"... in a clean facility where the immigrant workers speak our language."
So bemoans Margret Kopala, writing in The Ottawa Citizen. Canada's birth rate has fallen to 1.5 births per woman. As I've written about before, the West is committing demographic suicide. It takes 2.1 births per woman just to stay level in population. Canada's rate of 1.5 means that it is not far from falling off a demographic cliff. If the rate falls to about 1.3, as it has done in two or three European countries, there is almost no chance that it can recover.
There is no longer a single country in Europe where people are having enough children to replace themselves when they die. Italy recently became the first nation in history where there are more people over the age of 60 than there are under the age of 20. This year [1998 - DS] Germany, Greece and Spain will probably all cross the same eerie divide. [link]
Ms. Kopala also observes,
Greece has 1.3 births per couple -- the "lowest low" from which no society has ever recovered; Russia, where 60 per cent of pregnancies are terminated, has the fastest-growing rate of HIV in the world and, by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles. ...
Most European countries compensate for their low birth rate by importing very large numbers of immigrants, particularly from or through Turkey and from northern Africa. This habit produces its own set of problems, especially since most of these immigrants are Muslims and "Old Europe" has never actually desired that they become assimilated into traditional European culture. France especially has had very rough time which I wrote about in some length in Nov. 2004 in part four of "The Forever Jihad" (all parts combined here).
But back to the original topic. In Canada, Kopala says, one couple out of 15 are medically diagnosed as infertile. And women who do bear children are delaying it much longer than before; a mother's average age of of first birth is 29.5 years. But the older women are the less likely they are to conceive and the more likely the pregnancy will miscarry.
Compounding the problem, earlier and increased sexual activity means a greater likelihood for contracting gonorrhea or chlamydia. In women, pelvic inflammatory disease and, in turn, blocked fallopian tubes or ectopic pregnancy may result. In men, sterility is possible. According to healthyontario.
com, rates of STD infection are up 60 per cent since 1997, with girls between the ages of 15 and 19 incurring the highest rates. In 2003, 20,000 new cases of chlamydia were reported in Canada. ...
On this front, Mark Steyn blames the "progressive agenda" -- abortion, gay marriage, endlessly deferred adulthood -- and he's right. He doesn't get into many specifics but they are easily identified. In the U.S., 48.5 million abortions since Roe v. Wade only slightly exceeds the estimated 47 million civilians lost in the Second World War. And, as the University of Calgary's Rainer Knopf predicted, gay marriage means any public distinction between procreative and non-procreative sexuality is now totally abandoned.
On that last point, see my Wall Street Journal op-ed of march 2004, "Save Marriage? It's Too Late" - their title. not mine.
When society decided--and we have decided, this fight is over--that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.
Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of "saving marriage" is pretty specious. There's little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.
That the United States' birth rate is barely under the 2.1 repalcement rate should be of no comfort. The demographic trend has been for decades that American women are having their first children at steadily advancing ages (see "The Vanishing American Family).
"Shrinkwrapped," the nom de blog of a psychoanalyst, writes that the "me" generation (meaning practically anyone born after World War II) exhibits a kind of social narcissism that also helps drive down the birth rate:
People decide not to have children for all sorts of reasons and much of the time their narcissistic pathology doesn't enter into the calculation. However, on the margins, a society that has exalted the individual as its highest value, is a society that will have many individual members who do not know how, or are poorly equipped psychologically, to make the difficult compromises necessary to raise children. In such cases, eschewing children in favor of "self actualization" becomes the choice of enough people that Demographics are effected. When this is combined with a loss of faith in one's society (as seems to be so prevalent in Europe, where nothing but the profane is sacred), a staggering financial burden, and social opprobrium, Demographic decline can border on Demographic suicide.
The procreation of children is the ultimate expression of faith in the future. Yet to come, how religious environmentalism devalues human life and has convinced countless people (most astonishingly, Christians) that human beings are bad for the planet. Some advance reading assignments:
Nature is not your friend
"Environmentalism as Religion," by Michael Crichton
"Children 'bad for planet'"
"Eco-Extremist Wants World Population to Drop below 1 Billion. Sea Shepherd founder says mankind is a 'virus' and we need to 're-wild the planet.' "
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