Faith
That's how Population Decline is Reversed
Population decline is a huge topic today. It is a huge problem for most countries, particularly those dependent upon taxpayers to take care of the aging.
This graph tells the threat facing Europe:
FT Columnist Martin Wolf says in his op/ed, “To Raise Birth Rates, We Must Help Mothers, “Arguably, this collapse in fertility in high-income (and many other) countries, together with the burgeoning population of Africa, the poorest continent, is the single most important thing now happening to humanity.”
I agree, birth-dearth it is the single most important thing happening to humanity.
Wolf points to studies that show having children reduces the mother’s earning power…that mass urbanisation, the “rat race” and the cost of raising children have pushed millions to say, “no.”
He discusses many ideas, expanded tax credits, subsidized day care, baby bonus credits, and ends his piece by hitting the New Right: “Yet another (idea), now being toyed with on the right, is to turn women back into the servants described in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.”
That’s a fairy tale. In fact, it is the Left — the Communists in China, for example, who once had a one-child policy, where forced abortion was the order of the day — will be, MARK MY WORDS, the ones that force women to have babies and/or take multiple husbands. That is the actual Handmaid’s Tale.
Couple of points here. First, it’s the Left that advocates for abortion, Planned Parenthood, and women’s liberation—all of which have led to dead babies or fewer babies—in other words, our birth-dearth.
It is the proponents of the New Right, here in the US and abroad, who are happily having babies, and not forced one way or the other.
Kate Andrews, in her WaPo op/ed, The Unlucky Truth About Love,” shares that the French government is sending letters to every 29-year-old in the country to encourage them to have children. “Nothing sells Valentine’s Day like a collapsing birth rate.”
“Individualism, smartphones, progressive politics, girlbosses, and modernity are the usual culprits in a long list of explanations for why the U.S. marriage rate has fallen by 32 percentage points since its peak in 1949.”
Her remedy: Luck. “Ignoring luck is an egregious oversight in social commentary…for most of human history, being lucky in love was an irrelevant factor…Now, it is the factor, and it is largely out of anyone’s control.”
Andrews is 100% wrong. Wolf is also 100% wrong until he says, “changes in values, including divergences between men and women and a decline in religious belief,” also contribute to the decline in birth rates.
Now he’s hit upon it: the Faith Factor.
Declining faith = declining birth rate.
Big faith = more children.
That’s the equation. Israel has the highest birth rate in the world, as do practicing Christians, Mormons, and Muslims. The Faith Groups are growing, and many of them make up the New Right as they agree: There is a God, and I will have faith in God.
Faith informs their decisions, their future, and how they see the world. Not luck, not government policies like “free daycare.”