July 18, 2007

Democrats Wrong on The Issue That’s Even Bigger than Iraq

In his book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, Mark Steyn has shown that the birth rates of many Western nations are below replacement, meaning that the population shrinks with each generation, trending toward extinction. Per Steyn (in an article accompanying the launch of the book):

The single most important fact about the early 21st century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population - ie, no growth, no decline; just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010 - you need a Total Fertility Rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That's what America has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than any of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handguns, more UN peacekeepers, etc) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38, Japan 1.32, Russia 1.14. These countries - or, more precisely, these people - are going out of business.

...In the 14th century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent's population; in the 21st, a larger proportion will disappear - in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in. One can cite examples of remote backward tribes who expire upon contact with the modern world, but for the modern world to expire in favor of the backward tribes is a turn of events future anthropologists will ponder, as we do the fall of Rome.

...When my second child was born, a neighbor said, "Well, you've got two. You can stop now." She was being enlightened and responsible. After all, for her entire adult life, the progressive-minded have worried about "overpopulation". And this view became so pervasive that, in an age of hysteria about "dwindling resources", it became entirely normal to look on our greatest resource - us - as a liability. So today we're the dwindling resource, not the oil. We're the endangered species, not the spotted owl. The "population explosion" is a prop of the western progressive's bizarre death-cultism. We are so bad, so polluting, so exploitative, so violent, so destructive that we owe it to the world not to be born in the first place. Given the plummeting birth rates in Europe, Russia, Japan, etc, a large chunk of the world has evidently decided to take pre-emptive action on climate change and opt for societal suicide. The crisis we face today is the precise opposite of "overpopulation": the developed world's population is shrinking faster than any human society not in the grip of war or disease has ever shrunk.

Who would have thought that technologies such as birth control, and abortion, would threaten the end of many Western cultures? Yet this is the case.

But the Democrats are courting voters by promising that abortions will be paid for by the government:

Democrats pledge support for wide access to abortion

WASHINGTON -- Elizabeth Edwards said Tuesday that her husband's health-care plan would provide insurance coverage of abortion.

Speaking on behalf of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards before the family planning and abortion-rights group Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Edwards lauded her husband's health-care proposal as "a true universal health-care plan" that would cover "all reproductive health services, including pregnancy termination," referring to abortion.

We're already at a zero population growth birth rate in America. We need to have more babies, not fewer. The Democrats' policies are those that are leading to the extinction of Western cultures in Europe.