The Demographic Cliff

In all the recent debates about U.S. fiscal policy, debt and threats of a fiscal cliff, an underlying problem has received little attention. "Forget the debt ceiling. Forget the fiscal cliff, the sequestration cliff and the entitlement cliff," Jonathan V. Last wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. "Those are all just symptoms. What America really faces is a demographic cliff: The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate." The article is an excerpt from Last's new book that comes out today whose title says it all: What to Expect When No One's Expecting, but the blurb for the book fills in some helpful details:

For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that’s busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else. It’s all bunk. The "population bomb" never exploded. What to Expect When No One’s Expecting explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world.

We have enjoyed the writing Last has been doing on marriage and family for the Weekly Standard and were glad to see him write such a substantive book on the significant difference it makes when countries have fewer babies. What we especially appreciate is that Last is willing to describe the problem in great detail, but then also prescribe a way forward. And his prescription is simple:

In the face of this decline, the only thing that will preserve America's place in the world is if all Americans—Democrats, Republicans, Hispanics, blacks, whites, Jews, Christians and atheists—decide to have more babies.

He goes on to to address a variety of cultural attitudes (such as our preoccupation with an exalted view of "happiness" that drives us away from procreation) and policies that should change (Social Security reform, college cost management, land management planning, etc.) in order to make it easier to welcome babies.

A Drought of Children in California

California is the most populous state in the United States, but the number of children there is shrinking, leaving the state “ill-equipped for boomer retirement” according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. Birth rates are now below replacement level for whites, Asians and African-Americans. Rates among Hispanics had been high but are now dropping steeply and are also expected to drop below replacement in the next decade.

“The shrinking pool of youngsters coincides with a bulging population of older people,” the article explains. In other words, California is growing very European—it has promised generous benefits that depend on a growing population while cultivating a culture that doesn’t welcome enough new life to keep the scheme going. This is not sustainable.

The Pill Turns 50--Who's Celebrating?

I wrote a blog post on Boundless about the 50th anniversary of the introduction of The Pill, and specifically, Dr. Albert Mohler's commentary about it. In "I Think I'll Skip the Party," I quoted Mohler's commentary. He said,

The idea that sex would be severed from childbearing is a very modern concept — and a concept made meaningful only by the development of the Pill and its successor birth control technologies. The severing of this relationship represents a quantum change in human life and relationships, not to mention morality.

Nancy Gibbs [in TIME magazine] is fair and accurate in her use of my words and arguments. I do indeed believe that the development of the Pill “has done more to reorder human life than any event since Adam and Eve ate the apple.” Why? Because sex, sexuality, and reproduction are so central to human life, to marriage, and to the future of humanity.

The Pill turned pregnancy — and thus children — into elective choices, rather than natural gifts of the marital union. But then again, the marital union was itself weakened by the Pill, because the avoidance of pregnancy facilitated adultery and other forms of non-marital sex. In some hands, the Pill became a human pesticide.

The post, and his commentary, are stirring up a hearty debate — 155 comments and counting. If you're up for a good conversation, and especially if you have thoughts about the pros and cons of hormonal birth control, please join the discussion here.

When Is a Good Time to Have Kids?

Chelsey emailed us the week before her wedding. She wanted to let us know she'd read Start Your Family, and in her words,

We had been unsure about whether or not we would use birth control. I don't want to take the pill, and honestly, we didn't want to use birth control at all, but we are on a limited, though sufficient, income, and we didn't know if it was 'wise.' Your book, along with the wise counsel of our pastor, was such an encouragement.

Recently she wrote again with an update. I asked her if she'd write a version for the blog. And graciously, she agreed. Here's what she had to say,

My husband and I got married in April, almost three years to the day after we started dating. I had been 23 for a month; he was 22.

During our pre-marital counseling, our pastor reiterated what we already wanted so desperately to believe: that God is the giver of life and that whatever our best laid plans may be, He was the one who would ultimately determine when our family should start.

We had talked about wanting to have kids right away with our friends and families, but the word was almost always the same, based on our plans for the future: your early twenties is not a good time to have kids; right after marriage is a not a good time to have kids; when you’re in seminary is not a good time to have kids; when you’re on the mission field is not a good time to have kids. We were left wondering—when is a good time to have kids?

We couldn’t answer that, and neither could anyone else. So we decided that we would let God decide when was a good time for us to start having babies. It didn’t take long to find out. His good timing appears to be sometime next February, which means our ten-week-old son will be celebrating our one-year wedding anniversary along with us.

Since God softened our hearts in this area, there have been times of fear and doubting. Did we make the right decision? Is everything going to turn out OK? In response to these anxieties, God has proven to be the God of Psalm 94:18-19: “When I thought, ‘My foot slips,’ your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up. When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul.”

What have God’s consolations been for us? He provided me a job the day after we got back from our honeymoon, which has allowed us to build up our savings account. He has us in a church that values family and children. He recently gave my husband a new, better-paying job that will allow me to stay home with our little one.

I don’t know how many children God will ultimately give us, but whatever His plan, we are truly “tasting and seeing that the Lord is good” in allowing us to start our family when He did.

Congratulations Chelsey and Christian. Thank you for letting us rejoice with you!

Men Should Consider Biological Clock as Well

In Start Your Family, I (Steve) talk about the strong urge Candice felt to have a baby and how I got her to "hit snooze on her biological clock." It's those potent emotions about having children, as well as a broad range of headlines about fertility and the timing of babies, that make us so aware of a woman's biological clock. Increasingly, however, news reports are explaining that men also have a biological clock to keep in mind.

"It wasn't all that long ago that any suggestion that a man had a 'biological clock' like a woman, and should father children sooner rather than later, would have been given short scientific shrift," says a new article by U.S. News and World Report. "Not anymore. Today, a growing body of evidence suggests that as men get older, fertility can and does decline, while the chances of fathering a child with serious birth defects and medical problems increase."

The article sources Dr. Harry Fisch, author of the book The Male Biological Clock with the finding that after age 30, testosterone levels decline about 1 percent per year. Fisch doesn't come out and recommend an ideal age for men to start a family, but where men have a choice in the matter, Fisch suggests "the sooner, the better."

Pelosi Blames Babies for Economic Woes

A mother of five, grandmother of six believes she's found the cure to what ails our sluggish economy: more contraception. In her defense of adding birth control funding to the economic "stimulus" plan, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on This Week with George Stephanopoulos,

Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

Yes, there's a lot of bad news about babies being born outside of marriage. And yes, those out-of-wedlock births do cause a strain on state budgets. But Pelosi's proposed solution to that problem is straight from the Planned Parenthood playbook. And it's no solution at all.

In a 2005 column in The Washington Post, Economist Robert J. Samuelson explained why the opposite is true:

It’s hard to be a great power if your population is shriveling. Europe as we know it is going out of business. … Western Europe’s population grows dramatically grayer, projects the U.S. Census Bureau. Now about one-sixth of the population is 65 and older. By 2030, that could be one-fourth and by 2050, almost one-third.

According to information from the Demographic Winter documentary,

By the mid-point of this century, 16% of the world’s population will be over 65. By 2040, there will be 400 million elderly Chinese.

If present low birthrates persist, the European Union estimates there will be a continent-wide shortfall of 20 million workers by 2030.

Who will operate the factories and farms in the Europe of the future? Who will develop the natural resources? Where will Russia find the soldiers to guard the frontiers of the largest nation on Earth?

Who will care for a graying population? A burgeoning elderly population combined with a shrinking work force will lead to a train-wreck for state pension systems.

This only skims the surface of the way demographic decline will change the face of civilization. Even the environment will be adversely impacted. With severely strained public budgets, developed nations will no longer be willing to shoulder the costs of industrial clean-up or a reduction of CO2 emissions.

Pelosi's "solution" to our economic "crisis" will have the opposite effect. But even that's not the worst of it. In her striving to bolster our contraceptive culture, she's willing to deny millions of women the very choice that has brought her the most joy. She is the same woman who once proclaimed, "Nothing in my life will ever, ever compare to being a mom."

We've seen this before. Hostility toward babies born in less than ideal circumstances. It's the mindset of Pharaoh. The mindset of Herod. And to what end? If Pelosi's plan succeeds, who won't be born?

Rethinking the Pill

Carl Djerassi is having second thoughts about the pill. That's not so unusual. Lots of couples start out their marriage using it and later decide to toss it in exchange for the possibility that sex might lead to conception. But Djerassi's different. He's the guy who invented the pill. More accurately, Djerassi is the Austrian chemist who co-created the earliest version of it. With the benefit of hindsight, he's dismayed at the way his version of contraception has made it possible to disconnect sex and children. Not to mention the way Austria's populaion is plummeting. Now he's on a mission to help Austrians who "freely contracept ... wake up" to the downside of their actions.

Apparently it's not enough to "enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it."

Exactly.

The Big Gap

The promise of "planned parenthood" gives the impression that a man and woman have a great amount of control over family building. While there is quite a lot couples can do to control not having children, the implied promise that a planned approach can help couples have the number of children that's right for them has proven disappointing. A variety of contraceptive approaches now help couples not have more children than they planned on, but the perception of complete control is increasingly leaving more couples having children at a rate below what they intended. Only 2 percent of the respondents to a World Values Survey said they didn't want to have any children, but current demographics show 20 percent of couples ending up without children. Additionally, 3 percent of survey respondents said they only wanted one child while 16 percent of couples end up limited to having one child.

We've know numerous couples who've faced the disappointment of this gap and wish they had been more intentional about their approach. While planning how not to have a houseful of kids, they ended up falling short of the kids they hoped they could have.