharply restricted. In the following decade, the population nearly doubled. Today, 70 percent of Iran’s seventy million citizens are under thirty, making it one of the world’s youngest nations.
Shortly before his death in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini recognized the looming housing and employment shortages and reversed course. Iran has since become a model of family planning. It now operates the only government-approved condom factory in the Middle East, and a month’s supply of the pill is readily available without prescription for the price of a cup of tea. University students are required to take a sex-ed course in order to graduate, and couples must take contraception classes to receive a marriage licence. Most families now have no more than one or two children, even in the villages.
Ayatollah Khomeini had envisioned the baby boom as a twenty-million-member army of “soldiers for Islam,” but in Iran things rarely turn out as planned. Through sheer strength of numbers, the revolution’s children are pushing an agenda at odds with their elders. The new generation—a modern version of America’s postwar baby boom—is more interested in good times than guns, in ecstasy over Islam. At the royal palace, students and young couples snap pictures in the gardens and speak in hushed tones outside the gaudy palace chambers with their mirrored walls. They have no memory of the Shah’s rule by fear, no recollection of the savageries of the secret police, of the disappeared, the maimed, and the permanently silenced. Gazing at the photographs of world leaders that adorn the palace, they recall an era when Iran was a global player, a respected member of the community of nations. Reflecting on the 2,500-year history of the Persian Empire—a superpower that stretched from Anatolia and Egypt across western Asia to northern India and Central Asia—they envision a future in which Iran is no longer an international pariah. One man summed up the overriding sentiment: “We don’t want a wall around our country.” …. (352/6652 words)”
I would expect that should the dystopic scenario I described above ever come to pass, the result would be similar to what is now happening in Iran and we would no doubt return very quickly to the post 60’s baby boom scenario we are still living in.
The Catholic Church may not like it but regions as different as Eastern Europe, Korea, Iran and “The West” exhibit similar patterns/behaviours to excessive population growth and religion of what ever stripe appears to play little more than a bystander role.
I think there is more than religion vs. capitalism at play in the issue over birth rates. A very interesting case in point is the situation in Iran today. Deborah Campbell in an article titled “Iran’s Quiet Revolution” from the September 2006 issue of The Walrus (http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/international-affairs-irans-quiet-revolution/ ) shares the following:
. . . . .
“Understanding the role and significance of Iranian youth is crucial to developing a complete picture of the forces now shaping Iran. After the revolution, birth control was sharply restricted. In the following decade, the population nearly doubled. Today, 70 percent of Iran’s seventy million citizens are under thirty, making it one of the world’s youngest nations.
Shortly before his death in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini recognized the looming housing and employment shortages and reversed course. Iran has since become a model of family planning. It now operates the only government-approved condom factory in the Middle East, and a month’s supply of the pill is readily available without prescription for the price of a cup of tea. University students are required to take a sex-ed course in order to graduate, and couples must take contraception classes to receive a marriage licence. Most families now have no more than one or two children, even in the villages.
Ayatollah Khomeini had envisioned the baby boom as a twenty-million-member army of “soldiers for Islam,” but in Iran things rarely turn out as planned. Through sheer strength of numbers, the revolution’s children are pushing an agenda at odds with their elders. The new generation—a modern version of America’s postwar baby boom—is more interested in good times than guns, in ecstasy over Islam. At the royal palace, students and young couples snap pictures in the gardens and speak in hushed tones outside the gaudy palace chambers with their mirrored walls. They have no memory of the Shah’s rule by fear, no recollection of the savageries of the secret police, of the disappeared, the maimed, and the permanently silenced. Gazing at the photographs of world leaders that adorn the palace, they recall an era when Iran was a global player, a respected member of the community of nations. Reflecting on the 2,500-year history of the Persian Empire—a superpower that stretched from Anatolia and Egypt across western Asia to northern India and Central Asia—they envision a future in which Iran is no longer an international pariah. One man summed up the overriding sentiment: “We don’t want a wall around our country.” …. (352/6652 words)”
I would expect that should the dystopic scenario I described above ever come to pass, the result would be similar to what is now happening in Iran and we would no doubt return very quickly to the post 60’s baby boom scenario we are still living in.
The Catholic Church may not like it but regions as different as Eastern Europe, Korea, Iran and “The West” exhibit similar patterns/behaviours to excessive population growth and religion of what ever stripe appears to play little more than a bystander role.
Sorry about that double post and the name j. neither was intentional.
The decline in rates of procreation below the level needed to maintain the population in any country is not good news for that country. An increase in the average age of the membership points to decline. The causes for the reluctance to procreate are likely to be many, complex, and in dispute, and for that reason there is not likely to be any simple solution. But failure to maintain the population level over generations has serious and unavoidable economic consequences as well as political, social and cultural implications. To say that demography is destiny is perhaps to say too much, but it is not that far off the mark.
Bill M., just to clarify–
Our imported labor is largely Catholic from Mexico and points south, true. But if you throw in Western Europe, there is far more variety.
England has a huge Muslim population, ditto France, Germany and Holland. England also has a fair number of Hindus.
I agree that most immigrants are treated abysmally. They usually are. However, what I find even more troubling is the way Europeans–and the U.S. to a growing extent–view this labor force as “guest workers,” who will eventually go away. That doesn’t typically happen, as Germany found with the Turks.
The unwelcoming attitude toward a new, young labor force from abroad strikes me as wrong from a Christian and a practical point of view.
Does anyone remember from a few years back th at the most pressing concern was the imminent uselessness of most workers and the work that they do? No? I guess it has been replaced by the above mentioned concern.
Whenever anyone complains about the coming crisis in this or that, I remind myself that people are social organisms, and societies adapt. Certainly, a degree of planning helps, and there are probably places where the discrepancy among age groups will cause more rather than less disruption, but is there any reason to believe it will last for more than a generation or that it will cause more problems than, say, the plague, the reformation and the 30 years war, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, WWI, or WWII? Or for that matter, that the explosion of population in Europe (especially) in the 19th Century did not cause quite a bit of disruption, especially in those societies ruled by European empires and their excess population?
Quattrocento and Renaissance Italy had many fewer people. Raw numbers are hardly indicative of a healthy and thriving populace or a vibrant culture.
Do we have such paucity of imagination that we can’t even begin to figure out how to address this “problem”?
Birth rate decline has happened before and it usually portends great change or upheaval for an established civilization.
A historic example can be seen in the declining Roman Empire – perhaps it is an overused example but it continues to be helpful. The Aztec and other Native American cultures are other examples as are the once Christian civilizations in the Near East and North Africa. Byzantium suffered population and economic decline before she fell to the Turks.
Demographics mean everything to the survivial and health of a civilization and the population control community may realize this too. We know about Margaret Sanger’s work with the Eugenics movement. The hedonistic liberties anti-natalists sometimes prefer depends on the personal liberty offered in contemporary but demographically challenged western civilization.
The promise that the Church will survive to the end of time does not mean she will continue to flourish everywhere. The pressure to apostosize has been intense wherever Christianity has been supplanted. Dhimminitude is not an easy way of life.
After reading the article I looked the following terms up on Websters on-line:
colony: a body of people living in a new territory but retaining ties with the parent state.
immigrate: to come into a country of which one is not a native for permanent residence.
Question: When does immigration become colonization?
Is there a consensus? Is it p.c. to even ask?
Maid
Having the potential to cause upheaval between the first and 14th centuries AD just doesn’t seem that relevant. Consider: the plague was a wondrous development for laborers and a boon for their personal freedom. If hedonism depends on an expanding population, why shouldn’t we all be in favor of contraction?
And fianlly, birth rates are not just declining in the West. They are declining almost everywhere, including Latin America and Africa.
Barbara and Maid, thanks for the historical perspectives..
If it’s true that societies adapt to needs within a generation, then perhaps the attitude toward immigrants and guest workers will change.
Instead of seeing them as “drains” on our resources because they can’t speak English or do skilled jobs, we may see them as future citizens, willing to work hard to keep the country going and spend their wealth here, instead of sending it “home.”
Maid asks an interesting question: At what point does immigration become colonizaiton? I think that’s a really hard question to answer in the U.S., since the ethnography of the country has shifted around so much from its beginnings.
A lot of the original colonizers, most of my grandmother’s Mayflower ancestors, in fact, would be horrified to see how many Catholics there are. :–)
Birth rate issues relate to declining mariage rates, divorce and all kinds of difficult problems we talked about in “Marriage and De-Church” and “Shame and Fecundity” earlier this summer. To families who percecieve problems with having a (another) child demographics will seem awfully remote. And there are lots of problems for them to face.
If you saw “the disposable American” segment on The Evening News last night, it’s easy to se that even a hardworking family member might be uncertain to build his/her family (further) given the workplace scene.
Simple minded appeals to just follow official Church teaching(which large numbers have credibility issues with), blaming couples for “selfishness”, or tangential at best condemnations of homosexual unions offer no solution! More family friendly government policies in employment and health care (even if they diminish the botom line somewhat) might nudge things along. But we also need the will to deal with the whole complexus of problems around marriage in our society, if we want to tackle this.
Loss of population through disease or other forms of disaster may have a quite different effect from loss of population through failure to procreate at a replacement level. The situations are only comparable if the disease especially strikes those who are of an age to procreate. Even there, as with the plagues of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, those who survived were not disinclined to procreate. The situation which faces certain countries goes like this. There is a generation that collectively is producing far less than the averatge of 2.1 children per female that demographers say is necessary to maintain population level. In some countries only a little more than half the requisite number of children is being produced. The result is not simply a drop in total population but a relative increase of older people in proportion to younger people. If the trend continues, the situation gradually gets more out of proportion. This is comparable to state of a Religious Order that finds that it has far fewer young recruits than it had in the past. The upshot is that the average age of the membership rises sharply. Yet the older members, who can no longer work, depend on fewer and fewer younger ones for support. So in China, as a result of the one child per family policy, there are proportionately more and more older Chinese. I do not know what the expectations about retirement are in China, but in Europe many workers expect to retire at 60 or even younger. How will this continue to be possible if there is not a sufficient number of people actively working to replace those who retire? It is true that immigrants may fill the gap. But if the immigrants are not assimilable, this has profound implications.
Whether certain methods of contraception are morally acceptable is a question for moral theologians; whether God desire us to have children is not open to question: increase and multiply is the first command in the Scriptures.
If each generation has only half the number of children as the previous generation, the population begins to plunge and it is impossible to maintain the infrastructure that was set up for a far larger population. This is already happening in Germany.
All types of societies have declining birth rates; Catholic (Poland) or formerly Catholic (Spain, Quebec, Italy) societies have the lowest birth rates in the world. There is a sickness in modern civilization that affects all societies, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu., animist, Communist, capitalist. Perhaps civilization has to disintegrate and start over again, as it did when the relatively free societies of Europe replaced the slave society of ancient Rome (which also suffered from declining birth rates).
The United States is in a unique position. It was founded by colonial societies that had the highest berth rates ever known (the average age in Vermont at the time of the Revolution was 17, which explains a lot) and is the only developed society that has a replacement birth rate. We also attract immigrants. We have a military force that is stronger than all the other forces in the world combined (although it can’t protect New York or pacify Iraq).
We are in a unique historical situation demographically and there are no analogies to guide us. But if Christians throughout the world would assimilate the pro-natalist attitude of Scripture, that children are a blessing, it might make the difference between a catastrophic decline in population and a stable future.
To Robert Nunz: though I agree with your policy initiatives, I think you will find that they have done little to change the birthrate in Western Europe, where policies liberally support family life.
Regarding the issue of replacement birth rates, I think we have to accept, to some extent that we are part of a brave new world in that we can expect to live much longer than generations past. I realize that many Europeans “expect” to retire early, but perhaps their expectations will not be met, and perhaps Europe or the U.S. will transition to a “step down” approach to retirement rather than the all or nothing work that we now see, or adopt some other creative approach.
Barbara,
Even if people postpone retirement, they cannot do so indefinitely. There will always be those who are too old and infirm to work. At best postponement of retirement may
defer the effects of a rising average age in a population, but in the long run–and not all that long–disaster awaits.
Somewhat off topic, but I’m curious about what the average size Catholic family is nowadays and whether it exceeds the average U.S. family size.
Also wondering if the birthrate among the GenXers is higher than it was among Baby Boomers. Is the trend up or down?
In the long run we will be dead. Life is basically a series of short-term fixes. I live in Washington D.C., where I am awash in the next 25 crises. Maybe you are right, but I doubt it. We face greater threats than longevity and personal freedom.
Barbara, your posts have left readers with some challenging questions, however, your most recent has quite frankly left me more than a little stunned. The sentence “We face greater threats than longevity and personal freedom.” cannot go unchallenged.
The threat of longevity is debateable, , since we are indeed in uncharted waters, but the issue of “personal freedom” is not debateable. I recognize that Washington D.C. must be awash in crisis but it was ever thus, (reminds me of the prayer Glory Be to the Father…) but there is no greater threat to a democracy than the loss of personal freedom.
If that is the attitude that now infects Washington, then heaven help America.
John, either you misunderstood me or I am reading your post incorrectly. As I read this thread and the comments, I infer, perhaps wrongly, the veiled implication that this is all the fault of those people who follow their personal predilection not to have children rather than procreating for the good of civilization or country. My point is that the freedom not to reproduce should not be viewed as a threat to civilization. And also, for the entire modern era, gains in longevity have been seen as a positive thing, even if, in reality, they are often simply gains that result from the continued existence of the very young (children) and the relatively young (post partum women). Longevity and personal freedom may cause problems and disruptions for us as a society but we should keep in perspective that we are victims of our own success in that respect, and that we are most likely capable of addressing these problems. Wringing our hands as if we are in perpetual crisis mode is not going to help. And it was ever thus, that’s my point too — although sometimes the hand wringing seems necessary in order to get anybody’s attention.
John MicGreavy, perhaps you should restart this thread so we can do justice to it…so many points to make.
Another is that in ancient Rome a woman was unlikely to live so long because of the perils of childbirth. The average of a women was between 20 and thirty. It was a burden powerful women could resist.
I always wonder how sacred the exaltation of virginity was in those days in light of this?
Barbara,
I would just like to emphasize that I was merely pointing out the consequences of a level of procreation that falls below replacement. I said explictly that the causes of this behavior wre “likely to be many, complex, and in dispute” and I am not prepared to offer an analysis. The situation in the U.S. is not anything I would call a crisis at this point. As to whether there is a crisis in some other places, time will tell.
Barbara,
The problem was indeed mine. I gave a much broader interpretation to “personal freedom” than you intended. I do appreciate you reply and explanation as a fully agree with your analysis.
Barbara writes: “I infer, perhaps wrongly, the veiled implication that this is all the fault of those people who follow their personal predilection not to have children rather than procreating for the good of civilization or country. My point is that the freedom not to reproduce should not be viewed as a threat to civilization.”
Yes, I picked up that, too, given how often the world “commandment” was thrown around. And given how little the notion that “children are a blessing” entered into this conversation.
I hear some Catholics say that marriage is for the procreation of children, that couples who get married without intending to have children, are simply trying to have “legal” sex, and that they’re selfish.
The Catechism notes that marriage is for having children and raising them, but there is no minimum requirement of children or even a “suggested” number. Simply multiply as you are able and can afford to raise children, limiting your family through accepted procedures, of course.
Is the issue of lower birth rates being used as tangential evidence of just how selfish those without children or those with small families are?
Jean:
You ask: “Is the issue of lower birth rates being used as tangential evidence of just how selfish those without children or those with small families are?”
I think I can fairly say: Not by me.
Didn’t mean to imply you or anyone else on this thread thought so.
But I my sense is that there are Catholics out there who DO want to construe lower birth rates with selfishness, hedonism, materialism, and licentiousness.
And, in my opinion, those people are completely out of touch with how much money and stress it takes to raise a child these days.
Two quesitons:
1. What is the maximum sustainable population of the world?
2. What is the current population?
I suspect, without being sure, that we are so far above maximum sustainable population that all countries should strive to reduce population by slowing birthrates.
There are ways to address caring for the elderly while still reducing population growth. I am not too concerned about the need for cannon fodder by imperial enterprises. Those issues tend to get resolved quickly.
Joe McFaul:
“1. What is the maximum sustainable population of the world?”
The question cannot be answered by anyone unless you specify further parameters,
“2. What is the current population?”
I do not know.
“I suspect, without being sure, that we are so far above maximum sustainable population that all countries should strive to reduce population by slowing birthrates.”
China has radically reduced its birth rate by the one child policy It will be interesting to see what happens there over the next thirty years. But I doubt you would favor such harsh measures generally.
“There are ways to address caring for the elderly while still reducing population growth.”
Again that remains to be seen. What do you propose?
“I am not too concerned about the need for cannon fodder by imperial enterprises. ”
Nor am I.
“Those issues tend to get resolved quickly.”
You are certainly an optimist.