(Neo) Family Values

The coming fight over the birth dearth

Diary of the Late Republic, #26

Once upon a time—specifically at a 1972 United Nations conference in Stockholm Sweden—climate change became a thing. The issue gradually rose in prominence until it became the focus of a 1997 UN event in Japan that led to the adoption of the Kyoto Protocols in which the reduction of fossil fuel emissions became an explicit goal of almost 200 nations. For a long time, climate change seemed like a relatively innocuous issue for most people, like saving whales or fighting forest fires. Over time, it increasingly captured key sectors of the progressive imagination, especially among young people, and now has become an issue of some fervor. But like all good things, such environmentalism has costs, which is why a guarded American government, fearful of domestic political backlash over the loss of creature comforts, never signed on to the Kyoto Protocol. And by the 2020s, climate change had become a bona fide contentious issue. Many progressives don’t seem to understand the degree to which Donald Trump’s political base rests on the economic and geopolitical benefits of American energy independence, which, however lamentable its environmental effects, cannot be dismissed lightly.

I’ve been thinking about the trajectory of climate change in light of another global issue that has increasingly bubbled into public consciousness: our birth dearth. A series of studies have documented that the global fertility rate is on a path to dip below replacement rate by mid-century—and indeed already has in some nations, notably in the Far East. The United States, which for so long has had its population boosted by immigration, slipped below replacement rate last year and is now on a trajectory for decline.

Which for many people elicits a collective shrug. As with climate change, we’re talking about a phenomenon that is both abstract and remote, whose most dramatic impact is still decades away (though climate change activists are often quick, often on the basis of questionable evidence, to attribute this flood or that heat wave to climate change). Actually, there are some environmentally-minded people who think a falling population is a bona fide good thing in terms of global sustainability, and there’s no doubt that’s true in some respects. But it’s also clear that declining birth rates pose a serious problem in advanced industrial nations in terms of innovation, an adequate labor force, and the tax base necessary to sustain welfare programs for elderly people, among others—in short, to a way of life that has characterized human civilization for at least the last century.

In any event, this is a debate some people would really rather not have. An important reason is that one thing is already clear: if you do want to raise birth rates, economic incentives are not going to get you there. In advanced industrial societies like Scandinavia, better childcare, cash grants, and other welfare policies have failed to make a difference. It appears that a successful push to bring more babies into the world would require cultural changes in terms of attitudes and values toward neo-natalism. Trends toward investing more resources in fewer (or no) children would have to change.

It doesn’t take long to realize that such ideas pose a particular threat to some women. (“The kitchen is closed,” Michael Smerconish’s sidekick, the normally mild-mannered T.C. Scornavacchi, tartly concluded after one such conversation on his podcast.) Recent anger toward Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s comments on asserting the importance of motherhood at his recent graduation speech at Benedictine College in Kansas suggests the degree to which any discussion of traditional family values will be met with pushback, though progressive attempts to cancel him—the NFL issued a statement of denunciation—have largely withered in the face of defending his right to free speech. We seem to have turned a corner on that, in part because some on the left rather have discovered its utility when they’re accused of antisemitism.

Neo-natalism does not necessarily mean that women alone would have to change their emphasis on career fulfillment and personal leisure in the name of child-rearing. And, of course, expert projections have been wrong in the past; back in 1968, Paul Ehrlich published a widely influential book, The Population Bomb, whose Malthusian predictions led to advocacy for eugenics (a policy favored by abortion rights pioneer Margaret Sanger). It doesn’t strike me as inconceivable that we may someday (again) be dealing with global cooling, a phenomenon that killed off microbes that might have prevented the settlement of New England—and all else that followed. But control of the agenda means control of the discourse. My own political weather forecast calls for a westerly wind that some may find chilling.