Birth Rates Continue to Plunge: US Census Bureau
Birth Rates Continue to Plunge: US Census Bureau
The percentage of childless women who have reached the end of their child-bearing years in the United States has doubled from 10% to 20% in the last 30 years, reported the US Census Bureau on Monday.The survey also found that, “Women 40 to 44 years old will end their childbearing years with an average of 1.9 children each, a number below replacement-level fertility.” This is markedly fewer children than in 1976, when 3.1 children was the national average.
36% of the women who gave birth in 2006 were separated, widowed, divorced or never married. Five percent were living with a partner.
The news from the US Census Bureau is not good. Our fertility rate is down. The pundits say that we’ve already filled the earth to its capacity, children have too large a carbon footprint, our economy can’t support more non-contributors, and the cost-of-living is too high for large families. But the Bureau points out a number of consequences to these attitudes:
Only the Hispanic and Black populations in the US are replacing themselves with an average of 2.3 and 2.0 children born per woman respectively, making them the only stabilizing force in the American population. At this rate, experts say, whites will be the minority in America by 2042.
This stat might spur some latent racism. If you can repress it, there is a certain lament appropriate when seeing your heritage diminish. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating your German, Irish, English, Baltic, or whatever Anglo heritage just as an African-American or Latino celebrate theirs.
But it gets worse. We should be concerned for what Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University calls ”a future demographic crisis.” ”It means that 25 years from now, there’ll be many elderly people who are childless and who may not have anybody to care for them,” he said. That’s a real problem. Think no social security (built on the baby boomers) but also think much more managed elderly care. Having spent a year visiting folks hospitalized or in nursing care, I can tell you that for most the best care is is hospice care, living at home or with family. It’s not just about medical but also mental and social.
But if there are few or no children, we will not be able to provide this sort of care, relegating our elders to institutionalized care. For many this segregation marks the tolling of the final bell.
The attitudes also have another negative effect. Focusing unduly on economic cost has another negative impact:
In a 2006 message to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences Pope Benedict XVI, whose own native land of Germany has seen massive declines in birthrates, remarked that children are too often looked upon in terms of their economic cost and not as gifts from God. This mentality, he says, is not only causing a decline in birth rates, but it is also detrimental to children already born.
“It is children and young people,” he said, “who are often the first to experience the consequences of this eclipse of love and hope.” ”Often, instead of feeling loved and cherished, they appear to be merely tolerated.”
Last week Issues Etc. had a terrific pastor’s roundtable discussing divorce. (MP3 of Pastor’s Roundtable) I commend it to your listening in any case. Many examples of casuistry were considered including adultery, abandonment, recovery from a previous divorce, reconciliation and remarriage. One of the interesting topics raised was the corruption of God’s purpose for marriage and its relation to divorce. When marriage’s intended purpose is distilled to companionship and pleasure alone, they are prone to being distorted by selfish desires. It’s hard for each spouse to remember that those God-given purposes aren’t for themselves but for the other. We are not concerned about our companionship or pleasure but rather for providing these for the other.
This is life lived under the cross, living and loving our neighbor as God lived and died, that is loved us and gave himself up for us. But again, merely having a friend or having the pleasure of marriage is easily corrupted into self-serving desires rather than other-serving.
Children, on the other hand, are more difficult to corrupt in this way. Unless you are independently wealthy, its hard to distort them into feathers-in-ones-cap. Children always require financial sacrifice. Not just that, they require time, care, education, and general nurture.
When children are taken out of marriage, we’re left with family and a society (I would argue) which falls easily into selfish and personal desires, rather than caring and loving for others. So, children should be the norm for marriages. Family should be the norm for marriage. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be surprised that the elderly aren’t cared for, the children are neglected, and the marriages fail.
(cool! post #888)
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