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Posted on 06/01/2007 11:27:39 PM PDT by Sleeping Beauty
What causes low birth rates? I have debated this issue at some length with blogger Conservative Swede. Among the reasons frequently cited are the welfare state, feminism and secularism. However, if you look closely at the statistics from various countries, the picture gets quite complex, and there doesn’t appear to be an automatic correlation between low birth rates and any one of these factors.
The United States has the highest birth rates in the West, but this is largely due to ethnic minorities. If you compare white Americans to white Europeans, the American birth rate is somewhat higher than those of the Scandinavian nanny states, but still lower than replacement level. Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Sweden do have elaborate welfare states, high degrees of feminism and are not very religious, yet have some of the highest birth rates in the Western world (though still below replacement level.) They are certainly much higher than those in Catholic Poland, perhaps the most conservative religious country in Europe. And they are much higher than those of South Korea, which has more traditional sex roles and where Christianity is booming these days.
The gap between the Western world and the Islamic world in birth rates is clearly caused by religious factors, but the differences between industrialized nations are far more difficult to explain. If the cause is not welfarism, feminism or secularism, then what is it?
The Pill, and Abortion.
from Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler:
“...When reason have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “belongs to herself” - they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful...
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which last for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements...
Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution, stand empty, harbouring in their stone masses a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile-dwellings. Samarra was abndoned by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez’s time. In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward we read of old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty, crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheatre is a sown field, dotted with emergent statues and hermae. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable....”
Although I have a catholic viewpoint on world-history and identify with the “fellaheen” of Spengler, his words are wise and prophetic beyond belief.
Tell that to anyone who is relying on Social Security for any of their retirement money.
If you invert the pyramid the scheme collapses. Without children, the pointy end points down.
Thank you for those passages from Spengler. It seems impossible to find yourself across the broad and cyclical sweep of history — but I can see these patterns now in the world around me. The rise and fall...
Just the other day, I read that we had deployed 4,000,000 men during World War II. We built one war ship a month and produced airplanes by the week. We fought a war that lasted one year.
Our world has moved on... in a different direction.
Could it be because a woman is most receptive to reproduction in her teens/early twenties? Just a thought. I married at 17, have three kids, don’t regret it. Would have loved to have 10 kids. Lack of funds and both my boys are ADD. we’re talking never slept, walked by the time they were six months, wasn’t any carseat, high chair, crib, straight jacket they couldn’t get out of! I plain and simply could not have dealt with any more like them. My daughter was an angel. If I hadn’t had her, I would have thought I was the worst mom in the world!
As to your comment about women wanting more time to themselves-when women work outside the home, the first thing they do when they get home is start cooking, put a load of laundry in, settle the kids for homework-yada, yada,yada. Trying to get all the things done that they should have been doing all day. The men come in, sit down in front of the tv, and complaing because supper’s not on the table! Is it any wonder women need quiet time?!
Thanks for those links in Post 32!
Fascinating reading.
Nice observation. I think it is important.
I am discussing the finances of the family, not that socialist Ponzi scheme. NO ONE has children because they think "My children will pay into the social security system and help me retire!!"
When it comes to having children, their tax contributions to society at large is irrelevant to the decision.
APf
Abortion is obviously part of the explanation in Hungary, where in the early fifties (1950-1954) there were 3 children per woman of childbearing age, comfortably above the replacement level of 2.1 according to the Central Office of Statistics. In the year 2000, the last reliable published number, this has decreased to 1.33, and the number of abortions per live births has crept up from less than 1 in 10 in 1954, when illegal, to 1.2 already in 1960, when legalized! It has since decreased to about 0.6, but then the use of contraceptives has exploded in the meantime. All in all, sexual activity is unchanged, and the natural result is frustrated by contraceptives and abortions about in equal proportions. If abortions would be outlawed the number of live births would immediately jump to above replacement level.
I suspect, this is similar in most coutries.
I wonder about the implications of being rational and secular. A present, my generation, me, mentality makes sense. Why have children? Why bother? I think religion can give a view that extends into the past, one’s ancestors, and the future, one’s posterity, and places oneself as an important link in a more important chain.
Another implication of being rational and secular may be the phenomenon of the bully. Why not pick on those weaker than yourself, if you get something from it? Why not snatch purses from little old ladies? Why not fear, and align yourself with, the big bad dude stronger yourself? It all makes sense.
Caring for the weak makes little sense devoid of some moral compass. I think history shows that compass was often religion, particularly Judeo-Christian religion. I’m not so sure about Islam.
There really is no SSI trust fund. Without it to raid, the CONgress loots our wallets in other ways in order to buy the votes which ensure their ongoing employment.
As for having children, yes, that part is not determined by their future tax contributions, but for other reasons.
But the absence of those 'future contributions' from children already not had, as of two or three decades ago, is being felt.
Why do you think the government is dipping ever harder into your paycheck, which makes it hard for those not on the dole to have kids?
Why are they so desperate to shake and bake an huge new allegedly taxpaying class?
Instead we who are productive subsidize the third or fourth generation of the unproductive breeding the next generation of the unproductive, while scarcely being able to raise progeny of our own.
The entitlement mentality which permeates our culture from the bottom up has made it difficult to maintain our schools, our communities, and freedom from even more taxation, and so long as we subsidize those who will not work, we remain slaves of the state whose ability to raise our own children is severely limited by the economic factors which have been contributed to by our own lack of progeny.
We will soon be outvoted by the non-productive if this continues, because even those who work will need to be subsidized in order to raise children (they already are--the EIC). It is a vicious cycle, and this is not the first time around.
My point is that we rely on our children in ways we do not even comprehend. That starting in the 60's people were sold a bill of goods comparable to Kyoto, in which the best and the brightest were encouraged to not pass that on in the interest of there being a future, and those who were farther down the spectrum continued in the same behaviour they always had, with the added benefit of dribs and drabs of first-world aid which significantly lowered their mortality rates in childhood.
Other trends include selfishness, irresponsibility, and a culturally hedonistic attitude. All these have been facillitated by readily available abortion, divorce, birth control, and a general breakdown in social mores. But behind it all I see the simple spectre of selfishness, once cause to be deemed a pariah in a community, now extolled as virtue.
But as I see it, the point is the first gut response from women is of themselves. Men’s is of the family. It is an indication of leadership. A good leader puts his teammates' requirements above his own. Whether in sports or business or family, a good leader realizes that his success is measured by the success of the individuals he leads. Women’s outlook on life and the world is like that of a low level employee in a large corporation in which they feel imprisoned. No amount of money or freedom seems to change their attitude. This is why I believe a family should always have a male husband leading it. I believe the Adam and Eve story is a warning. It warns us that the natural path of destruction is for the man to succumb to the woman and the woman to succumb to evil. This story is telling men and women what not to do. Families in our society are gradually being undermined because as a whole we are not heeding this warning.
The feminization of men and the sexualization of women is the proof.
So to start with, abolish tenure and privatize the schools.
Islam values alms to the poor. Unfortunately they don't value peace.
In college, I challenged a feminist with the idea that feminism is a self extinguishing ideology, because feminists characteristically have far fewer children than nonfeminists.... and, I asked, how are you going to create a new generation of feminists? So help me, she looked right at me and said, "We'll get them in the schools." I was stunned that she actually admitted it.
Do away with child labor laws.
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There are good reasons to get rid of Social Security (or at least modify it so that it provides a decent return on investment) but to force people to have children to take care of them in their old age? Really now.
You can accomplish the same effect by tweaking the 401K-type plans or even forcing people as we are kind of doing to save for their retirement.
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