The state of Israel is bucking the trend: It has a very high fertility rate for a developed nation. What's behind it?

In addition to things like a high per capita income and high levels of literacy, one of the defining characteristics of a "developed" country is a low fertility rate.

We've often spoken of the demographic crisis facing industrialized countries. No member of the European Union has a "replacement level" fertility rate. Even with high levels of immigration, most members' populations are on a downward trajectory.

In East Asia, the outlook is even bleaker. In Japan, more adult diapers are sold every year than baby diapers.

Then there's the United States. Our fertility rate is only slightly higher than China's, even without the latter's infamous "one-child" policy. It seems that the command to be "fruitful and multiply" has been forgotten–with the notable exception of the people to whom that command was first given.

I'm speaking of course of Israel. A recent Wall Street Journal piece by pediatrician Robert C. Hamilton took notice of Israel's unusually high fertility rate: 3.1 births per woman as opposed to an average of 1.7 births in the rest of the developed world.

The obvious question is "Why?" The automatic answer is that Israel's numbers are "inflated" by Ultra-Orthodox women having seven kids each. By the way, ultra-Orthodox Jews are known as "Haredi" in Hebrew.

That's part of the story, but not all of it. As Hamilton points out, "the rise in the Israeli birthrate since the late 1990s has been driven by the non-Haredi population." While, not surprisingly, observant Orthodox women average 4.2 births, less religiously observant, and even completely secular Israeli women also have fertility rates that are well above what demographers call "replacement level."

Israelis are so good at being fruitful and multiplying that some Israeli academics are publicly fretting about the possibility of overpopulation: "crowded hospitals, classrooms, and roads; depletion of biodiversity; and mounting greenhouse emissions."

Now, while the Haredi or even the very religious alone do not account for Israel's high fertility rates, this doesn't mean that religion isn't important in this story. On the contrary, as Hamilton writes, these rates "seems to arise from cultural norms sustained by religion."

In Hamilton's words "Israel treasures" children. Its high fertility rate "reflects a consensus among Israel's communities," secular as well as religious, about what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" means. These beliefs, in turn, "inform each citizen's personal choices, and inevitably affect the nation's demography."

Where did these beliefs come from? The obvious answer is Judaism. The Talmud says that "childhood is a garland of roses." Psalm 127 calls children "an inheritance from the Lord." And one Jewish sage taught that God gave the Law to the Israelites for the sake of their children, who were to be the guarantors that the Law would be kept.

While many Israelis may not believe these things, or even be aware of them, these beliefs have shaped how many Jews, even secular ones, view children. Having children is not a purely private act. It has communal dimensions.

This communal dimension is especially important in light of recent history, which saw approximately half of the world's Jews murdered. Only in recent years has the world's Jewish population recovered to pre-World War II levels.

One way of expressing why Israel is an outlier when it comes to fertility is that it's an outlier in an even more important sense: It is a society with a telos, a purpose: a haven for a people whose history, as one wag put it, is "paranoia confirmed by events."

The rest of developed world, including the United States, lacks a sense of purpose beyond personal gratification. Having kids is something you get around to, not something you build your adult life around.

Thus, in contrast to Israel, many of these countries look "old and fading." It could hardly be otherwise. Hamilton quotes one Jewish sage as putting it this way, "A child without parents is an orphan, but a nation without children is an orphan people."

http://pop.org/content/europe-we-know-it-dying

Europe as We Know It is Dying

What Will Follow the Winter of Western Civilization?

By Steven W. Mosher

Weekly Briefing: 2013 (v15)

It’s happened before.

Polybius

Writing a century and a half before the birth of Christ, the Greek historian Polybius observed “nowadays all over Greece such a diminution in natality and in general manner such depopulation that the towns are deserted and the fields lie fallow. Although this country has not been ravaged by wars or epidemics, the cause of the harm is evident: by avarice or cowardice the people, if they marry, will not bring up the children they ought to have. At most they bring up one or two. It is in this way that the scourge before it is noticed is rapidly developed.”

He concluded by urging his fellow Greeks to return to their historic love of family and children. “The remedy is in ourselves,” he wrote. “We have but to change our morals.” His advice, unfortunately, went largely unheeded.

The demographic winter of the Greek city-states led to economic stagnation and military weakness, which in turn invited invasion and conquest. After a century of increasing dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean, Rome finally annexed the Greek city-states in 146 B.C.

Will a Europe in the grip of a similar demographic winter come to a similar unhappy end? Certainly Europeans of today, like the Greeks of old, are barely having children. The birthrate across the entire continent is far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple. Italy, Spain, Austria, and Germany have total fertility rates, or TFRs, of only 1.4 or so, while Poland and Russia languish at 1.32 and 1.2 respectively. The more or less generous child allowances these countries pay the prolific has scarcely caused these numbers to budge. The birth dearth continues to widen.

Polybius is considered by some to be the successor of Thucydides in terms of objectivity and critical reasoning, and the forefather of scholarly, painstaking historical research in the modern scientific sense. According to this view, his work sets forth the course of history’s occurrences with clearness, penetration, sound judgment, and among the circumstances affecting the outcomes, lays especial emphasis on the geographical conditions. Modern historians are especially impressed with the manner in which Polybius used his sources, and in particular documents, his citation and quotation of his sources. Furthermore, there is some admiration of Polybius’s meditation on the nature of historiography in Book 12. His work belongs, therefore, amongst the greatest productions of ancient historical writing. The writer of the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1937) praises him for his “earnest devotion to truth” and for his systematic pursuit of causation.Meanwhile, adherents of pro-family sects such as Islam are moving in, having children, and repopulating historic Christendom. Is this process likely to continue? And to what end?

Most Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East have fertility rates two or three times as high as Europe. Afghanistan and Somalia, whose fertility rates are above 6 children (6.62 and 6.4 respectively), may be outliers. But other Middle Eastern countries with above-replacement TFRs include Iraq at 4.86, Pakistan at 3.65, and Saudi Arabia at 3.03. Even immigrants from the most Westernized Muslim countries such as Turkey and Tunisia average nearly twice as many children as the extant populations of most European countries.

While falling fertility may be humanity’s general fate, it is this differential fertility that will determine Europe’s destiny. Although the birthrates of Muslim immigrants to Europe are far lower than they were just a generation ago, they are still far more open to life than highly secularized Europeans. Moreover, these immigrants, once in place in Germany, Italy, Spain, etc., tend to maintain their relatively high fertility for a generation.

As a result of this potent mix of immigration and procreation, the number of Muslims will continue to grow. Europe as a whole, some demographers suggest, will have a majority Muslim population by 2100.

What a strange twist of history! Over the centuries, various Muslim armies have repeatedly attempted to conquer Europe. Time and time again, at Tours, Vienna, at Lepanto, at Malta, they were thrown back. Yet now what their forebears were unable to accomplish by force, their distant descendants will achieve by peacefully winning the Battle of the Cradle.

Whether they will be radicalized or secularized Muslims is the central question. If they are radicalized, then we can expect efforts to impose Sharia law in country after country, along with the growing persecution of the Christian minority. Catholics in Germany, for example, may come to be treated in largely the same way that Coptic Christians in Egypt have been for the last few centuries, that is to say, as second-class citizens, to be maligned, taxed and beaten almost at will.

If, on the other hand, the second- and third-generation Muslims are largely secularized, then the Christian minority will be, presumably, treated somewhat better, though still subject to some level of discrimination. As everyone knows by now, the Secular Left preaches a tolerance that it generally does not practice.

Either way, believers in once-Christian Europe will probably find themselves living in what might be called a pre-Constantine moment. In others words, they will be living under regimes that punish, even persecute, them for their beliefs.

At the present moment, Europeans still control their own destiny. As Polybius, were he alive today, would surely remind them: “The remedy is in yourselves. You have but to change your morals.”

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