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Cult Watch Title: Here’s Who Will Lament — and Celebrate — the Plummeting U.S. Birth Rate The birth rate among women in the United States just hit a historic low, leading some demographers to worry that population decline may lie in our future. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that in 2016, there were just 62 live births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. That’s a one percent decrease from 2015, and the lowest rate on record. Blame the millennials, say demographers — they’re not having kids. Some commentators have worried this may become a “national emergency” if the rate were to drop below population replacement levels. What’s so bad about fewer babies? That depends on who you ask — and, often, their political leanings. A population that fails to replace itself means a growing elderly population sustained by a shrinking workforce, creating social anxiety, economic troubles, and a general sense of cultural malaise. William Frey, a population expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, suspects that a still-recovering U.S. economy is to blame for the dip, rather than more permanent factors. “Every year I say when the economy is getting better then we’ll start having more children,” Frey told the Washington Post, “and I’m still expecting that to happen.” Solutions to population woes are where partisan views begin to diverge. Conservatives are more likely to emphasize religious and traditional values as the best way to encourage families to have more children. A May 2015 article in Breitbart, the alt-right news site, called falling fertility rates among millennial women “disturbing.” It connected lower birth rates to abortion, noting that 5.6 million pregnancies had been terminated between 2007 and 2011 — a common view in the pro-life movement but less widely accepted outside of it. In some European countries, many of which have lower fertility rates than the United States, governments have launched public initiatives, such as Denmark’s “Do it for mom” campaign in 2015, which encouraged couples to have kids to please their parents. Another way to ensure population replacement is through robust immigration. But that is another point where partisan concerns about fertility diverge — and where some of the real civilizational angst can set in. Japan presents an extreme case. The nation’s population is already in net decline, with whole villages aging away. There’s one village where elderly residents make life-size dolls and place them in classrooms and playgrounds to remind them of what children are like, since there are no more children there anymore. As the working population in Japan shrinks, there won’t be enough nurses to take care of the people who will soon be filling up nursing homes. Taiwan and Hong Kong also have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world, but they’ve implemented visa programs that allow foreign workers. But Japan has kept its immigration laws watertight, preferring instead to pour billions of dollars into creating service robots for the country’s burgeoning nursing home industry. The Japanese government would literally rather have robots take care of its aging population than open the country to non-Japanese workers. Tinges of a similar ethnocentrism can be found, with increasing fervor in the past few years, in more distant corners of the American and European right. Concerns about declining birth rates, rising immigration from non-Western countries, and the fall of the Judeo-Christian West resonate on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain’s former chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, has warned that the secularization of Europe was leading to its demographic, moral, and ultimately civilizational downfall. Sacks claimed in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2016 that there was no “historical example of a society that became secularised and maintained its birth rate over subsequent centuries.” “That’s how great civilizations decline and fall,” he said. These fears help explain why Trump’s base can support policies that would reduce overall immigration while simultaneously fearing a shrinking population. In May 2016 White House chief strategist and former Breitbart chief Stephen Bannon invited Italian conservative Benjamin Harnwell to his radio show to share a similar message. “There’s not a single country, a single EU member state, that has a fertility rate at replacement level,” Harnwell claimed. Yet Muslim immigration threatened the continent as well, he said, since Europeans, who have lost touch with their Christian values, were unable to see the “innately aggressive” aspects of Islam. News of the low birth rate is likely to delight at least one U.S. group — the small Virginia-based nonprofit Negative Population Growth. The group believes that endless population growth will destroy the environment and strain resources; it supports policies to lower the birthrate and reduce immigration to “traditional levels.” Theirs isn’t a view that is currently widely held in the United States, but it harks back to fears of a “population bomb” that gripped the Western world in the 1970s, when the group was founded. In 1969, Paul Ehrlich, a popular public intellectual and biologist who frequently appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, declared at a conference, “Our first move must be to convince all those we can that the planet Earth must be viewed as a spaceship of limited carrying capacity.” The United Nations declared 1974 “Population Year,” and more than a hundred countries gathered to discuss global population control measures. China’s draconian one-child policy was borne in part from this strain of thought. “We must not simply stop population growth,” Negative Population Growth proclaims on its website. “We must turn it around.” Poster Comment: That is a crude birth rate of about 10.3 which is far below the projected CBR of 18.2 for 2015-2020. From Wikipedia
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 3. Anthem, I think we could have a meaningful discussion of this. My mind comes at this from three very different angles - a religious one, a secular/liberty-focused one, and a national security/cultural one. Where I come out on it is that whining about things and saying what they "ought to be" from a moralistic and religious perspective is among the most useless things anybody ever does. God never intervenes in such matters, to save cultures from the consequences of their own choices. He's not going to this time either, because we're not really a "good" people by his definition. So, if we want to keep going and not simply melt into Latin America (a prospect that does not, frankly, offend me all that much), then we actually have to fundamentally change some aspect of our society. Changing the birth control/abortion culture would be the religious way to effect change. But we are ruled by Protestant Republicans, with secular Democrats right behind, so we will never - not ever - be changing course on birth control or abortion until the country has already become Latin America, and maybe not then. The religious way will not work, because there are not nearly enough religious people who even understand the problem. It's a dead letter. The other option is secular. France and Iceland are the only First World "Christian" countries in Europe or North America to be nearly at replacement rate for fertility. They do this by the sort of comprehensive economic support for families: housing, child care, education, health care, income support necessary for First World people to have enough children to sustain the population. Of course, in France those numbers are tricky, just like in the United States. Truth is, France and the US show an overall fertility rate that is much higher than the WHITE fertility rate in either place. In the US, the white fertility rate is in the sewer, at European levels. France does not keep statistics based on ethnicity, considering all French to be "French" and France to be colorblind. It would be illegal and discriminatory for the French state to keep racial statistics on its people, so it doesn't. That said, it's obvious from observation that it is Arabic (mostly from North Africa), as well as Black Africans and French Caribbean people (mostly Christian) who are the primary childbearers. White fertility is lower. So even my preferred method doesn't appear to really work in countries where the benefits are generous. For that reason, I actually think that the third answer - learning Spanish - is the most practical for Americans. We will not change our religious beliefs, and will not change our economic structures, and therefore will not change our reproductive practices. That means a relentless downward spiral of available workers, putting upward pressure on wages and political pressure for immigration. In the end, because we won't change anything, we will change our language to Spanish. Whether that will change our religion to Catholic, and permanently change our fertility rates upward to resemble Latin America, or that, rather, Latin Catholics in a First World country will behave like Spaniards in Spain, secularize, and also stop having babies, remains to be seen. For my part, I would like to see the culture come to its senses. But since I know from talking to my fellow Americans that it won't, I have adopted a shoulder shrug attitude towards the Hispanicization of America. I have the two strategies to stop that, but nobody wants to do those things. Instead, they want to do what the Japanese are doing - close the doors. That works for a racist island like Japan, where there is an emperor and where the culture reigns supreme. But America is much more heavily dominated by economic interests, and is much more divided. No consensus for keeping the borders closed will ever hold. So our future is to become Latin America. It would be best if we were to become Chile or Costa Rica, rather than Venezuela or the bad parts of Mexico.
Replies to Comment # 3. The religious way will not work for you because you Dont have faith on god. You said that is n your screed. If I read your drivel I'm sure you will talk about abortion to end poverty and some more commie bullshit. Perhaps if you didn't pray to a dead woman who will never ever hear your prayers you would have more faith. Then you call the commie pope holy father blaspheming the one true god. Sick.
#20. To: Vicomte13, A K A Stone (#3) (Edited) My mind comes at this from three very different angles - a religious one, a secular/liberty-focused one, and a national security/cultural one.
#21. To: Vicomte13 (#3) The other option is secular. France and Iceland are the only First World "Christian" countries in Europe or North America to be nearly at replacement rate for fertility. They do this by the sort of comprehensive economic support for families: housing, child care, education, health care, income support necessary for First World people to have enough children to sustain the population. Leaving France aside; smaller more homogeneous polities like Iceland, Finland, or Norway can organize social welfare by government much more successfully partly because they are smaller so the bureaucracy is smaller, but mostly because of the commonality of their identity. People who live in what amounts to an extended clan are more willing to care for their "brothers and sisters" than completely strange people who look and behave differently. In large mixed polities social welfare at a large scale is more damaging than helpful. At some point there needs to be the face to face human check to see that the help is needed and effective.
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