[colorado tanker]

You can attribute it to lots of things but the fact is the birth rate began to decline in the first industrialized countries once urbanization started rolling in the 19th Century. Now, the birth rate is declining in all the industrialized countries. China is paying a huge price for forcing its birthrate down before it had fully developed.

It has become an iron rule of demographics that no country has overcome. Worldwide population is predicted to plateau around 2050 and sometime after will begin an inexorable decline.

The trend began long before the widespread availability of birth control or the sexual revolution. My own opinion is that the trend began and is driven by the fact that in an urban society women postpone marriage and child bearing for longer and longer periods and sometimes never have children. Children are an economic liability in an urban society versus an economic asset in a rural society.

Nothing has been able to alter the trend, not payments or tax breaks for having children, exhortation, appeals to patriotism or religion, nothing. During WWII, Germany was so desperate for manpower that Himmler appealed to the girls of Nazi Germany to have sons out of wedlock for the fatherland and offered to make available to them handsome, virile SS men. Few takers.

[elcid1970]

“Himmler appealed to the girls of Nazi Germany to have sons out of wedlock for the fatherland and offered to make available to them handsome, virile SS men. Few takers.”

Wrong. “SS-Lebensborn” was huge. Google it.