ZPG Thinking Reaps What It Sows

When my mother was in college, she signed a "Zero Population Growth" pledge: she planned to have only two children, so that the population wouldn't continue "growing wildly out of control." I find it beautiful - and hilarious - that she's the mother of three, one of whom (me) is a Catholic who will hopefully raise a large family (if God allows me that privilege). However, millions of other people raised in the sexual revolution era made good on their promises and had only one or two children. My generation isn't doing much better, delaying marriage and children until the late twenties or thirties and often frowning upon couples who have more than two (or, God forbid!) three children. After forty-odd years of this behavior, there were bound to be some consequences. The Demographic Winter is coming, and it isn't going to be pretty.

Last week my long-awaited copy of Demographic Winter arrived. The film was excellent. Disturbing, but excellent; the scholarship was well-informed and presented the argument for the dangers of depopulation from many angles: economic, sociological, environmental, etc. They didn’t touch on the morality-based reasons population is declining, but neither did they sugarcoat the truth about how the sexual revolution was pretty darn horrible for family stability and world population maintenance. My only critique of the film is that it doesn’t really offer a solution to our problem; rather, the experts seem to all throw up their hands with a sort of “Yup, we’re screwed” attitude.

The mainstream media is really good at ignoring crucial issues if they’re politically incorrect, but, as usual, this will eventually come around to bite them from behind. It’s kind of a beautiful irony, if you ignore the whole pesky “denying-the-inherent-dignity-of-human-life” aspect.

World birth rates are declining. Rapidly. This will eventually come to everyone’ attention when our Social Security system goes (completely) bankrupt, but until then, it’s a silent but deadly snake in the grass. If it weren’t for immigration, the populations of both Western Europe and the United States would already be far below replacement rate (2.1 children per woman). Even developing countries are seeing vast declines in population. This has all sorts of catastrophic consequences explained in the film. However, I’m going to find a silver lining.

In the U.S. at least, some of the only people having more than two children per family are…. Practicing Christians, specifically, NFP-using faithful Catholics. (and Mormons, apparently, though I’m not aware if Mormonism has a specific teaching about family planning). While it’s tragic that the remaining 98% of the population isn’t experiencing the joy of fertility appreciation, eventually they’ll die out. Look at the numbers:
Say there are 200 people, or 100 couples, in an imaginary model society. 98% of them contracept and have, at most, two children per family. For the sake of an easy model, if they replace themselves each generation with 2 children per family, there will always be 98 contracepting couples, or 196 people born each generation. The remaining 2 couples are faithful Catholics who use prayer and discernment to let God decide family size, via NFP. They have, on average, five children per family and instill in their children the same pro-family values.

Generation 0: 196 people, or 98 contracepting couples, plus 4 pro-family people = 2 pro- family, pro-fertility couples.
Generation 1: Contracepting Postmodernists(CPMs): 196 children born, who grow into 98 couples. Pro-family faithful Catholics (PFFCs): First generation of 2 couples yields 10 children, or five couples.
Generation 2: CPMs: same number: 196 born, 98 couples. PFFCs: 25 children born to five couples, and those 25 children grow into 12 couples (one will be a priest, of course!).
Generation 3: CPMs still going strong at 196 children born. PFFCs have 60 children who grow into 30 couples.
Generation 4: CPMs are at 196 children. PFFCs closing in with 150 children or 75 couples.
Generation 5: CPMs staying at 196 children. PFFCs have 375 children or 187 couples (plus a priest).
Generation 6: CPMs still have 196 children. PFFCs have taken a commanding lead, 935 children or 467 couples (and another priest! No vocation shortage in this model!)

Within five generations (and especially by the sixth), contraceptors have become a minority group- literally culling themselves out of existence. Wow! So if a generation is usually about 25-30 years long, within 150-180 years the anti-family crowd should die out. However, that’s assuming that none of the pro-family children jump ship and start contracepting. But in my own anecdotal experience, the people I know (at least the other young adults I know) who come from large, faithful Catholic families are NFP-using pro-family advocates. Thus, there’s some truth to this little fable. Of course, it’s just a model, and doesn’t account for things like acceptable, serious reasons to limit family size via NFP, so not *every* PFFC family will have the “average” of five children.

It’s been two generations since the introduction of widespread contraceptive use. And things are already pretty messed up because of it. It’s only going to get worse, I’d imagine, but in the end, the truth will prevail (which it has a funny way of doing): Mess with procreation and you open a pretty nasty Pandora’s box.