Cost of raising kids hits EU birth rate

Gulf Times ^

[MinorityRepublican]

BRUSSELS: A European Union study has shown that most European couples would on average like at least two children but end up having only one because of worries about financial costs.

The study, funded by the EU Commission and based on data from 30,000 people in 14 European countries, said that more than half of all those questioned – male or female – wanted to have two or more children.

But it said many stopped after one child because they did not want to see a decline in their standard of living. Couples desiring more than two children lived in Cyprus and Poland as well as Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary and the Netherlands. But the report said people in Germany, Italy, Austria and Belgium and the Czech Republic were happy with just one child. In fact, in Germany and the Netherlands, a large number of people did not want children at all.

The study said that the declining importance attached to marriage and the rise in divorce rates did not necessarily translate into fewer births.

It said births had remained steady over the last 10 years in the range of 1.2-1.4 children, with the ratio of children born to unmarried mothers rising to 30-40%. However, having children within marriage remained the preferred choice, especially in southern and eastern European countries, with approval rates of 80% in Italy, Lithuania and Poland.

On the other hand, living together without having children is also becoming more acceptable, especially in the Czech Republic, Germany and the Netherlands. – DPA

[Aetius]

Well of course they are not going to say that the decline of marriage has any negative impact.

[Proud_USA_Republican]

Gasp!!! They might have to give up having two months of vacation a year and 35 hour work weeks to raise a second child!!! Oh what is a secular socialist to do?????

[misterrob]

Actually with taxes as high as they are over there I could see that making it hard for people to afford a second kid.

[freeangel]

Worries of financial costs"

These costs don't seem to be worrying the people who are sucking the taxpayers dry.

[Sarah]

Oh you just CANNOT post this article without the link to this:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1579787/posts
Thanks, Sarah

[Sarah]

Please read this:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1579787/posts
and tell me if you sleep well tonight.
Sarah

[Sarah]

see above post

[SWAMPSNIPER]

Kids don't cost anything to raise, unless you want to just piss your income away on junk.
You can't take anything with you, but it sure is good to know that you have someone to leave it with!

[PzLdr]

If they do away with the social programs that require such heavy taxes [which will NEVER happen], the kids will start being born.

[MinorityRepublican]

If they do away with the social programs that require such heavy taxes [which will NEVER happen], the kids will start being born.

Socialism is a ponzi scheme. It will eventually fall, somehow.

[danamco]

The muzzies are on the march soon to extinct the Europeans as we know it!
The E.U.'s selfishness for the materialistic goods take priority over human fruitfulness!!
Their abortion policies creates their own "suicidal" elimination, and we better look out ourselves!!!

"Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam." So declares Oriana Fallaci in her new book, La Forza della Ragione, or, "The Force of Reason." And the famed Italian journalist is right: Christianity's ancient stronghold of Europe is rapidly giving way to Islam.

Two factors mainly contribute to this world-shaking development.

*

The hollowing out of Christianity. Europe is increasingly a post-Christian society, one with a diminishing connection to its tradition and its historic values. The numbers of believing, observant Christians has collapsed in the past two generations to the point that some observers call it the "new dark continent." Already, analysts estimate Britain's mosques host more worshippers each week than does the Church of England.
*

An anemic birth rate. Indigenous Europeans are dying out. Sustaining a population requires each woman on average to bear 2.1 children; in the European Union, the overall rate is one-third short, at 1.5 a woman, and falling. One study finds that, should current population trends continue and immigration cease, today's population of 375 million could decline to 275 million by 2075.To keep its working population even, the E.U. needs 1.6 million immigrants a year; to sustain the present workers-to-retirees ratio requires an astonishing 13.5 million immigrants annually.

Into the void are coming Islam and Muslims. As Christianity falters, Islam is robust, assertive, and ambitious. As Europeans underreproduce at advanced ages, Muslims do so in large numbers while young.

Some 5% of the E.U., or nearly 20 million persons, presently identify themselves as Muslims; should current trends continue, that number will reach 10% by 2020. If non-Muslims flee the new Islamic order, as seems likely, the continent could be majority-Muslim within decades.

When that happens, grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilization — at least until a Saudi style regime transforms them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up. The great national cultures — Italian, French, English, and others — will likely wither, replaced by a new transnational Muslim identity that merges North African, Turkish, subcontinental, and other elements.

This prediction is hardly new. In 1968, the British politician Enoch Powell gave his famed "rivers of blood" speech in which he warned that in allowing excessive immigration, the United Kingdom was "heaping up its own funeral pyre." (Those words stalled a hitherto promising career.) In 1973, the French writer Jean Raspail published Camp of the Saints, a novel that portrays Europe falling to massive, uncontrolled immigration from the Indian subcontinent. The peaceable transformation of a region from one major civilization to another, now under way, has no precedent in human history, making it easy to ignore such voices.

There is still a chance for the transformation not to play itself out, but the prospects diminish with time. Here are several possible ways it might be stopped:

*

Changes in Europe that lead to a resurgence of Christian faith, an increase in childbearing, or the cultural assimilation of immigrants; such developments can theoretically occur but what would cause them is hard to imagine.
*

Muslim modernization. For reasons no one has quite figured out (education of women? abortion on demand? adults too self-absorbed to have children?), modernity leads to a drastic reduction in the birth rate. Also, were the Muslim world to modernize, the attraction of moving to Europe would diminish.
*

Immigration from other sources. Latin Americans, being Christian, would more or less permit Europe to keep its historic identity. Hindus and Chinese would increase the diversity of cultures, making it less likely that Islam would dominate.

Current trends suggest Islamization will happen, for Europeans seem to find it too strenuous to have children, stop illegal immigration, or even diversify their sources of immigrants. Instead, they prefer to settle unhappily into civilizational senility.

Europe has simultaneously reached unprecedented heights of prosperity and peacefulness and shown a unique inability to sustain itself. One demographer, Wolfgang Lutz, notes, "Negative momentum has not been experienced on so large a scale in world history."

Is it inevitable that the most brilliantly successful society also will be the first in danger of collapse due to a lack of cultural confidence and offspring? Ironically, creating a hugely desirable place to live would seem also to be a recipe for suicide. The human comedy continues

[voletti]

"Socialism is a ponzi scheme. It will eventually fall, somehow."

True.
Also, its a rejection of traditional values that pretty much to blame. People prefer vacations to kids now? Simple economics alone can't answer why. Which is why certain minority groups (Asian non-muslimes for e.g.) do well in not just the number but the quality of kids raised.

[the invisib1e hand]

let's just skip to the conclusion the article leads us to: abortion is more "cost effective."

death-dealing-sophistry alert.

[wideawake]

Thanks for this.

This suicidal mentality does not only prevail in decadent, neutered Europe but also among many self-styled conservatives in the US who champion contraception.

The social dynamics of Europe are changing not only because there are fewer children, but also because most European children are now only children.

This creates social attitudes directly opposite to the conservative values that the West needs to survive - it undermines patriotism and the centrality of family.

The children of the fraction of this generation of European only children which actually reproduce will have no first cousins, no aunts, no uncles.

They will be like atoms floating randomly in the ether, socially.

Islam is gaining ground not because Muslims are wealthier, more intelligent, harder working or have any other such advantage - their sole advantage is their group ethos.

The most effective way to fight radical Islam short of picking up a rifle and entering the field is to have and raise as many children as possible.

[Looking4Truth]

If they do away with the social programs that require such heavy taxes [which will NEVER happen], the kids will start being born.

The sad thing is, the native euros are not having their own kids because they're paying high taxes which in turn are supporting the non-natives who are out-breeding them and sucking up those tax dollars on welfare.

[BW2221]

The cost of care and feeding millions of free-loading Muslims doesn't help either.

[gwb2OO4]

Individualism is a conservative value.

We don't live in the 1950s anymore. To many of us, marriage and family have become liabilities. Surely you can't expect people to behave the same way they did before feminism destroyed our social fabric?

[Notwithstanding]

Euroweenies: "I'm not gonna trade my cushy life for a second kid."

[Notwithstanding]

I live in Europe, and EVERY TIME we go out to dinner (as we often do since we travel whenever we can), the waitress will ask if the kids are all ours and then shake their head with amazed disapproval (I want to say "No, 4 of them are rented, the other 2 are ours" or "Yes. And how many kids do you have? Oh, only 1? Why don't you have more? Why are you using birth conrol?" or "Well, we are thinking of euthanizing a few while we are here in Europe, and this dining experince is a test to see which ones are the most bothersome - we will be passing out comment cards toward the end of the meal")

They just can't fathom anyone finding that real treasure is having a family.