I first heard of declining fertility – or Demographic Winter -- at a conference in Geneva in 1999. The New York Times just found out.
Not that I’m saying that I’m smarter than The New York Times – no one is.
But there it was, on May 24th, a story in the Times headlined: “Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications.” The subhead admitted, “Toward the middle of this century, as deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to fathom.” The operative words here are “sweeping ramifications” and “hard to fathom.”
There was a time when The New York Times and those with its mindset maintained that Demographic Winter was a myth created to advance the pro-life cause. Let us pause to welcome the Times to reality.
To put the coming demographic crisis in perspective, population growth or decline is measured by fertility rates. The point of equilibrium is called replacement-level fertility – in developed nations, 2.08. That’s the number of children the average woman must have in her lifetime just to replace current population. More and your population grows, fewer and it declines. For a nation, this is known as its total fertility rate or TFR.
Worldwide, fertility has fallen by almost 50% in a less than 70 years. In 1950, the average woman on planet earth had 4.7 children. By 2017, that number had plummeted to 2.4 – slightly above replacement level.
Today, every industrialized nation has below-replacement fertility – in some cases, well below replacement. Developing nations are heading in the same direction.
Let’s start with a dramatic example. Known as the Land of the Rising Sun, now the sun is quietly setting on Japan. Its total fertility rate is 1.4, roughly 33% below replacement. Between 1989 and today, its over-65 population doubled -- from 11.6% of the total population to 21.2%.
Between 2015 and 2020, Japan’s total population declined by 800,000. It’s projected to decline by another 25% by mid-point in this century. So many Japanese are dying alone at home, because they have no one to care for them -- no children or grandchildren, that an industry has sprung up devoted to disposing of their remains. The Japanese even have a name for the phenomenon. They call it “lonely death.”
Japan is a preview of the world to come.
In 2018, the U.S. birth rate fell for the fourth consecutive year. The number of babies born fell by 2%. That’s why so many schools have been turned into senior housing and adult day-care centers.
Here’s a test: Watch a few hours of commercial television. Count the number of commercials for diapers, infant formula, toys and the like. Now, compare that to commercials for retirement communities, in-home care and products to treat a host of ailments of the elderly. You’ll get the point very quickly.
According to the Census Bureau, in 1950, in the midst of the Baby Boom, the average American woman had 3.5 children. Now that number is around 1.8, or below replacement. Today, there are 47.8 million Americans over 65 years of age. By 2050, that number is projected to rise to 83.7 million. You don’t need a crystal ball to predict the coming collapse of the Society Security System and the real estate market.
But America is in the midst of a baby-boom compared to Europe. For the European Union as a whole, the total fertility rate is 1.5. For countries like Italy, Greece and Spain, it’s considerably lower. All other things being equal, countries with a TFR of 1.3 or lower will lose half their population every 45 years.
Global population decline will become a reality as early as 2030, in just 9 years.
The collapse of fertility will lead to a world with fewer and fewer children. Comedian Dick Cavett used to say, “If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either.” This humor contains a grain of truth. Obviously, the children who aren’t born today won’t have children and grandchildren of their own, creating a smaller child-bearing base in each generation, resulting in a downward spiral.
The world will grow older and older and move slower and slower. Modern technology requires robust population growth. With fewer and fewer to care for it, the mighty industrial engine we built over the past two centuries will eventually grind to a halt and rust.
We know what’s happening. The looming question is why? Why the fateful fall of fertility? Nothing happens in a vacuum. In society, as in nature, there is always cause and effect.
At the heart of Demographic Winter lies the Sexual Revolution – which is usually traced to the 1960s but whose origins lie decades earlier. This sea-change in attitudes and behaviors included first separating sex from childbearing, then from marriage, and finally from love or any sense of commitment.
Pornography, premarital sex, promiscuity and perversion were all normalized. Abortion was legalized and, in developed nations, enshrined as a basic human right.
The Sexual Revolution laid the foundation (for Demographic Winter. You can see the results all around us.
· For the first time in history, just under half the world’s population of child-bearing age uses some form of birth control. The global contraceptive market will generate an estimated $43.8 billion in 2022 (more than double the total in 2015). In most cases, this is financed by governments or employers. Other species have become extinct. Ours may be the first to finance its own extinction.
· Worldwide, there are over 42 million abortions a year. That’s twice the number of military deaths in World War II, the bloodiest conflict in history-- except, instead of a country’s soldiers dying in battle, these are casualties a nation inflicts on itself.
· The demographic crisis is also a marriage crisis.
· In the United States, in 1968, 39.2% of young adults (ages 18 to 24 were married and 0.1 % were living with someone they weren’t married to. Fifty years later, in 2018), more were cohabiting than married.
· Given the impermanence of these relationships (half last no more than a year), cohabitating couples are more likely to be childless or to have fewer children then their married counterparts.
· In 1976, 72% of all adults in the United States were married. By 2018 the figure had dropped to 50%. Now, here’s where it really gets dicey. Among 18-to-29-year-olds – those in their prime childbearing years – 59% were married in 1960, compared to only 20% today. Inevitably, fewer marriages equal fewer children.
· In 1968, the median age for marriage in the United States was 23 for men and 21 for women. By 2017, it was 30 for men and 27 for women. Delayed marriage results in fewer children.
· In a 2010 Time magazine survey, 39% said marriage is obsolete, compared to 28% in a similar survey taken in 1978. Ladies and gentlemen, if marriage is obsolete, so is the human race.
· The decline of marriage has had a more profound impact on fertility than contraception or abortion, though, admittedly, they complement each other. Despite the high percentage of out-of-wedlock births, those who don’t marry generally don’t have children. Not many women want to have children with a man whose commitment consists of a signature on a joint lease.
Some will say that fewer people in the world is a good thing -- that there are too many of us and that we are despoiling the planet.
They are disciples of economist Thomas Malthus, In the early 19th century, Malthus said “overpopulation” could only be cured by war, to eliminate the surplus. When Malthus was writing, it is believed the world’s population was 900 million. Today, it’s 7.8 billion. And yet the average person on this planet now is better fed, better housed and healthier in every way than in 1800, and with a lifespan double what it was 221 years ago.
But neo-Malthusians just keep recycling the same junk science. In 1969, Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb,” said “over-population” would lead to worldwide starvation in the 1970s. You probably missed that. I certainly did.
The latest excuse for population-control is climate change and what are called carbon footprints.
All of these predictions never came true or won’t come true. Unlike the foregoing, Demographic Winter is very real and very scary. Consider the catastrophic consequences of the coming baby-bust.
Who will do society’s vital work in a nation where fewer and fewer children are born each year? Who will operate the farms and factories? Who will serve in law enforcement, be the health-care providers, the teachers, the soldiers, the entrepreneurs, the inventors and innovators?
Let me try to explain it with an analogy. Let’s say a man who weighed 260 lbs. suddenly lost 80 pounds. Besides being a lot healthier, he’ll need a whole new wardrobe. His old suits will hang off him.
But society can’t get a new suit. As our population declines, the infrastructure won’t shrink with it. We’ll still have the same highway system, railroads, ports and power grid – and the same industrial plant and land devoted to agriculture. What we won’t have are the people to grow the crops, make the products, drive the trucks, repair the roads, staff the hospitals, keep the streets safe and guard the nation.
Our health care expenditures and tax burden will increase exponentially. Obviously, a 75-year-old needs a lot more care than a 35-year-old. A declining number of workers will be called on to provide pensions and health care for a growing number of elderly, until finally young workers revolt and the system collapses.
Again, the primary factor driving declining fertility is the Sexual Revolution. Since 1776, there have been five revolutions that have affected humanity profoundly – the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Sexual Revolution. Like the others, the Sexual Revolution is based on a set of beliefs.
A basic tenet of the Sexual Revolution is the equality of sex acts. Unlike Biblical morality, the Sexual Revolution holds that any type of sex is as good as any other, as long as it’s consensual.
What used to be called perversions are now designated lifestyles, and those who engage in them are said to be expressing their “sexual preferences.”
Activists are minting new “communities” at a dizzying pace – gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgendered – everything but confused.
Their success in reshaping the moral landscape may be seen in a Gallup Poll, released in June, on what Americans now consider morally acceptable, compared to 20 years ago. Those who find homosexuality acceptable went from 40 % to 69%. Those who are okay with out-of-wedlock births increased from 45% to 67%. And those who approve of sex between unmarried partners went from 53% to 73%. And this is all over a period of 20 years.
The Sexual Revolution is an insatiable beast. Nothing is ever enough. Regarding LGBTQ, first came anti-discrimination laws, then hate-crimes legislation, then public-school indoctrination (currently called Comprehensive Sexuality Education), and then so-called “gay marriage.” Now, it’s on to what’s called “transgenderism” – which, like homosexuality -- has no scientific basis.
Transgenderism demands that men who say they’re women be treated as women – including having access to the bathrooms and showers/changing rooms of those who actually are women and girls – regardless of considerations of safety and modesty.
If you reject these delusions, you will be called “bigoted” and accused of fomenting “hatred.” This proves George Orwell’s dictum: “The further society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
The Sexual Revolution demands that we be non-judgmental: Don’t judge unmarried couples living together. Don’t judge those who have children out of wedlock. Don’t judge men who dress like women and insist that you refer to them with feminine pronouns. The only people you are allowed to judge are those who object to the foregoing.
Two things stand in the way of total victory for the Sexual Revolution and Demographic Winter – faith and family.
Europe has the lowest fertility rates of any continent; so it’s hardly surprising that Europeans are also the least religious. They are actually embarrassed by their roots. Once, Europe was known as Christendom. Yet the 70,000-word preamble of the European Constitution contains not a single reference to the faith which was the continent’s defining characteristic for more than a thousand years.
There is a direct correlation between faith and fertility. Only 21% of Europeans say religion is “very important” to them, compared to 59% of Americans. Consequently, the U.S. fertility rate is 1.82, somewhat below replacement. In the European Union as a whole, it’s 1.5, well below replacement.
Countries with high church attendance have higher fertility. The reverse is also true: Empty churches lead to empty cradles and empty hearts.
Religion teaches responsibility to God and man. It tells us that our lives aren’t the sum total of human existence, that there’s something higher– a grand scheme that explains both who we are and why we are.
The Sexual Revolution tells us that the here-and-now is all there is -- that pleasure should be our highest priority. And that anything that limits sexual urges is unhealthy and inevitably leads to neuroses. Thank you, Dr. Freud.
Finally, the Sexual Revolution is based on a lie. It promises freedom but leads to oppression. It says women should be free to have abortions, but society should be forced to pay for them, and women should be kept in the dark about the nature of the unborn child. It says same-sex couples should be free to marry, but is intent on punishing Christians who refuse to participate in these ceremonies. In other words, you have the freedom to endorse the revolution’s agenda, but not to reject it.
In the final analysis, the Sexual Revolution is a revolt against God and Bible-based morality.
The Sexual Revolution says all forms of sexual expression are equally good. Biblical morality says that only sex in marriage, between a man and a woman, is good.
The Sexual Revolution says abortion is a basic human right, that women have a right to control their bodies. Biblical morality says the unborn child is human, and so is precious to God.
The Sexual Revolution says the family is outmoded and stands in the way of human happiness and social progress. Biblical morality says the family is an essential part of God’s plan for humanity. In the beautifully poetic words of the King James Bible, “Male and female created He them…. Therefor shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. And they shall be one flesh.”
We also know that the family is the best system ever devised for controlling chaotic sexual urges and raising children in a loving environment to be responsible adults.
If you want to know what awaits us in the depth of Demographic Winter, I suggest reading “The Children of Men,” published in 1992, a haunting novel by P.D. James. It’s set in Britain 20 years after the last child is born on earth, due to a worldwide plague of infertility. Because it’s a world without children, it’s a world without hope.
With Demographic Winter, this will happen gradually, over many years, unlike James’ novel where it happens over the span of 20 years.
Finally, the question is, what is can we do. Here’s a seven-step program:
1. Promote marriage and reject marriage substitutes
2. Encourage large families – Stop subsidizing contraception, start subsidizing procreation.
3. End abortion as a practical, if not a moral, necessity
4. Stop population control propaganda and sexuality education in the schools
5. Create a family-friendly culture. Make it easier, not harder, for couples to have children.
6. Encourage religion. This is the most important. Again, there is a direct correlation between religious observance and fertility. In Utah, where 53% attend religious services weekly, the fertility rate is 1.99. In New York State, weekly church attendance is 29% and the fertility rate is 1.64.
7. Educate. The Times story acknowledges the phenomenon – which must not have been easy for a paper that never misses an opportunity to promote abortion and the new morality. But there’s more to the story.
Whatever we do, so-called progressives will fight us every step of the way.
The program I outlined a moment ago, will it be enough? I don’t know, because I don’t know the point of no return. No one does.
I do know that we’re required to try, even if failure seems certain.
We’re fighting for Judeo-Christian civilization, which started with the Bible. And so, I’ll close with the words of the Prophet Hosea, as true today as they were almost 3,000 years ago: “They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head, it will produce no flour.” And Deuteronomy 30:19: “I have set before you this day life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life so that you and your children may live.”
You choose life and you get life, including children. You choose death and you get death – including childless societies doomed to extinction.
Ultimately, the Sexual Revolution and Demographic Winter are both about death. For over half a century, we in the West have chosen death – death by abortion, death by contraception, death by the flight from marriage and childbearing – death, death, death. We’ve sown the wind, the whirlwind is fast approaching.
