THE NATION THINKS DEMOGRAPHIC WINTER IS A PRO-NATALIST CONSPIRACY

By Don Feder

Posted February 27, 2008

According to Kathryn Joyce, sneer-and-smear artist for The Nation, those who are concerned about the worldwide decline in birthrates are – to put it mildly -- racist, neo-Nazis, who have a hidden agenda and (under the guise of demographic winter) are engaged in our age-old quest to control women’s bodies.

The Nation is this nation’s oldest and largest-circulation leftwing journal (outside of The New York Times, of course). Joyce’s screed, “Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies,” will appear in the March 3 print edition, but is currently available online.

Joyce believes – with the faith of one immune to facts and logic – that those sounding the alarm about plummeting fertility rates care only about the inability of white Europeans to replace themselves. We’re trying to whip up xenophobia against the continent’s rising Muslim tide. Thus, demographic winter is the invention of a vast Christian conspiracy to get Europeans to start making babies again.

Joyce has religion on the brain. (As a child, perhaps she was bitten by a Gospel singer.)

One of the grand conspirators cited in her piece, Steve Mosher, is described as “the president of the Catholic anti-contraception lobbyist group, Population Research Institute.” Christine de Vollmer of the Latin American Alliance for the Family is “Catholic activist de Vollmer,” while Austin Ruse is “head of the ultraconservative Catholic UN lobbyist group C-Fam.” Not just a Catholic, but an ultra-conservative Catholic? That’s pretty serious.

Joyce further notes that: “The last two popes have involved themselves in the debate, with John Paul II pronouncing a ‘crisis in births’ in 2002 in an anomalous papal address to Italy’s Parliament and Benedict XVI remarking on the ‘tragedy’ of childless European couples.” As if papal involvement was enough to discredit the concept.

But the conspiracy spans the religious spectrum, making it all the more sinister, Joyce informs us.

Rick Stout and Barry McLerran —respectively the director and the producer of the new documentary “Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family” – “are among hundreds of Mormon pro-family activists (They’re everywhere. They’re everywhere!) who have made common cause with conservative Catholics and evangelical ideologues.”

One envisions little Katie as Dorothy in a lefty version of “The Wizard of Oz,” treading fearfully through a creepy family-values forest whispering: “Catholics and Mormons and evangelicals – oh, my!”

There’s little to support her fantasies in “Demographic Winter.” The documentary’s experts are overwhelmingly academics – demographers, sociologists and a Nobel laureate in economics – from institutions like the University of Chicago and University of Virginia. Most of the scholars don’t think of themselves as religious.

Another focus of Joyce’s paranoia is the World Congress of Families, which held its fourth Congress in 2007 in Poland, “a heavily Catholic bastion (there she goes again) of conservatism amid the gay friendly EU.” According to the author, under the leadership of the “extremist Kaczynski brothers,” Poland has “shifted to the far right, embracing a social conservatism that aggressively targets gays, Jews, women’s rights and foreigners.”

On my two visits to Poland, I saw no signs of anti-Semitism. For a feminist like Joyce, a nation that does not encourage partial-birth abortions in the ninth month and celebrate transgenderism in the public schools is a bulwark of bigotry.

Joyce finds the World Congress of Families -- a gathering of pro-family leaders, scholars, activists and parliamentarians – particularly ominous. She quotes Jennifer Butler (author of “Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized”) who “has tracked the rise of the international Christian right with apprehension.” Butler tells Joyce, “You can’t underestimate what they can do” –as if the latter needed convincing.

It’s alright for American feminists to use the United Nations to force the left’s social agenda on the developing world. It’s OK for “progressives” from this side of the pond to work with the European Union to advance homosexual rights. But for U.S. social conservatives to talk to pro-family forces in Europe is sinister and manipulative -- the dreaded globalization of the Christian Right.

If World Congress of Families is the holy alliance pushing a pro-family agenda, demographic winter is the nativist wedge issue conspirators are using to drive cosmopolitan Europeans to start rocking cradles again.

Joyce contends that “the baby-bust,” “the birth dearth,” and “the graying of the continent” are “modern euphemisms for old-fashioned race panic as low fertility rates among white ‘Western’ couples coincides with an increasingly visible immigrant population across Europe.”

Joyce shamelessly engages in guilt by association, when she notes that “Mussolini’s fertility project … attacked bachelors, rewarded mothers of many children, criminalized abortion and banned contraception.” Along the same lines, she cites Nazi efforts to raise the birth rate in the Third Reich as a further indictment of advocates of large families.

Of course the Nazis wanted more little Aryans. Wars aren’t won by nations with shrinking populations. If Roe v Wade and the pill had been around in the 1920s, we would have been lucky to land a platoon on Omaha Beach.

The Nazis also wanted to de-populate conquered lands. The Slavs, who the Nazis despised as untermenchen, were a special target. To imply that a desire to raise fertility rates is somehow comparable to Nazism, is like saying that because China has a one-child-per-family policy, Planned Parenthood is part of the politburo.

We’re the racists, but they’re the ones flooding the Third World with contraceptives and pushing abortion, which, alas, do not depress the white birthrate.

Speaking of Nazis, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, their prophetess, considered non-Aryans “a great biological menace to the future of civilization.”

Ever wonder why blacks, who comprise 12% of the population, account for 32% of all abortions? (For Hispanics, the figures are 13% and 20%.) Might it have something to do with all of the abortion clinics conveniently located in inner-city neighborhoods?

The “Demographic Winter” documentary, which Joyce hasn’t seen, (her critique is based on viewing a 3-minute online trailer) has only the briefest mention of emigration – as a negative for developing countries, which are seeing their youth siphoned off to provide labor for the lands of the childless.

Immigration or emigration has never been a topic of discussion at a World Congress of Families, which draws participants from Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as Europe and the United States. World Congress of Families III was held in Mexico City. One possible location for WCF V is Nigeria.

Europe is frequently the focus of discussions of demographic winter because it’s there that the effects are most stark. But proponents are quick to note that birth rates are falling everywhere.

In less than 40 years, the world’s total fertility rate (the number of children the average woman will bear in her lifetime), has dropped from 6 to 2.9. By the middle of this century, worldwide fertility will hit 2.05 – well below replacement. That forecast is from the United Nations Population Division (UNPD), which – at last report – had not been co-opted by the vast Catholic-Mormon-evangelical conspiracy.

More interesting than what’s in The Nation article (innuendo, ad hominem, paranoia) is what’s missing. In a piece running several thousand words, Joyce mentions exactly one statistic – in paragraph 3, where she notes that 2.1 children per couple is the “estimated ‘replacement-level fertility’ for developed nations.” That’s it.

For someone trying to debunk demographic winter, statistics aren’t just inconvenient; they’re intimidating. So Joyce simply avoids any discussion of the evidence.

Smart move on her part. How do you argue away the fact that (again, according to the United Nations) 59 countries with 44% of the world’s population now have below-replacement fertility?

For the European Union as a whole, the birthrate is 1.5. Population-wise, the continent is disappearing so fast that even mass immigration can’t save it. The EU estimates that, if current trends continue, there will be a shortage of 20 million young workers by 2030.

In the face of this looming catastrophe, EU bureaucrats are engaged in a relentless campaign of promoting same-sex marriage. Ah that “gay friendly EU.” What is the fertility rate of homosexual couples, anyway?

Back in the real world, Russia is losing roughly 700,000 people a year. (Motherless Russia now has more abortions than live births each year.) Its population of 143 million is expected to shrivel to 112 million by the middle of this century. With that number, it will be impossible for the Russians to hold the largest land mass of any nation, which will result in a free-for-all land-grab that throws the entire region into chaos.

It’s not just Europe where children are disappearing. In the 1970s, the average Filipino woman had 6 children. Today, the number is 2.8 – expected to decline to 2 by 2030. Mexico has only a replacement level fertility rate of 2.1. (Where will The Nation’s readers find their future gardeners and cleaning ladies?) Iran is the first nation in the Middle East to achieve below-replacement fertility.

Most Third World countries are still growing, but it is here that the fall in birth rates has been most pronounced. Egypt’s birth rate went from 7.3 in the 1960s to 3.7 today. It too will be below replacement by the middle of this century.

The UN estimates that by 2050 there will be 248 million fewer children in the world than there are today. Those children who never were in turn won’t have children of their own, and so on, leading to accelerating population decline in many areas.

If you’ve decided not to deal with reality, because to do so might cast doubt on your cherished isms, you don’t have to consider the consequences of the world that’s coming – a world where the cries of babies and the laughter of children fade away.

Take Japan. Remember back in the 1980s when we were calling it Japan, Inc? The Japanese were an unstoppable economic juggernaut, the coming superpower. They’d bought Rockefeller Center and were well on their way to owning everything else.

Japan Inc.’s stock soared for a time -- until the Rising Sun began to shuffle off into the sunset of Banzai Retirement Community. During the 1990s through 2005, the Japanese stock market fell 80% from its all-time high. At the same time, the Japanese real estate market lost 60% of its value.

Why has economic decline hit Japan so fastk? Unlike America, the Japanese never had a post-War baby boom. Their birth rate now is an anemic 1.25, among the 10 lowest in the world.

In 1989, 11.6% of Japan’s population was 65 or older. By 2007, the percentage of seniors had risen to 21.2 – the highest in the world. Thriving economies aren’t propelled by rapidly aging populations.

Throughout the developed world, the population is growing gray and slow of gait. Today, 20% are over 60 years of age. This is expected to rise to 32% by 2050. UNPD tells us that then there will be two elderly for every child. Schools will be turned into nursing homes. Playgrounds will become graveyards.

Among the questions we’re not supposed to ask are these: How can pensions for a growing number of retirees be financed by a shrinking workforce? Who covers their increasingly pricy medical bills? How long before euthanasia – voluntary and involuntary – becomes universal?

Pity the average child born in Italy today – without brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins. The self-indulgence (bordering on self-obsession) of this generation has bought loneliness and economic decline – perhaps the twilight of civilization -- for those who will follow us.

The Nation is shorthand for what’s led us here: women and men sacrificing families for careers (delayed marriage, no marriage, cohabitation), easy divorce, abortion (each year, worldwide, a woman’s “right to choose” wipes out the equivalent of the population of Italy), and materialistic lifestyles.

Yet The Nation’s readers sit with their sterile wombs or male non-reproductive organs, seething because someone (Catholics? Mormons?), somewhere wonders who’s minding the nursery.

Kathryn Joyce calls the effort to awaken a slumbering humanity “a ‘clash of civilizations’ to be fought through women’s bodies, with the maternity ward as the battleground.” Cute.

Rather than a clash of civilizations, it’s the left’s worldview against civilization – an old story.

While they squawk about manmade global warming, and demand sacrifice for the planet, they rail at those who are trying to warn the sentient beings who inhabit the planet that their future is increasingly bleak – due not to SUVs but IUDs, and the rest of a contraceptive, anti-procreation culture.

This article was originally posted at GrassTopsUSA.com