According to updated statistics, the US Total Fertility Rate has fallen from 2.1 to 1.9. This is a historic and greatly underlooked shift that has taken place this year because now America is below the population replacement rate. Put simply, there are more people dying than being born. This includes, mind you, the masses of immigration taking place to the United States from other countries.
America has now entered into the steps of the European nations, all of whom have a negative fertility rate. This is old news for the nations of Western Europe- it is well known that families, if people even choose to get married, and then if they do get married, if the choose to have children, have one, maybe (for the odd exceptions) two children. Any more is rarely heard of, as such people are looked upon strangely nowadays. This is in spite of the attempts by the governments of those same nations paying people a monthly stipend to for each child they have in order to boost population rates. Italy, once a nation known for producing the stereotypical “large Italian family” is at such low fertility levels they are offering families now double the monthly payment per child.
However, these campaigns never seem to work. Russia, a country who has known for a long time that it has a declining population, has been trying for at least ten years to increase its population through handouts and other family-friendly subsidies. While not a “Western” nation, Japan has the same problem and likewise has been trying the same approaches, but to no avail.
Several years ago, there was a rapper, Chapter Jackson, who made a rap parody song called It’s Free! Swipe Yo EBT that criticized the irresponsible behavior found in many poor Afro-American neighborhoods of women who spend their days getting pregnant and having children simply to collect welfare benefits because getting pregnant was easier than working at a job and trying to be a productive member of society:
(Note: this is the “clean” version per her Youtube Channel, but some people may find it offensive)
The song, while humorous and critical of the American welfare system’s abuses, does beg a simple, yet timely question in light of the declining European and American populations: Why is nobody having children when having them is so easy, especially when your government wants to give you money to have kids?
As any parent will tell you, raising children properly is not an easy task and it takes a lot of time. And by that, I mean raising people who are morally upright, who have critical thinking skills, and who can take care of themselves when they are adults. These are not lessons which require in-depth, intellectual skills that are difficult or impossible to possess except by an exceptional minority, but they are basic, learned behaviors that anybody, including small children, can learn which provide a set of rules, spoken and unspoken, for how to respect oneself and other human beings regardless of the situation at hand. The famous book All I Ever Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarden is one good example of this. Children need to be raised, ideally from the time they are young, in a good, loving environment that instills the proper values which will shape them to be upright adults.
This reason- parents saying they need to raise their kids properly- is something I have repeatedly heard when it comes to reasons why families do not have many children. The next most common reason is economic concerns- ‘we don’t have enough money’- with the assumption being that having “enough” money is a condition to properly raise a child, without ever defining what “enough” means.
As I stated earlier, I understand very well the physical, mental, and financial constraints which children place on a marriage and daily life. However, I do not believe that the two above-given reasons- “proper” upbringing and economics- are the real reasons why people are not having children in the West. In my opinion, it is because of a much more selfish reason: people see no meaning to life outside of their own gratification, and they see children as both a way of fulfilling and an obstacle to that gratification.
This is the “trophy” child idea. Parents who have one, maybe two children. Three in the case of an “accident”. After that it’s back on the pill or off to the doctor for “the snip.”
However, this view is completely anti-Christian. It is grossly unbiblical, for as the Bible itself says:
Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine Within your house, Your children like olive plants Around your table. (Psalm 128:3)
Now, let’s be clear that I am not speaking about having children simply for the sake of having children, such as in the case of the American Evangelical cult popularized by the Duggar family- these people intentionally attempt to get pregnant and stay pregnant as much as and for as long as possible. This is likewise not Christian.
A basic idea of Christian fertility is that which was traditionally taught by the Church- to be simply open to life when having relations. In other words, sexual activity exists first for the generation of new life and second for the enjoyment of the spouses in that order. It is a reflection of the union between the Father and the Son, whose love manifests in that of the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. This is the reason why birth control is absolutely forbidden in the Church and has always been, and the prohibition exists in spite of the fact that more than 95% of Catholics do not practice this teaching.
This view of children as something one desires but is a nuisance is an assumption that the result of the atheistic, hedonistic, self-centered philosophies that have taken control of public discourse in our modern times. They have always existed in some form- St. Paul speaks about the adherents of the worldview of the Greek philosopher Epicurius when he says their god is that of self-indulgence and he says “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” In a normal situation, such people are in the minority, and when the do inevitably die, their ideas die with them. If they had one (or two) children, then their children usually marry into families with (hopefully) better ideas, and the Epicurianism of their parents is abolished by the time their grandchildren arrive.
There is a history which lead up to the situation today, but one of the biggest reasons why this philosophy has taken power today is because in addition to the decline of the Faith and the rise of heresy is the use of modern birth control and abortion. Like it or not, modern birth control and abortion are very effective ways of limiting a human population’s size because they disrupt, very abruptly, the natural order of events as to how families grow. However, this was conditional upon the spiritual rot of a people.
There is a Hindu saying- “When the people are ready, the teacher appears.” In this case, the peoples of Western Europe and America, poisoned by bad philosophy and teaching for many, many years, were ready for their own suicide. In good time, that mechanism for their suicide came in the form of a piece of rubber and a little white pill.
Now approaching nearly sixty years after the “pill” and birth control along with mass abortion became popular do we see the rotten fruits of it in the west through the Muslim “refugee” invasion. Do not mistake me, these “refugees” need to be held accountable for their disordered and anti-human behavior. But how did they get into these societies? They were invited it. Why were they invited in? Because there are, truly, declining populations and governments thought they would be an easy fix. The Europeans (and Americans, too) refused to have children, so in order to perform the basic functions of society, these same governments needed people to literally work in the positions that, under normal circumstances, would be filled by members of that same society.
Human populations and ultimately, the survivability of a society needs people who are both able to function with self control as well as have the physical mass to exist. If you do not have people, you cannot have a society, and if an invader comes who is significantly larger, you will be overrun.
Will the West survive? Not in its current form. What will it look like? I do not know.
However, this brings me to my next point, and that is the population situation in Eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe has been very strong in standing against Islam and the Muslim invasions. However, unless there is a fundamental change soon, Eastern Europe will suffer the same fate as Western Europe for the same reason- demographics.
All of Eastern Europe, just like Western Europe, has negative fertility rates. While the reason for the decreased population sizes are not the absolute same as those in the West, there is still an element of hedonism and the end result is the same. Whether you are 81 million strong like Germany or 140 million strong like Russia, you cannot have a society without people. While we know that in the West the population has reached an inflection point after which we will see many more elderly than new births, this point has not reached the same extent yet in the East. However, it is rapidly approaching and must be addressed soon or else the same problems, and likely same consequences, will happen in that part of the world too.
I refer again to CIA factbook on Total Fertility Rates. Look up the First 50 and last 50 nations. 38 out of 50 in the top 50 are sub-Saharan African, many with large Muslim populations. The bottom 50 are all European (and America).
Perhaps I could phrase it another way: The “native European” is a minority. He is an endangered species. If he does not start having children, he will be extinct in a matter of several generations.
The numbers issue just begins with the declining birth rates. It does not begin to address very serious causes of early death in those same nations, such as HIV/AIDS and drug-resistant TB (both of which are at epidemic levels), heavy drug and alcohol use, and general stupidity that results in death. All of these are also major, major problems that the governments are only now attempting to deal with.
I referred to Chapter Jackson’s video earlier. To make a second point related to that video is the fact that Eastern Europe, when it comes to fertility, looks an awful lot like the situation of the Afro-American people. While there are plenty of the stereotypical “baby mommas on welfare” that the video mocks, the actual population of Afro-American people has dropped by almost a third since 1973- approximately 42 million to 31 million- especially due to abortion, but also drug/alcohol abuse, and bad behavior- the same things which are destroying Eastern Europe. One Afro-American commentator on Youtube, David Carroll, likewise discusses this in the Afro-American context:
There has been a lot of talk about the Eastern Nations saving Europe from the Muslim hordes. I like Eastern Europe, and I admittedly have a bias towards them because of my ancestral ties to the area (my last name is a clear giveaway). Eastern Europe also has stronger, at least nominal, ties to their Christian roots. However, it is clear that the strength of the Church in Eastern Europe, as well as that of the Orthodox Churches, is as not as strong as it would seem to be- else there would not be such an enormous and growing issue in this matter. If anything the Christianity is cultural rather than it is a matter of belief, and that is where the danger lies, for as the culture changes or erodes, the very faith which is attached to that culture will also erode among the people because it is seen as an external vestige instead of a essential part of their being because they believe it is true on the reason that it is true.
These nations are following their Western European brethren in to error and will likewise suffer the same fate if things do not change.
And in spite of all this, the answer is so simple- the answer is literally a part of the people’s bodies, and doing something that is about the easiest thing one can do- having children.
