The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (35 page)

Framing the issue this way, conservatives managed the neat trick of connecting sexual liberalism to the spread of Islam, and doing so at a time when liberals were worried about growing Muslim populations in part because of their extreme social conservatism. Gay people became the precursor to religious fundamentalism, rather than its victims.

One of the speakers at the World Congress of Families was the Latvian megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev, known for the elaborate eschatological rock operas that he writes, directs, and stars in. “One of the rock operas, which young Russian-speaking anti-gay activists promote on video-sharing websites, features a hero character wearing a tuxedo battling men in black tights armed with tiki torches,” wrote Casey Sanchez of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a U.S. civil rights watchdog group. “Over heavy-metal guitar riffs, a military-like chorus sings of ‘victory over the gays.’ ” The report quoted Ledyaev, “The first devastating wave of homosexuality makes a way for the second and more dangerous wave of islamization [
sic
].”
⁴

At the World Congress of Families, the anti-Islam undertone to the rhetoric of demographic winter was not lost on the conference’s smattering of Muslim participants. Farooq Hassan, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the UN and a World Congress of Families regular, criticized some in the movement for focusing on the disparate birthrates between Christians and Muslims in Europe. After all, he noted, those really concerned with traditional gender roles should welcome the growth of Islam. “[C]learly in the current political-cum-social realities, this mantle of ambassadorial advocacy on behalf of the family has been carried by the Islamic peoples,” he said in a speech to the gathering.

Nevertheless, despite Carlson’s efforts to create an ecumenical fundamentalist brotherhood, these are not the kind of family values most Christian (or Jewish) conservatives had in mind. For many of them, the prospect of growing Muslim communities and declining birthrates among native Europeans has set off the kind of demographic panic not seen since Paul Ehrlich published
The Population Bomb
in 1968.

T
he debate has now come full circle. Once again politicians, religious leaders, and popular authors are sounding the alarm about a global crisis in birthrates. Fertility has fallen below replacement level in every developed country save the United States, where it hovers right on the edge. A new genre of declinist literature, ranging from anxious to apocalyptic, has appeared to warn of the coming population implosion and the loss of Europe to more fertile, faithful Muslims. There is Mark Steyn’s
America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
; Pat Buchanan’s
The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization
; George Weigel’s
The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God
; and Walter Laqueur’s
The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent
. A group called the Family First Foundation, which is close to the organizers of the World Congress of Families, released an hour-long documentary called
Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family
. The right-wing
National Review
mockingly advertised a “Farewell to Europe Tour,” including a visit to the “Islamic Republic of the Netherlands”: “For this special two-day event, females traveling with our party will be allowed to disembark the plane
without a veil
!”
⁵

The narrative of catastrophic population decline is a classically millenarian one, in which Europe, like Sodom and Gomorrah, is destroyed for its sins of secularism and feminism. “In short, the rise of feminism spells the death of the nation and the end of the West,” declares Buchanan’s best seller. News of Europe’s imminent doom is often delivered with smirking schadenfreude. Predicting “the demise of European races too self-absorbed to breed,” Steyn writes, “[i]n demographic terms, the salient feature of much of the ‘progressive agenda’—abortion, gay marriage, endlessly deferred adulthood—is that, whatever the charms of any individual item, cumulatively it’s a dead end. As fertility dries up, so do societies. Demography is the most obvious symptom of civilizational exhaustion, and the clearest indicator of where we’re headed.... The design flaw of the radically secularist Eutopia is that it depends on a religious society birth rate.”
⁶

Republican Mitt Romney incorporated these ideas into the speech announcing the end of his quest for the 2008 Republican nomination. “Europe is facing a demographic disaster,” he told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the premier gathering of the American right. “That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality. Some reason that culture is merely an accessory to America’s vitality; we know that it is the source of our strength. And we are not dissuaded by the snickers and knowing glances when we stand up for family values, and morality, and culture.”

According to this view, secularism drains countries of their life force, leaving them vulnerable to conquest. “The Islamic presence in Europe is not the problem so much as the symptom of the problem,” Carlson told me later. “The problem is that the Europeans have ceased to reproduce themselves, with a couple of exceptions, and have embraced a postmodern, postchild culture.” Muslims, he said, “are coming in because there’s a vacuum, and they’re coming in because they’re still growing, and a growing population next to a declining population, no matter what you put at the border, there is going to be a movement. That’s been true throughout human history.”

The decline of Europe, Carlson said, is “tragic, but it’s also the inevitable consequence of the values revolution that cut through Europe in the nineteen sixties and seventies.” All is not lost, however. “Some countries in Eastern Europe are reacting very positively, and trying to turn things around.”

T
o hear all this one would think that pious countries like Poland are uniquely fertile oases on a barren continent, their multiparous women a pronatalist example to the world. That’s what makes the right-wing argument about population decline so fantastically audacious. Poland does not have one of Europe’s highest birthrates. It has one of its lowest—1.27 children per woman in 2006. That year the highest birthrate in continental Europe was in echt secular France, followed by the Scandinavian countries of Norway (1.9) and Sweden (1.85), both known for their liberal abortion laws, no-fault divorce, and national commitment to sexual equality.
^f

This is not a coincidence. In contemporary developed societies, birthrates are highest where support for working mothers is greatest, a fact conservatives simply ignore in their doomsday surveys of future European decrepitude. There is a tremendous irony in the way the antifeminist right has run with this issue, while the feminist left has ignored it. A great body of research, oddly unpublicized, shows that after a certain point of development liberalism doesn’t cause population decline—conservatism does. Speaking of calls to restrict reproductive rights and reinstitute traditional gender roles in the service of population growth, Australian demographer Peter McDonald, incoming president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, said simply, “If governments went in that direction, birthrates would fall even further.”

The decline in fertility rates in the developed world is a real problem, one almost certain to lead to rapid population aging, slowing economies, exploding pension costs, and a need for more immigrants than can be comfortably assimilated. In order for a population with low child mortality to replace itself, each woman needs to have an average of 2.1 children. Demographers had always assumed that birthrates would stabilize around that number. Instead, after effective birth control became widely available in the 1960s, fertility plunged below replacement in every developed country, although at various points it has recovered in the United States, France, Sweden, and Iceland.

According to leading demographers, countries can adapt without much trouble to fertility rates that are just a few tenths of a percent below replacement. Real problems start when they fall below 1.7, McDonald said. That’s what has happened in developed countries where family and government institutions haven’t evolved to fit modern women’s ambitions. Italy, Japan, Poland, and Spain, for example, all have fertility rates of 1.3 or less.
⁷
Such numbers, wrote McDonald, “threaten the future existence of the peoples concerned.” For example, if Italy’s 1995 fertility rate remained constant, then without immigration, the country’s population size a century hence would be a mere 14 percent of what it is today.
⁸

With birthrates falling as longevity increases, the first world is about to get a lot older. “Today’s developed countries stand on the threshold of a stunning demographic transformation,” began a report from the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Throughout most of human history until well into the Industrial Revolution, the elderly only comprised a tiny fraction of the population—never more than 3 or 4 percent in any country. Today in the developed world, they comprise 16 percent. By 2030, the share is projected to rise to 23 percent and by 2050 to 26 percent. In some of the fast-aging countries of Western Europe, it will reach 35 percent by 2050—and in Japan it will approach 40 percent. By midcentury, at least half of Americans will be over age 40 and at least half of Europeans will be over age 50.
⁹

There will be fewer young workers to support this expanding elderly population. To maintain pension systems, taxes will have to be raised or benefits cut, or both. An older population will put an increasing strain on health systems, which, again, will have fewer workers supporting them through taxes. Shrinking workforces will demand levels of immigration far greater than anything Europe has ever seen, which will likely spur nationalist backlashes. Militaries will lack for recruits. These are grave threats; Vladimir Putin has called Russia’s low birthrates “the most acute problem facing our country today.”
¹⁰

S
peakers at the World Congress of Families celebrated a vision of women saving their cultures by returning to their God-given vocation of homemaking. “A society that has no desire to continue in time, and has so low a birthrate as we have seen, is a society with little joy, and of course no future,” said the Venezuelan countess Christine de Vollmer, president of the Latin American Alliance for the Family.

[T]he great challenges for the modern woman are to remain women: to value and exercise the tremendous calling to be mothers and formers of the men and women who will lead the world in an awesome and promising future. And therefore to make the effort to subject her interests, her ambition, and her daily routine to teaching those little people that she will be contributing to the world.

This gets it completely backward. There is abundant evidence that if you want women in modern economies to have more babies, you need to help them reconcile work and childbearing, not encourage their subjection. In developing countries a lower status for women is associated with higher fertility, but once societies become highly industrialized and women taste a certain amount of liberation, the opposite is true. “Whereas previously the countries with the highest period fertility rates were those in which family-oriented cultural traditions were most pronounced and in which women’s labor market participation was least, these relationships are now wholly reversed,” wrote the political scientist Francis G. Castles.
¹¹

Yale political scientists Frances Rosenbluth, Matthew Light, and Claudia Schrag came to the same conclusion in a 2002 paper. “To put our thesis in the simplest terms, fertility is low where vested interests keep women out of the workforce, and higher where easy labor market accessibility and child care support make it easier for women to balance family and career,” they wrote. (As we’ll see, this holds true even for the United States, which at first glance seems like an exception to the rule.)
¹²

In a similar vein, McDonald theorized that very low fertility is the result of a mismatch between women’s modern lives and social institutions that still assume male breadwinners and female homemakers, forcing women to limit childbearing (or, in some Asian countries, marriage) so as not to be trapped in an unequal, antediluvian role. The first-world fertility crisis has been caused by women reacting to the constraints on their lives with a kind of birth strike. Further restricting their choices isn’t just morally wrong—it’s demographically counterproductive.

S
ome conservatives have realized this. In 2003, British MP David Willetts, then the Tory shadow secretary for work and pensions, published a report warning that both Europe’s pension system and its economic strength as a whole are imperiled by low birthrates. “By 2050 Europe will have a shrinking population, a low underlying growth rate, and a falling share of world output,” wrote Willetts. “By contrast the USA will have a strongly growing population, it will still be relatively youthful, and if anything its share of world output will be rising. There are many more important things in life, even in economics, than simply being big. However, the idea that Europe has a viable long-term option of becoming a cultural or economic alternative to America in these circumstances is pure fantasy. To understand the USA’s future as the world’s hyper-power you do not have to look far beyond these demographic facts.”
¹³