(LifeSiteNews) — America’s dismal birth rates are often blamed on economics. But the cost of bearing and raising children is only part of the reason the American total fertility rate, at 1.6 children per woman, is at historic lows.
Equally important in discouraging young people from marrying and having children is the coming apocalypse.
What apocalypse, you ask?
Here you can pick and choose, since there are a half dozen or so floating around in the ether. And every few years a new phantasm appears, seemingly out of nowhere, usually coinciding with a falloff in the hype and hoopla surrounding the previous one.
The apocalypse that’s been around the longest is — you guessed it — overpopulation.
Beginning in the late Sixties and continuing to the present day, there has been a steady drumbeat of propaganda warning that we are breeding ourselves off the face of the planet.
The apocalypse of the Eighties was something called “global cooling.” Human activity was putting so much particulate matter in the air, the experts told us, that it was blocking out the sun’s rays and leading to a new ice age. In a few decades we would all be huddling in igloos.
These credentialed geniuses did not take long to reverse themselves, however, and were soon waxing hot about “global warming.” The Nineties were full of feverish tales about how rising temperatures would melt the polar ice caps, flood coastal regions, while turning large parts of the surviving terra firma into deserts.
Then one of these prodigies came up with the all-encompassing term “climate change.” This, it turns out, is nothing more than the sum of all fears where weather is concerned.
The goal is the terrify people with the idea that the earth’s climate is spinning totally out of control. Human activity — particularly the burning of fossil fuels — was supposedly causing wild swings in the weather, from parching drought to flash floods, from intensifying hurricanes to insanely hot “heat domes.”
Each and every one of these doomsday scenarios was blamed on humanity, of course. As one of the early anti-natal slogans put it, “Population is Pollution.” We could save the planet and ourselves, we were told, if only we would stop having so many babies or, as the radical environmentalists call them, “little carbon emitters.”
Those of us who are older have long since learned to scoff at these apocalyptic tales. Once you’ve heard one scary story, you’ve heard them all. Once you realize how many scammers have become rich and famous by shouting “The End is Near,” you stop listening.
But what we failed to realize that “The End is Near” crowd wasn’t speaking to us so much as to our children. And our children were listening. Actually, they had no choice but to listen, because they were a captive audience. They attended public schools where indoctrination about the supposed dangers of “overpopulation,” “global warming” and “climate change” is embedded in many courses, from history to the social sciences.
These apocalyptic tales, repeated year after year, in class after class, decade after decade, have had their intended effect. For example, a 2021 Morning Consult survey noted that one in four childless adults (25 percent) cited climate change as a factor in not having children. Also, 2022 ABC News/Ipsos poll reported that 23 percent of U.S. adults aged 18-45 said climate change made them reconsider having a biological child, and 25 percent considered having fewer children.
The younger those surveyed, the more concerned they were about bringing children into a dying world. Just last year, a Lancet survey of 16-25-year-olds across all 50 states, finding 52 percent endorsed hesitation to have children due to climate concerns.
That is to say, slightly more than half of Generation Z has been convinced that the carbon footprint of children may soon make the planet uninhabitable.
Who wants to bear children in an igloo, or a furnace, or an unpredictable climate maelstrom?
What this means is that financial incentives of the kind that Vice President J.D. Vance has proposed aren’t going to solve America’s fertility crisis.
Much of what he is suggesting — generous tax benefits and other subsidies for families — already exists in European countries and has for decades. But they have done little to stop the slide in fertility rates, which have fallen even lower than those in the United States.
Don’t get me wrong. I support such transfer payments to parents to promote fertility rates.
But we also have to realize that we not dealing here just with checkbook issues, but a widespread climate anxiety that in many cases borders on neurosis. You might call it climochondria or climophobia.
Given the mental state that many young are in, you won’t be able to simply bribe them into having babies. They are too frightened of what they think the future holds.
Instead, we have to reform the curriculum to eliminate negative references to population growth, which has been one of the great drivers of human progress. And, above all, we need to stop telling impressionable children that — because of them — the world is soon going to come to an end.
