I would have liked to have gotten a bar graph showing birth rates of women in their 20s as well but couldn't find it. This graph most certainly shows the impact of birth control and abortion in Europe.
Posted on 12/23/2003 6:26:01 AM PST by redgolum
Europe's problem is that it's barren By Mark Steyn (Filed: 23/12/2003)
'But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John."
If you're one of the increasing numbers of Britons who have "some problems with conventional organised religion" (as J K Rowling puts it), you've probably forgotten that bit from the Christmas story. It's Luke 1:13, part of what he'd have called the backstory, if he'd been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician.
Only two of the gospels tell the story of Christ's birth. Mark plunges straight into the Son of God's grown-up life: he was writing for a Roman audience and, from their perspective, what's important is not where Jesus came from but what He did once He got going. But Matthew was writing for the Jews, and so he dwells on Jesus and His parents mainly to connect the King of the Jews with all that had gone before: he starts with a long family tree tracing Joseph's ancestry back to Abraham.
Like Mark, Luke was writing for a gentile crowd. But, like Matthew, he also dwelt on Jesus's birth and family. And he begins with the tale of two pregnancies: before Mary's virgin birth, he tells the story of her cousin Elisabeth: Zacharias is surprised to discover his impending fatherhood - "for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years." None the less, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth's pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive.
If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle - the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus's birth is the miracle. Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth - all life - is to a degree miraculous and God-given.
There's a lot of that in the Old Testament, too, of course - going right back to Adam and Eve, and God's injunction to go forth and multiply. Or as Yip Harburg explained in his Biblical précis in Finian's Rainbow: "Then she looked at him And he looked at her And they knew immediately What the world was fer. He said 'Give me my cane.' He said 'Give me my hat.' The time has come To begin the Begat."
Confronted with all the begetting in the Old Testament, the modern mind says, "Well, naturally, these primitive societies were concerned with children. They needed someone to provide for them in their old age." In our advanced society, we don't have to worry about that; we automatically have someone to provide for us in our old age: the state.
But the state - at least in its modern European welfare incarnation - needs children as least as much as those old-time Jews did. And the problem with the European state is that, like Elisabeth, it's barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it's made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate's down to 1.2 children per couple - or about half "replacement rate". You can't buck that kind of arithmetic.
Israel's doing the numbers, too. If it doesn't unload the "occupied territories" soon, Palestinians will do their sums, quit asking for their own state, and instead demand a one-man-one-vote arrangement for the state they're already in. Last week, in a speech on the country's demographic difficulties, Binyamin Netanyahu conceded: "We do have a demographic problem, but it is with the Arab Israelis."
"The day is not far off," replied Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset, "when Netanyahu and his cohorts will put up roadblocks at the entrances to Arab villages to tie Arab women's tubes and spray us with spermicide."
Mr Tibi is correct to this extent. The problem is not tying Arab tubes, but metaphorically untying Jewish tubes. It's remarkable that, having survived the Holocaust, the Jewish people should now be in danger of not surviving their survival of the Holocaust.
Demography is not necessarily destiny. Today's high Muslim birthrates will fall, and probably fall dramatically, as the Roman Catholic birthrates in Italy, Ireland and Quebec have. But demo-graphics is a game of last man standing. It's no consolation that Muslim birthrates will start falling in 2050 if yours are off the cliff right now. The last people around in any numbers will determine the kind of society we live in.
You can sort of feel that happening already. "Multiculturalism" implicitly accepts that, for a person of broadly Christian heritage, Christianity is an accessory, an option; whereas, for a person of Muslim background, Islam is a given.
That's why, as practised by Buckinghamshire County Council, multiculturalism means All Saints Church can't put up one sheet of A4 paper announcing tomorrow night's carol service on the High Wycombe library notice board, but, inside the library, Rehana Nazir, the "multicultural services librarian", can host a party to celebrate Eid.
To those of us watching from afar the ructions over the European constitution - a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem - it seems amazing that no Continental politician is willing to get to grips with the real crisis facing Europe in the 21st century: the lack of Europeans. If America believes in the separation of church and state, in radically secularist Europe the state is the church, as Jacques Chirac's edict on headscarves, crucifixes and skull caps made plain. Alas, it's an insufficient faith.
By contrast, if Christianity is merely a "myth", it's a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ's divinity in the miracle of His birth. The obligation to have children may be a lot of repressive Catholic mumbo-jumbo, but it's also highly rational. What's irrational is modern EUtopia's indifference to new life.
I recently had a conversation with an EU official who, apropos a controversial proposal to tout the Continent's religious heritage in the new constitution, kept using the phrase "Europe's post-Christian future". The evidence suggests that, once you reach the post-Christian stage, you don't have much of a future. Luke, a man of faith and a man of science, could have told them that.
Our "brown meance" is Hispanic, not Middle Eastern, but the results will be about the same. Will "el Dallas" or "el Denver" come sooner or later than "al-Paris" or "al-Amsterdam"?
And Sharia is quite a burden to put on my future grand-daughters.
This is a different type of conflict than any we had in the previous century. It will not be won exclusively with the military but will require the efforts of the entire American nation (and whatever allies we can gather) for multiple generations. Unlike WWI & WWII, this is a culture war, not a power struggle between competing governmental systems. Cultures take much longer to change than governments (look at Russia or Georgia). Unless the two cultures can develop mutual acceptance (which Islam does not accept in the Koran - they do not acknowledge you have the right to go to hell), one will surely be a lost civilization. Winston Churchhill may have been a lonely voice in the wilderness, but the weight of his ideas would have vanished had Germany been victorious. Great ideas die when their proponents die. So it can be with this Great Experiment.
I think our cultural enemies are far more committed to their cause than we are to freedom. We forget the first responsibilty of freedom is to defend it. I don't hold out high hopes.
I'll check in later but, for now, I'm off to work. Take care.
I understand, and I agree. I just get the willies when the proposed solution is to outbreed them even if the kids aren't really wanted. eeek.
I've read that birthrates go down when women are given more education and more options. Maybe a better way to destabilize their culture and reduce their birthrate would be to educate and free their women. Tough to do, though, with the current nutjobs that are the men of that society.
Just a thought,
LQ
Well stated, and don't forget the anti-children laws that have crept into American judicial circles.
Having children puts you at the mercy of any and all annonymous snitches who sic the authorities on parents from everything from failing to lock up the kids in car seats to having the CPS come and confiscate them from their parents.
With laws like that it's no wonder why a lot of us are very reluctant to reproduce.
The problem isn't the birth rate, after all Europe has a larger population than ever and the land mass is not growing. Nor is it the advancing age of that population since that is an inevitable effect of modern medicine and cannot be solved with Ponzi-like schemes either of natives births or immigration since these citizens will also live to a ripe old age. The problem is a political problem. It is the concept of multiculturalism, that the native peoples of Europe have no more claim to their historic homelands than any one else, indeed that it is evil to desire the continuation and existence of their cultures. The government of any healthy nation should exist only to support and uphold the people, culture, and sovereignty of that nation. Instead, throughout the West, we have the bizarre, possibly unprecedented, historical spectacle of the establishments of those countries spending huge amounts of effort and money to dispossess their own people, to de-Germanize Germany, de-Britonize Britian, etc., and in effect wipe their nations off the historical stage.
Some points on the suicidal religious cult that has seized the post-Christian West. First, it is a product of wealth and decadence, the classic wealth-induced gout that has destroyed many civilizations in the past. People who are comfortable will put up with anything that doesn't threaten that comfort, and will be hostile to anyone or thing that does, and the ruling class will portray any threat to their power as a threat to that comfort. Secondly, its lightning like spread and remarkable uniformity is the result of the technology of television and other forms of mass-media. Thirdly, it is largely an American product. Multiculturalism developed in the U.S. because the relatively large black population represented an opportunity to use race as a weapon to crack open the old society. This has worked incredibly well, and the European left, with a population conditioned by the massive output of American propaganda on the wonderfulness of diversity, and envious of the power of this political weapon, began importing their own minorities. What started out as a cynical politcal ploy has now become religious doctrine both in Europe and the U.S., a jihad stronger than the other one, to be continued at all costs, regardless of issues like sovereignty, environment, overcrowding, social peace and unity, freedom, democracy, or even the very existemce of the nation and civilization.
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