"In a recent poll, invited to state the "ideal" number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered 'None'."
Mark Steyn
The medium is the message. The world is shrinking due to technology. But this, this is something different. The world is shrinking due to the technology of abortion and birth control. Steyn demographizes onward:
"Unfortunately, the Western world is running out of young people. Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In Germany, 30 percent of all women are childless."
Here is one way to look at it, although it may not be the best way: It is a numbers game as far as the world producing enough genius and brilliance to solve its problems. For every thousand souls born, perhaps fifty will grow up to think the world forward. Yes, political and economic systems also play a part in generating educated souls who can creatively think and act the world out of its current set of impossibilities. Some are better at this than others. For example, the freedom to think and act and earn gorgeous amounts of money tends to produce more creative solutions to problems than those systems where citizens are prisoners.
I've got to think that killing off half the world's population in vitro can't be helping us to take it to the next level. This inverted triangle of world population is going to get a lot more top heavy in the next two decades. Our children and grandchildren--those fortunate to be born--will be facing an inheritance of debt that won't be able to be dealt with in the usual, civil manner. Here's hoping somebody gets born with the gumption to figure it all out.
Quotes taken from the Mark Steyn column, Happy Warrior, in the April 20 print edition of NR.
3 comments:
I'm not sure what's with the recent trend for Lutherans getting upset about people having less children. The sin was always there, yes?
And speaking as one woman who has no children, because I am admittedly too screwed up to want them, oh well.
Lucci, I'm certainly not condemning your individual choice to not have children. That choice has always been an acceptable one, as far as I'm concerned. What is new though, is an entire generational shift-generated by abortion and abortifacients--that is causing entire nations not to reproduce themselves. It is generational suicide. Now that is something to speculate about.
And, it may be a mirror for you as well, but that is a personal issue; none of my business.
If some folks have not read it, they should pick up a copy of Steyn's Book, America Alone.
It is worth the read and right on pertinent to this subject.
Children are a blessing, not a financial hardship.
Blessed is a man who has a quiver full of them.
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