Mark Steyn wrote an excellent mediation on Christmas, posted on National Review on Dec. 24. It’s a political piece (as Mark Steyn is a political commentator), making an excellent point about the problem with low fertility rates:
If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? The developed world, like Elisabeth, is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it’s made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple — or about half “replacement rate.” 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 a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.” We are living in Zacharias and Elisabeth’s world — by choice.
You know, it’s difficult to argue with the numbers. If you haven’t picked up Steyn’s larger book, America Alone, do it. It is a riveting read.
For some, numbers are difficult to follow. The heart is more convincing. We don’t understand why so many people resist the calling of parenting. Why do millions opt out of it? Why is childlessness attractive? We’ve talked about fertility these past few days, and they’ve drawn some outlandish responses. We are speechless at some who actually find childlessness a nobile desire, something to be encouraged. Our jaws drop at such ideas.
Because we can’t help but compare. Really, we remember childlessness; the childless don’t recall the alternative life with children. We remember the footloose and fancy-free life. It was great while it lasted, but why would we have wanted it to continue? There came a time to marry and bring children into our lives, to broaden our limited view of life, to take on the next step and become parents. To find out what love was all about. Rather than just receive it from our own parents, we wanted to give it to our children.
Doesn’t this make sense? Why such objection?
Read Mark’s article. It’s excellent. Especially because of the fact that this is a Christmas meditation on the birth of Jesus. The truth is, life is worth it. Life – and bringing life into the world – leads to beauty and eternity, as did the “unconventional” births of John and Jesus did. We think similarly of our life. It may be unconventional, but it is so worth living.
About Chris & Wendy Jeub
