When Babies Disappear (What to Expect When No One's Expecting)

RealClearBooks ^ | January 14, 2013 | Heather Wilhelm

[Mrs. Don-o]

Oh! Jan 2013! Well hello there, n00bie. Welcome to our brawl.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Yeah, Loretta Lynn, Betty Friedan and Hugh Hefner. That’s quite a killer threesome.

[Tax-chick]

Steven Mosher is an amazing man - I’ve exchanged emails with him over the years - but I think he is wrong in his tax-policy proposals. If they were spherical tax credits in a vacuum, it might work, but in our society, his ideas simply pit segments of the population against one another, when we need to be united against our common enemy, Communism.

Lower taxes for everyone. Reduce spending on everything. Eliminate regulation for everyone. Break government education, government medical care, and the government-employee racket for everyone. Any decision made because it could result in a government benefit fails on its merits. The exercise of free will, worthy of human beings, doesn’t include the question, “Will Daddy ‘Bama give us a cookie?”

FREEDOM! For freedom Christ has set you free, so do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Standing up for a standing-O!

[Tax-chick]

You have to take Loretta’s life experience into account: she got married at 13, didn’t even know how babies were made, and stuck with the alcoholic, abusive adulterer until he died, which was a LONG time.

[Tax-chick]

We’re all mad here.

[Romulus]

Every member of a human community has responsibilities to it. Everyone serves the state in some way; it has always and everywhere been thus. Only your unconsidered reflexes and manifest ignorance of history make it seem “red” to you. Likewise, it has always been understood that the poorest of the poor had nothing to contribute but their human fertility, which is nevertheless accepted as valuable and indispensable.

Stupid slogans and smears are really no substitute for thought. Your resistance to facts is making you ridiculous.

[Road Glide]

“Loretta Lynn, Betty Friedan and Hugh Hefner. That’s quite a killer threesome.”

If I’m not mistaken, Ms. Lynn was a mom by her mid-teens, and a grandmother while still in her thirties. She knows what she be-a-talkin’ about.

But — don’t blame her for the message in her song.

For almost the entire length of human history, women had children because they couldn’t prevent themselves from having children.

By the 1960’s (and the “Griswold v. Connecticut” decision) that changed.

Women now have “the pill”. What “choice” have they made since that option became available?

The only way to reverse the consequences of that choice, is to take “the option” away.

Otherwise, amongst women who have the choice (and the pill) available, too many will make the same choice as is being chosen today (as trends indicate).

I’m not advocating that we do that. But conservatism is being able to see reality for what it is, to understand that reality, and then determine how best to conduct ourselves in view of (or in spite of) it.

That’s the way it is...

[fattigermaster]

I can't speak for others, but I suspect elk is not dissing the occasional persons/couples who are childless for whatever reason, but reacting to the barrage of anti-childbearing crap from the liberal child-rejectors who've controlled the schools, media, and large chunks of both major political parties for the past 45 years.

Completely reasonable, and classified I presume under her "pundits" category. The actual individuals od couples who do not bear children, however, seem to fall into her "bitter feminists metro males and whoever" who want to "skip the work" category.

I reiterate that this attitude towards single people and childless couples is common, and hope I've not trod on a forbidden holy boundary by mentioning it.

Google "childless prejudice" and see who is being judgemental to whom.

[Brightitude]

we supply the troops

And you also supply the criminals and troublemakers. It all cancels out in the end.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Yes, and thank you. Tax-chick just smartened me up on Loretta Lynn's grim early marital history, which sounds like a couple decades of abuse.

However, I am not so sure about the inevitability of having unlimited kids without the Pill, or the inevitability of women desiring to be more-or-less constantly sterile thanks to the Pill's availability.

True, that makes a kind of intuitive sense. But the history of fertility (in the U.S. and other countries where such stats are available) shows that under conditions of "demographic transition" --- which means dropping infant and childhood mortality rates, higher percentage of children reaching adulthood, higher numbers of elders living longer, increased urbanization, and increased female education with consequently bigger career horizons --- women's fertility drops whether or not there are cheap endocrine disruptors available. That means, with or without the availablility of the pill, the patch, the implant, and the shot, i.e. hormonal desexing.

That may make you scratch your head -- I'm certainly scratching mine. But it seems that under conditions of "demographic transition," there is less tolerance for young pregnancy and for young marriage as a response to premarital pregnancy; more women delay marriage until mid-adulthood; and women will have less sex after they have their intended family size. This is true across cultures.

Fertility has dropped massively in many Islamic countries where few "modern contraceptive" methods are readily available.

Moreover, there are situations where contraceptives are available, yet families choose to have more kids. That is what demographer S.L.N. Rao found, e.g. in 1967, 28 percent of "devout" Rhode Island Catholics planned to have five or more children; that year the fertility rate of American Catholic college-educated women was 3.7 -- and this was 7 years after The Pill hit the market (1960).

Catholic fertility dropped rapidly over the next 10 years, but the key seemed to be not the availability of contraceptives devices, but the acceptance of a contraceptive ideology.

For a time, American Mormons were an exception here. While fertility tumbled elsewhere in the U.S. during the "baby bust" of 1965-80, the birth rate actually rose in Mormon-dominated Utah, along with average completed family size.

Again, a matter of ideology --- which is to say, values --- not availability.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Depends on who you mean by "we," I suppose. Childbearing families by definition bear all the chldren: therefore, to say we bear "good" kids and "bad" kids is a tautology. But the fact is --- pay attention, now--- NO KIDS, NO FUTURE. No nation. No nothing.

That's in the long term.

Short term: few kids means demographic structural deformity, i.e. more retirees than entry-level workers. You get the inverted-pyramid shape: every generation having less and less workers to support more and more elders.

You get less young men in the military. Therefore higher reliance on filling those slots with women, and foreign troops. (Our friendly free-world allies, e.g. Afghanistan. Libya. Benghazi. Grim smile.)

Then the euthanasia begins. They needn't even call it that. In the U.K., the NHS killed 137,000 patients last year on their "Liverpool Care Pathway" by the simple expedient of cutting off their nutrition and hydration, and causing their demise via hunger and thirst. Not cruel, though. They were sedated til they stopped breathing. Not cruel at all.

And if only half of them were even told (or their next-of-kin told) that they were being loaded onto the LCP exit ramp --- well, it's oldsters. The U.K. has decided they don't need oldsers. Don't need babies. Don't need Brits, basically.

But life goes on, Inshallah!

[Road Glide]

“Again, a matter of ideology -— which is to say, values -— not availability.”

Without “availability”, ideology wouldn’t count for much at all...

[Mrs. Don-o]

I think you missed a key point: in conditions of demographic transition, fertility declines whether there are contraceptives available or not. E.g. U.S. fertility was way lower in 1935 than in 1955, erven though contraceptives were much more available in the 1950's.

(Source: Nat.Center for Health Statistics)

This is also true in Islamic countries where contraception is far less available: 4 of the 10 greatest fertility declines ever recorded in a twenty-year period took place in the Arab world. Google "Nicholas Eberstadt" Muslim fertility decline

[PapaBear3625]

Humans went through this once before. When women became aware of the relationship between getting boffed and getting pregnant, they stopped getting boffed.

The women who could make it on their own went off on their own. The ones who needed a man to support them had to put up with sexually satisfying their man if they wanted to get fed, and that naturally led to kids.

Not all that long ago, kids were an economic asset. Whether on the farm or in the family business, they could be put to work doing something productive at a fairly young age. As they got older, the eldest stood to inherit the family farm/business in exchange for supporting his parents as their ability to work faded. It worked out.

In an environment where parents work for somebody else, and it takes 12 to 16 years of increasingly-expensive education before a kid can enter the workforce, kids have lost most of their economic value to their parents.

[Tax-chick]

few kids means demographic structural deformity

Demographic decline isn't a new phenomenon; Imperial Rome is the most famous historical example. However, the structure of today's welfare state, with its growing preponderance of the unproductive elderly, is new. "What do we do about all the indigent octogenarians?" was not a question faced in Rome's later years, but it's a big one for us, when an impressive preponderance of medical costs are expended on people in their last few months of life - and these costs are borne not by the patient and his family, but by a larger pool.

Rome also did not have a large population of non-working potential workers on the dole. The "corn dole" supported the working poor and their dependents, not generation after generation with no concept of work.

Whatever is going to happen in advanced Western societies will be a historical novelty, and it will not be pleasant for the weakest, most "expendable," members of society. A strong familia with religious values will protect its young/old/disabled members, but for the atomized, "state-owned" individual ... ZOT when you can't produce.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

-— A strong familia with religious values will protect its young/old/disabled members, but for the atomized, “state-owned” individual ... ZOT when you can’t produce. ——

That’s why I’m predicting the return of family clans within a generation. It will be a matter of survival. It will also be the good that God brings out of this mess.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

“Be fruitful.and multiply,” but not if you want to send three kids to Ivy League Schools, or something.

[Tax-chick]

I see myself as “Katie Elder” ... Anoreth is John Wayne, Bill is Dean Martin, Tom is that large guy, Pat is the flaky one going to A&M college ... ;-), and the rest of them are extras.

If it comes down to gathering the relations and arming the perimeter, that’s what you do. I may look like a hapless suburbanite, but I’m one generation off the farm, and I can feed a family on beans and greens if I have to.

I agree that reconstituting family solidarity is a good thing. When the “social security” system cut off the elderly from the following generations, that was a true evil which has multiplied unfortunate results. The Hatfields and the McCoys took better care of their families than we do, in many cases.