Dear Colleague:

Little by little, the dangers of depopulation are becoming apparent to the
secular media.  (We've been telling 'em so for years.)  But they are still
clueless in what to do about it.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
8 October 2004
Vol. 6 / No. 31

Secularism's Demographic Conundrum

One by one, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and now Newsweek are
declaiming that our long-term problem is not too many people, but too few
people.  Long blinded by the myth of overpopulation, they have only lately
seen what we at PRI espied from afar, that birth rates were falling so far
and so fast that depopulation was inevitable.  Now it is upon us, and they
cry out in alarm.

Newsweek magazine, in its Sept. 27 issue, carried a major story by Michael
Meyer on the "Birth Dearth."1  Meyer begins by saying "Everyone knows
there are too many people in the world." Wrong.  Many of us in the
pro-life movement have known for years about the demographic disaster of
plummeting birthrates and aging populations that loomed before us like an
iceberg in the North Atlantic.

He then describes the crowded urban world in which he lives (by choice),
as if this somehow excuses his former belief that the planet was teeming
with people.  All it proves is that there has been a global exodus from
the countryside into the cities, which has left many rural areas virtually
empty of people.  This is a well-known and noncontroversial fact.

What Meyer breathlessly claims as new-that people around the world are
having fewer and fewer children-is in fact a decades-long trend.
Fertility rates have fallen by half since 1972, dropping from six children
per woman to 2.9.  The UN has been reducing his population predictions
regularly for the past two decades.  While it currently projects that the
world's population will "continue to grow from today's 6.4 billion to
around 9 billion in 2050," this is probably too high.  Plummeting birth
rates will probably knock another billion or so off of that number in the
years to come.  And once the peak is reached, we are in for a roller
coaster ride of frightening dimensions, as the bottom literally drops out
of the world's population.

Europe will be losing 3 to 4 million people a year by mid-century.  Asia
will be close behind, as the voluntary childlessness of the Japanese is
matched by the force-pace population reduction in China's one-child
policy.  China's population will peak at 1.5 billion in 2020 or so, and
then dramatically shrink.  By mid-century, Europe and Asia could be losing
a quarter of its population each generation.  Mexico, as the head of that
country's National Population Council recently told me, is having barely
enough babies to maintain the current population, and fertility rates
continue to drop.  While birthrates in Africa remain high, the AIDS
epidemic continues to claim new victims, and Africa's long-term
demographic destiny is in doubt.

Economic growth and population have always been closely linked.  If you
take away a significant portion of the population, the economy-retail
sales, housing starts, investment, the stock market, you name it-is almost
certainly going to go into a tailspin.  Meyer admits that "The potential
consequences of the population implosion are enormous," but he doesn't
have a clue as to what to do about it.

Sure, he speaks blithely of how "enlightened governments" like "France and
the Netherlands [are] institut[ing] family-friendly policies that help
women combine work and motherhood, ranging from tax credits for kids to
subsidized day care."  But his claim that "Scandinavian countries have
kept birthrates up with generous provisions for parental leave, health
care and part-time employment" is simply not true.  The nations of Sweden,
Denmark, Finland, and Norway are dying just as surely as their less
"enlightened" counterparts to the south.

The hard fact is that such programs, beloved of radical feminists because
they discourage marriage and encourage women to work outside of the home,
have done nothing to reverse the birth dearth in Scandinavia-or anyplace
else, for that matter.    You can put all the women to work in the factory
or the office, or you can encourage marriage and stay-at-home moms and
have a birth rate above replacement.  It is highly unlikely that you can
have both.  Women are unlikely to be trapped into the classic double
bind-several children and a full-time job-by such relatively minor
inducements.

Meyer also claims that "Environmentally, a smaller world is almost
certainly a better world, whether in terms of cleaner air or, say, the
return of wolves and rare flora to abandoned stretches of the east German
countryside."  This is exactly backwards.  People don't cause
environmental degradation, poverty does.  And it is prosperity that
provides the financial and human resources to deal with it.  A depopulated
world is likely to be a poorer world, and a poorer world is likely to be a
dirtier world.  Does Meyer really believe that the elderly are going to
give up their entitlements to pay for expensive environmental clean-up
programs?

But the biggest omission of all is Meyer's failure to address the obvious
inanity of continuing to promote abortion, sterilization, and
contraception in a dying world.  As long as the "women's health care" that
we provide the developing world consists largely of disabling their
reproductive systems, we can hardly expect the birth rate to bounce back.


ENDNOTES

1. "Birth Dearth"; Newsweek, September 27, 2004
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6040427/site/newsweek/

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