Population implosion: Many nations aborting future generations, creating underpopulation crisis

WORLD ^ | 2/15/02 | Gene Edward Veith

[Caleb1411]

The president of Estonia goes on national TV to urge his countrymen to have more children. Russian President Vladimir Putin warns his parliament about "a serious crisis threatening Russia's survival": the nation's low birth rate. The government of Singapore is trying to reverse that country's birth dearth by sponsoring a massive taxpayer-funded matchmaking service.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, panicking the world with dire predictions of a population explosion. By the year 2000, he predicted, the world would be so crowded that hundreds of millions would die of starvation. Although Mr. Ehrlich's prophecies have turned out to be almost comically wrong, PBS has produced a documentary taking him seriously, and philanthropists like Ted Turner still donate millions to combat population growth.

But the problem today is not overpopulation; it's underpopulation. For a population to reproduce itself, the fertility rate must average 2.1 children per woman. (The .1 allows for child mortality.) The fertility rate today among major developed nations is only 1.6.

The United States is rare among its peers in keeping its fertility rate at around the replacement level of 2.1, according to the Population Reference Bureau, which provided the fertility data cited here. Europe, though, is shrinking. Germany's rate is 1.3. Despite the stereotype of large Catholic families, France has a fertility rate of 1.9 and Italy has one of the lowest in Europe, 1.3. At this rate, there will be only about half as many Italians in the next generation. There will also be fewer Russians, whose fertility rate is 1.3.

Even nations that were once notorious for booming populations have drastically slowed down in reproducing themselves. In the last 20 years, India's fertility rate has gone from over four children per woman to about three. Mexico has gone from over four to just under three. China has a fertility rate of 1.8.

African nations continue to have very high fertility rates, up to five or six children per woman, but those lands are ravaged by AIDS, which is decimating their population. Muslim nations, on the other hand, tend to have booming population growth—Yemen's fertility rate is 7.2 children per woman.

Demographers predict that the world's population will level off at 9 billion, reports The Wall Street Journal. Then it will start dropping. There may well be nearly 500 million fewer people by 2075.

Isn't this a good thing? Why are so many governments panicking at the drop in their populations?

Although radical environmentalists like Mr. Ehrlich see human beings only as "consumers of the earth's resources," human beings are in fact the most valuable resource of all. Citizens are not just consumers but producers. Having fewer people can wreak havoc on an economy, creating both a labor shortage and a shortage of buyers. A government with a shrinking population faces a smaller military and fewer taxpayers. Dwindling populations have always signaled cultural decline, with less creativity, energy, and vitality on every level of society.

Already Japan— fertility rate 1.3—is facing the problem of having fewer taxpaying young people to support the burgeoning number of retirees, something that will hit the generous welfare states of Europe especially hard.

Already Europe has had to import large numbers of immigrants to bolster the labor force, most of them from the Middle East. Fewer and fewer native Europeans—along with the dwindling influence of Christianity—and more and more Muslims raise the prospect of the Islamification of Western Europe. One reason "old Europe" is not supporting the United States in a war with Iraq is that politicians in France and Germany fear the reaction among their Muslim voters.

Why the population decline? The worldwide collapse of what are, literally, family values. Thanks to contraceptive technology, sex has become separated from childbearing. With women pursuing careers of their own and men getting sex without the responsibilities of marriage, why bother with children? For many women and men, pregnancy has become an unpleasant side effect, something to prevent with contraceptives or easily treat with a trip to the abortion clinic.

The dirty little secret of the population implosion, one seldom mentioned by demographers, is that the world is aborting its future generations. China has shrunk its fertility rate by its cruel policy of forced abortion. (The website of the International Planned Parenthood Federation has only good things to say about China and does not even mention how the government coerces women to have abortions. So much for "choice.")

In the United States, abortion ends between one-third and one-fifth of all pregnancies, and the U.S. abortion rate is relatively low. In Russia, the average woman may have as many as four abortions in her lifetime. There are two abortions for every live birth. That is to say, Russians kill two-thirds of their children before they are born. That, Mr. Putin, is the "serious crisis threatening Russia's survival."

[Age of Reason]

Please cite the civilization that never knew famine or natural disaster.

I wasn't tallking about civilization--I was talking about hunter-gathering peoples living before population growth forced people to farm and own land.

But since you bring up the subject, famine and disasters do seem to go along with farming and civilization.

[Fishrrman]

quebecois wrote:
"Only religious conviction, compounded by a cultural expectation of having large families to continue the existence of a cultural/tribal group, can provide adequate incentive to women to have more babies."

Very well stated.

But --- consider the propraganda that is being preached to whites nearly everywhere in the world today: that whites are evil, that whites are racists, that whites are polluters, that whites are enslavers, that whites are imperialistic, that the white man's main accomplishment has been to exploit the earth's nonwhite peoples, at the same time depleting its resources and forever ruining its natural beauty.

In such an atmosphere, it is any wonder that young whites don't harbor the enthusiam to create large families through which "to continue the existence of [their] cultural/tribal group"? After all, don't they belong to the most oppressive, evil cultural group in human history? (laughs)

Conversely, I sense that children in most Islamic schools are being taught that -- regardless of the oppression foisted upon them by the West -- that they are a population "in acscendance", with a triumphant future before them. There's a good reason why the maps of Islam don't show Israel: it is because Islam believes it has a future; the Western world teeters on the verge of forfeiting such beliefs.

Make no mistake about the original article of this discussion. It bemoans the fact that [Japan and Singapore aside] those populations that are in decline are white, western, mostly Christian peoples, and that those populations that threaten to overwhelm them in numbers are not. Of course, this is not explicitly stated, for to openly mouth such ideas (as I am doing here) invites one to be branded as "racist". But that's what it infers.

Cheers!
- John

[Age of Reason]

Where do you live: city, suburb, country, boondocks?

In my time, I have lived in all those places, including places with and without electricity and plumbing.

[Mamzelle]

Exactly what do you realistically, *reason*ably expect? The outlawing of all immigration and a seal on the borders? I'll settle for enforcement of exsisting laws, thanks. That's hard enough to accomplish.

[Age of Reason]

Exactly what do you realistically, *reason*ably expect?

An understanding that population growth reduces freedom.

Once that is understood, then it's a matter of weighing the loss of freedom against the benefits of immigration--both near term and long term.

Another possiblity is that no one should be allowed to become an American citizen unless, in addition to the usual requirements, he is able to purchase the citizenship of a current American, who must then leave the country.

[Mamzelle]

re: Another possiblity is that no one should be allowed to become an American citizen unless, in addition to the usual requirements, he is able to purchase the citizenship of a current American, who must then leave the country.)))

Now I get it. Much momentum to your effort?

[hocndoc]

""I wasn't tallking about civilization--I was talking about hunter-gathering peoples living before population growth forced people to farm and own land.

But since you bring up the subject, famine and disasters do seem to go along with farming and civilization""

Famine and disasters would have affected everyone, don't you think?

Remeber the wilderness that most of this continent was before 1800. Or look at Australia or any given South Pacific Island. The aboriginal peoples in these lands, those who might qualify as your ideal, still suffered the effects of disasters and had famines due to bad weather or a natural disaster.

I don't think your ideal society would have left much of a record to study, however.

Agriculture and a minimum level of population is necessary for culture, including recording and contemplating history.

There is no overpopulation on the Earth. There are the results of bad leadership and greed, but no overpopulation.

[Caleb1411]

Read my [Age of Reason] other posts on this thread.

Overpopulation is not about how much you have.

Overpopulation is about what you must do to obtain what you will have.

Are you hearing echoes of Through the Looking Glass here? 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

The derided "experts" rhema cited have responded to exactly the specter of "overpopulation" presented to the world by junk-science false prophets like Paul Ehrlich. But if one has gnostic insight into the arcana of "overpopulation," . . .

[Caleb1411]

abortion ends between one-third and one-fifth of all pregnancies

So?

After a while, people inclined to abort their children will have selected their genes out in the course of evolution--such people, by aborting their pregnancies, will make their kind extinct.

Left alone to run its course, and your problem will solve itself.

In the materialist's world, yes, women would be genetically predisposed to abort their children.

In the real world, abortion bespeaks a soul sickness, as countless women who've aborted will testify.

[Damocles]

[Coleus]

I've read about this in the past, do you have any links?

[Antoninus]

I believe that Americans should have more kids. See the following Teddy Roosevelt quotes below:

On motherhood as the true source of progress, Teddy Roosevelt said: "A more supreme instance of unselfishness than is afforded by motherhood cannot be imagined."

Before an audience of liberal Christian theologians in 1911, he said: "If you do not believe in your own stock enough to see the stock kept up, then you are not good Americans, you are not patriots, and ... I for one shall not mourn your extinction; and in such event I shall welcome the advent of a new race that will take your place, because you wil have shown that you are not fit to cumber the ground."

On the centrality of the child-rich family to the very existence of the American nation: "It is in the life of the family, upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the nation rests....The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders."

On parenthood: "No other success in life, not being President, or being wealthy, or going to college, or anything else, comes up to the success of the man and woman who can feel that they have done their duty and that their children and grandchildren rise up to call them blessed."

On out-of-wedlock birth versus practiced sterility: "After all, such a vice may be compatible with a nation's continuing to live, and while there is life, even a life marred by wrong practices, there is a chance of reform.

In another place, on the same subject: "...[W]hile there is life, there is hope, whereas nothing can be done with the dead."

On the behavior of 90% of those who practice birth control: "[It is derived] from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the difference between the all-important and the unimportant."

On the "pitiable" child-rearing record of graduates of women's colleges like Vassar and Smith who bore only 0.86 of a child each during their lifetimes: "Do these colleges teach 'domestic science'?... There is something radically wrong with the home training and school training that produces such results."

[Coleus]

http://www.humanlife.org/abor_supl/html/POPULATN.html

http://www.improb.com/teach/lessons2002/people-in-texas.html

http://www.pop.org/main.cfm?EID=139

http://www.pop.org/

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams022499.asp

http://www.newsmax.com/commentarchive.shtml?a=1999/2/24/090254

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/folder/ friday_rush_smashes.guest.html

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/world.html

http://www.worldalmanacforkids.com/explore/states/texas.html

http://geography.about.com/library/quiz/bl021400.htm

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html

[m18436572]

I have a sneaking suspicion that you are correct. This seems to be a class problem.
Lower classes have no reason not to breed.
As your wealth increases, and your expectations of how your kids should be raised becomes more of a concern, you see more reasons to postpone, or not have as many, or completely forego having, children. Parents raising kids to the same or better standard of living they enjoyed as kids today seems almost impossible. Just a gut feeling.

[Young Werther]

My birthday was Tuesday and I {gulp} turned 60!

In 1953 when Stalin died the world also marked a milestone. World Population exceeded 1 billion. Now the population stands at 6 Billion. I just did alittle bond table. 1 Billion grows to 6 billion over a 50 year period at a 3.6% per year growth rate.

Yes certain cultures have embraced policies to limit birth rates.

Implosion? I don't think so!

[Countyline]

You definitely seem to think outside the box. Often such thinking is a good thing: it certainly raises our level of thought in a new way, either strenghtening or expanding our view about the whole.

It has been an interesting read.

"How silly that prisons equate crowding with punishment and loss of freedom."

Punishment is the institutionalization of men and the loss of freedom in the world, i.e., removal from society at large. The crowding is for less cost and convenience of those who contain them from the world. The prison really belongs to the prisoners. Just ask the guards. It is a dangerous place to be. Individuals (inmates) often filled with anger, rage, violence, hate. Not all but many. Not a good thing for anyone to be exposed to on a daily basis.