Finding Our Way Out Of The Forest – Faith, Family And Fecundity
a speech by Don Feder to the Moscow Demographic Summit, June 29, 2011
Imagine that you’re walking in the forest. There’s a layer of fresh snow on the ground. Suddenly you realize that you’re lost. You’re cold. You’re tired. You’re hungry. If that weren’t enough, there are wolves howling in the distance. This is beginning to sound like a Russian novel.
What do you do? The easiest course is to retrace your footsteps – to return the way you came. So it is with demographic winter. To get out of the cold, bleak, barren landscape where we find ourselves, we need to retrace our steps – in other words, to reject the ideas and reverse the trends that got us into this mess.
Worldwide, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the number of children the average woman will have during her lifetime – fell from 5.0 in the mid-1960s to 2.7 today, a decline of almost 50%. We’re told that 59 countries, with 44% of the world’s population, now have below-replacement birthrates – in some cases, well-below replacement. The rest are heading in the same direction.
Such dramatic changes don’t happen in isolation but are the result of powerful forces long at work. We live in a manifestly anti-marriage, anti-child, anti-procreation culture. But these are symptoms. As any pathologist will tell you, the disease precedes the symptoms.
While abortion, contraception, divorce, unmarried couples living together, children born out-of-wedlock, the culturally instilled desire for small families and the relentless drive to normalize homosexuality all have an impact, in some cases a pronounced impact, on declining birthrates, they are results not causes.
However, they are connected.
In the United States, the deconstruction of Judeo-Christian civilization has preceded in stages – from the introduction of oral contraceptives in 1960, to taking prayer out of our public schools in 1963, to the legalization of abortion in 1973, to no-fault divorce in the early 1970s, to the rise of cohabitation, illegitimacy and single-parent families, to the institution of so-called same-sex marriage in the past decade. In many ways, it’s a logical progression from one devastating assault on society’s moral foundation to the next. One overthrown norm is used as a staging area to attack the next.
The Sexual Revolution of the ’60s triumphed in the decades that followed, when sex was severed from marriage and morality.
Now, for the first time in history, just under half of the world’s population uses some form of contraception. Break the word into its component parts: contraception – against conception – that which prevents life from happening. And this we are supposed to celebrate as liberating, part of the great march of human progress.
From what I have seen, my generation (young Gen X) is wimpy when it comes to the challenges of raising children as compared to our parents and grandparents.