So I followed the link in Jill’s post to the poor-me Emily Yoffe article in which she whines that childfree people hate her and she’s rilly rilly just trying to help the poor benighted childfree couple see how very fun and rewarding parenthood is, and, like, she changed her mind about being a parent, and now she just loveslovesloves it, and she just wants everyone to know the joy she knows, and she just knows that they don’t know they want it yet, and when they say they don’t want to know the joy, they don’t know their own minds.
Yeah. Anyway, if that weren’t offensive enough, she justifies her unsolicited advice to the childfree couple to get to breedin’ by appealing to natalism:
What is going on when there is so much scorn for parenthood—the way a society perpetuates itself? Fertility rates are much in the news these days. The United States is rare among developed nations in that it is still producing children at a replacement rate. But many countries collectively agree with the people who wrote to me—that children are a tantrum wrapped in a diaper and not worth the trouble. So, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, among others, are going down the demographic tubes, with shrinking pools of young workers to support growing masses of seemingly immortal retirees.
They might have to let in immigrants!
The horror. The horror.
She sounds like David Brooks here. Or Pat “Europe is committing ‘racial suicide'” Robertson.
Or Mark Steyn:
What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they’re running out a lot faster than the oil is. “Replacement” fertility rate–i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller–is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria’s by 36%, Estonia’s by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans–and mostly red-state Americans.
My God! We might have to let in brown people! And those brown people might be Muslims!
It’s all the fault of those selfish women, wanting to be educated and use their educations and getting lofty ideas about being able to do what they want rather than what the Fatherland needs them to do to preserve racial purity.