Fear of Too Many Babies is Hard to Bear - Mark Steyn

Chicago Sun-Times ^ | October 22, 2006 | Mark Steyn

[Tom D.]

Fear of Too Many Babies is Hard to Bear

October 22, 2006 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist

Last Tuesday morning, in a maternity ward somewhere in the United States, the 300 millionth American arrived. He or she got a marginally warmer welcome than Mark Foley turning up to hand out the prizes at junior high. One could have predicted the appalled editorials from European newspapers aghast at yet another addition to the swollen cohort of excess Americans consuming ever more of the planet's dwindling resources. And, when Canada's National Post announced "'Frightening' Surge Brings US To 300m People," you can appreciate their terror: the millions of Democrats who declared they were moving north after Bush's re-election must have placed incredible strain on Canada's highways, schools, trauma counselors, etc.

But the wee bairn might have expected a warmer welcome from his or her compatriots. Alas not. "Three hundred million seems to be greeted more with hand-wringing ambivalence than chest-thumping pride," observed the Washington Post, which inclines toward the former even on the best of days. No chest-thumping up in Vermont, either. "Organizations such as the Shelburne-based Population Media Center are marking the 300 million milestone with renewed warnings that world population growth is unsustainable," reported the Burlington Free Press. Across the country, the grim milestone prompted this reaction from a somber Dowell Myers. "At 300 million," noted the professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California, "we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation."

I, on the other hand, was feeling pretty chipper about the birth of the cute l'il quality-of-life degrader. The previous day, my new book was published. You'll find it in all good bookstores -- it's propping up the slightly wonky rear left leg of the front table groaning under the weight of unsold copies of Peace Mom by Cindy Sheehan. Anyway, the book -- mine, not Cindy's -- deals in part with the geopolitical implications of demography -- i.e., birth rates. That's an easy subject to get all dry and statistical about, so I gotta hand it to my publicist: arranging for the birth of the 300 millionth American is about as good a promotional tie-in as you could get and well worth the 75 bucks he bribed the guy at the Census Bureau. But, even if you haven't got a book to plug, the arrival of Junior 300 Mil is something everyone should celebrate.

So why don't we? The answer is that too many people who should know better are still peddling the same old 40-year-old guff about "overpopulation." What does Professor Myers mean by "quality-of-life degradation"? America is the 172nd least densely populated country on Earth. If you think it's crowded here, try living in the Netherlands or Belgium, which have, respectively, 1,015 and 883 inhabitants per square mile compared with 80 folks per square mile in the United States. To be sure, somewhere such as, say, Newark, N.J., is a lot less bucolic than it was in 1798. But why is that? No doubt Myers would say it's urban sprawl. But that's the point: you can only sprawl if you've got plenty of space. As the British writer Adam Nicholson once wrote of America, "There is too much room in the vast continental spaces of the country for a great deal of care to be taken with the immediate details." Nothing sprawls in Belgium: It's a phenomenon that arises not from population pressures but the lack thereof.

As for other degradations the weight of which is so crushing to Myers, name some. America is one of the most affordable property markets in the Western world. I was amazed to discover, back in the first summer of the Bush presidency, that a three-bedroom air-conditioned house in Crawford, Texas, could be yours for 30,000 bucks and, if that sounds a bit steep, a double-wide on a couple of acres would set you back about $6,000. And not just because Bush lives next door and serves as a kind of one-man psychological gated community keeping the NPR latte-sippers from moving in and ruining the neighborhood. The United States is about the cheapest developed country in which to get a nice home with a big yard and raise a family. That's one of the reasons why America, almost alone among Western nations, has a healthy fertility rate.

Everywhere else, for the most part, they've taken the advice of Myers and that think tank in Vermont. In America, there are 2.1 live births per woman. In 17 European countries, it's 1.3 or below -- that's what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility, a rate from which no society has ever recovered. Spain's population is halving with every generation. These nations are doing what Myers and the Vermont "sustainability" junkies would regard as the socially responsible thing, and having fewer babies. And as a result their countries are dying demographically and (more immediately) economically: They don't have enough young people to pay for the generous social programs the ever more geriatric Europeans have come to expect.

By the way, I wonder if any helpful reader would care to provide a working definition of "unsustainable." We hear it all the time these days. You can hardly go to an international conference on this or that global crisis without Natalie Cole serenading the opening-night gala banquet of G-7 finance ministers with a couple of choruses of "Unsustainable, that's what you are." Two centuries back, when Malthus warned of overpopulation, he was contemplating the prospects of a man "born into a world already possessed" -- that's to say, with no land left for him, no job, no food. "At Nature's mighty feast," wrote Malthus, "there is no vacant cover for him." But that's not what Myers and Co. mean. No one seriously thinks 400 or 500 million Americans will lead to mass starvation. By "unsustainable," they mean that we might encroach ever so slightly onto the West Nile mosquito's traditional breeding grounds in northern Maine. Which is sad if you think this or that insect is more important than the developed world's most critically endangered species: people. If you have a more scrupulous care for language, you'll note that population-wise it's low birth rates that are "unsustainable": Spain, Germany, Italy and most other European peoples literally cannot sustain themselves -- which is why, in one of the fastest demographic transformations in human history, their continent is becoming Muslim.

As a matter of fact, you don't have to cross the Atlantic to see the consequences of a loss of human capital: The Burlington Free Press would be better occupied worrying less about the 300 millionth American and more about the ever emptier schoolhouses up and down the Green Mountain State. I used to joke that Vermont was America's leading Canadian province, but in fact it's worse than that: demographically, it's an honorary member of the European Union.

The reality is that in a Western world ever more wizened and barren the 300 millionth American is the most basic example of American exceptionalism. Happy birth day, kid, and here's to many more.

©Mark Steyn 2006

[ukie55]

Easy way to reduce the population....deport the illegals.

[gridlock]

Mexicans can be assimilated. Muslims cannot.

[TADSLOS]

...and an excellent book it is. Steyn's, not Sheehan's.

[marc costanzo]

In 2021, Non-hispanic White Americans will become a minority in this country !

In 2050, the population of America could top 464,000,000 ---

--PATH TO NATIONAL SUICIDE by Lawrence Auster

[marc costanzo]

>>However, articles I've read in the past stated or implied that U.S. population growth was almost entirely due to immigration and immigrants, who are the ones having babies (according to the MSM, who also imply that all of America's increase is nonwhite -- and the future).<<

The future is the destruction of the United States of America
precipitated by the secession of the Border States under the rule of Mexican Nationalists

[marc costanzo]

Mexicans and Latinos are not assimilating anymore !

[battlegearboat]

I was FReeper baby 37553.

[marc costanzo]

>>That baby has already been born. Young black couple. The father is a soldier and came home from Iraq just for the birth of his daughter.
<<

Wrong wrong wrong !

Go read Debbie Schlussel's comments on this event .
Her words are a real eye-opener

www.debbieschlussel.com

[A. Pole]

In America, there are 2.1 live births per woman

If so, why the population of America is growing so fast if 2.1 is BELOW the stable replacement rate (about 2.3 or 2.4)?

Should Europe emulate US example?

[nathanbedford]

I first posted this a couple of years ago. Alas it is only more drearily true today:

THE POPULATION OF AMERICA HAS DOUBLED IN MY LIFETIME

If you have lost control of your local school system and you believe it is because liberalism is triumphing over conservatism, you are right but you have identified the symptom and not the cause: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.

If you have lost control over your own real property, if your rights to manage, improve, and develop your property have passed over to bureaucrats, if you can no longer choose whom to rent to or whom to sell to, if you have lost confidence that your deed in fee simple absolute will protect you against a venal government or one wholly given over to interest groups, and for all of this you blame liberalism, you have identified the symptom but not the cause: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.

If you are a rancher who has lost his rights to graze his cattle upon lands licensed to his family for generations, if you're a fox hunter who has been deprived of his sport, if you must wait three hours for a tee time, if you have given up taking the family to the Jersey shore because the travel time now exceeds three hours, if, after hours of travail, you finally arrive at the Jersey shore with your family and you find your neighbors to close, too numerous, polyglot, and uncongenial, know this;The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.

If you look at Broward and Palm Beach counties in Florida as-miracle of the jet age-suburbs of New York City, and you watch helplessly as the politics of these counties veer ever farther left potentially dragging all Florida and, with Florida, the soul of the Republican Party in America, be advised: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.

If, as a parent or grandparent, you find yourself mightily boring your children or grandchildren with descriptions of how Christmas used to be, descriptions of a time gone by when shopkeepers were permitted to say, "Merry Christmas," when Christmas carols were really that, carols, when the public square was a place for the exuberant celebration of the birth of Christ, rather than a forum for the celebration of the pagan, then you instinctively know: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.

If you are old enough to remember America before the vietnamization of America, then you must love your country and you see her "a shining city on the hill" as the last best hope for men.

You know what to do.

[ichabod1]

Not sure how you'd get broadband Internet service there, tho . . .

Line-Of-Sight Microwave service.

[Erasmus]

Not sure how you'd get broadband Internet service there, tho . . .

Satellite. At least when you have the gen'rator running.

< }B^)

[Moonman62]

Designating this particular baby as the 300 millionth is an arbitrary act . Babies are being delivered every minute .

Of course. At least they didn't pick a single crack addict who already has six children.

[Paladin2]

Cindy'd book: Amazon.com Sales Rank: #186,676 in Books

[Paladin2]

Mark's book: Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6 in Books.

[goldstategop]

Conservative books are best-sellers; most liberal books head after a few weeks to the bargain books bin.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus

[raybbr]

I really enjoy your posts.

The Path to National Suicide by Lawrence Auster (1990)

An essay on multi-culturalism and immigration.

Click the Pic!!!!

How can we account for this remarkable silence? The answer, as I will try to show, is that when the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 was being considered in Congress, the demographic impact of the bill was misunderstood and downplayed by its sponsors. As a result, the subject of population change was never seriously examined. The lawmakers’ stated intention was that the Act should not radically transform America’s ethnic character; indeed, it was taken for granted by liberals such as Robert Kennedy that it was in the nation’s interest to avoid such a change. But the dramatic ethnic transformation that has actually occurred as a result of the 1965 Act has insensibly led to acceptance of that transformation in the form of a new, multicultural vision of American society. Dominating the media and the schools, ritualistically echoed by every politician, enforced in every public institution, this orthodoxy now forbids public criticism of the new path the country has taken. “We are a nation of immigrants,” we tell ourselves— and the subject is closed. The consequences of this code of silence are bizarre. One can listen to statesmen and philosophers agonize over the multitudinous causes of our decline, and not hear a single word about the massive immigration from the Third World and the resulting social divisions. Opponents of population growth, whose crusade began in the 1960s out of a concern about the growth rate among resident Americans and its effects on the environment and the quality of life, now studiously ignore the question of immigration, which accounts for fully half of our population growth.

This curious inhibition stems, of course, from a paralyzing fear of the charge of “racism.” The very manner in which the issue is framed—as a matter of equal rights and the blessings of diversity on one side, versus “racism” on the other—tends to cut off all rational discourse on the subject. One can only wonder what would happen if the proponents of open immigration allowed the issue to be discussed, not as a moralistic dichotomy, but in terms of its real consequences. Instead of saying: “We believe in the equal and unlimited right of all people to immigrate to the U.S. and enrich our land with their diversity,” what if they said: “We believe in an immigration policy which must result in a staggering increase in our population, a revolution in our culture and way of life, and the gradual submergence of our current population by Hispanic and Caribbean and Asian peoples.” Such frankness would open up an honest debate between those who favor a radical change in America’s ethnic and cultural identity and those who think this nation should preserve its way of life and its predominant, European-American character. That is the actual choice—as distinct from the theoretical choice between “equality” and “racism”—that our nation faces. But the tyranny of silence has prevented the American people from freely making that choice.

[livius]

There are lots of places in Europe that look like wastelands now - parts of Spain, such as the rural village areas - and are virtually uninhabited. Well, except for the Moroccans and African Muslims who are beginning to move in and set up shop. I have seen them in some of the most remote villages in Spain.

[G Larry]

America's population would be cresting 370 Million, if not for abortion.

50 Million directly and 20 Million would be offspring in the 33 years since 1973 R vs. W.

[300winmag]

At any rate, liberalism is headed for demographic extinction.

Not when you count the votes of the dead, illegal, and never-existed-in-the-first-place voters. If that doesn't work, they can fall back on an oligarchy of judges, rather than democracy.