David Karki

A new Pew Research Center study released this week indicates that 20 percent – 1 in 5 – women aged 40-44 is childless. This is an all-time high for the United States; never before in its history have as many of this group not been mothers. Not surprisingly, there is a concomitant lack of marriage amongst this cohort as well, with 40 percent of the childless also being single and never married.

Hello, EPA!

This may not seem like a big deal, or like something worthy of a societal-level analysis. After all, selection of a spouse (or to not have one) and whether to have children or not are two of the most personal decisions anyone has in life. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t significant demographic consequences, at least once a sufficient threshold number of such has been reached.

The western world has crossed that threshold, with most of Europe, Japan, and Canada all below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per household. A number of European countries are well below it, surpassing the point from which no civilization in human history has ever recovered. In short, they are committing a slow suicide – self-extinction by failure to reproduce sufficiently. Worse yet, over the next couple decades they will be supplanted by Muslims, who are having children in large numbers. (Just look at the most popular names list for newborns, if you don’t believe me.) How does the idea of a majority Muslim Europe sound to you?

For our part, The United States is still hanging on at the 2.1 figure, mostly due to Latino families having 4+ children per capita. We aren’t quite in the dire straits of the rest of the West, but in the years to come learning to speak Spanish will probably be a good idea, and possibly a necessity.

Put into this context, the statistics in the Pew study come off as a bit more alarming. As does the prospect of an already crushed-by-debt public sector trying in vain to pay for the retirements and health care of all these childless elderly before collapsing into total insolvency. Suffice it to say, there aren’t anywhere near enough young taxpayers to cover the costs of all these older folks with no familial support system to help independently bear the burden.

That enormous cost of government, entitlements and otherwise, is part of both the cause and what prevents change. When both husband and wife must work outside the home to pay the huge tax burden required to sustain a much-too-expensive behemoth of a public sector, this necessarily prices children out of existence. (To say nothing of what it does to that couple’s available time and energy to attempt creating them.) It’s fair to say that you can have big government or big(ger) families, but not both.  Sadly, it appears we’ve chosen the former.

And while the study doesn’t address it – an absence which itself reflects the attitudinal and cultural problem, in my opinion – this also means by mathematical definition that a fairly similar number of men of the same age are not fathers and husbands. Moreover, this condition is more apt to be not of their own choosing, but as the inescapable result of the unilateral individual choices made by this female cohort, underscored by biological reality. Lastly, the final effect is that if a civilization is to maintain itself, those couples who do have children must have more of them in order to make up for those not born to the childless.

Simply put, while marriage and children are an individual decision, they also in some respects are very much not an individual decision, in that the consequences inherently impact others. For example, the study’s complete ignorance of the effect this trend has on men is breathtaking; if we’ve really reached the point where childbearing is considered to be a unilateral decision made by and the responsibility for it borne by a woman alone, it’s no wonder that fewer of them choose to do it. Perhaps there’s a darned good reason why it takes two to produce and properly raise children, and a mother by herself has a much tougher time.

Or that men seem to be stuck in adolescence, when the main thing that forces them to quickly mature – the responsibility of a wife and children to take care of – has effectively been put off-limits to them by a feminist-driven culture which holds that men should have no say and husbands and fathers are irrelevant. (Never mind the mountain of research that clearly shows the number one determinant of failure in a child’s life is the absence of his or her father.)  Most men are not going to accept a chunk of that responsibility without getting some of the decision-making power to go along with it.

This may seem harsh to say, but just try being a single guy in his late 30s very much interested in marriage and children sooner rather than later – for example, like me – and saying to prospective mates that you’d like to have 3 or 4 or 5 kids. And then that it’d be best for their sake if their mother were to stay home with them while they’re little, and then possibly to private school them or share together the task of home schooling them as the education of our children, especially in regard to proper morals and values,  is our responsibility alone.

Suffice it to say, in a culture which holds that women make such crucial decisions alone, that tends not to go over real well. Never mind the assumption of sole financial responsibility for the entire household which you’d willingly accept in the deal. (And for which you’re already preparing by budgeting minimally now.)  Or that you fully understand that 3-5 children would mean 3-5 years of pregnancy, giving birth, nursing, and late-night feedings. (Biological reality making some things hers to handle doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t do your share.) Or that once the children aren’t so little, you’d enthusiastically support her in whatever career she may endeavor to resume or begin. That all gets missed or disregarded in the reaction of one whose line of thinking isn’t along the same route.

My point here isn’t that people shouldn’t be free to choose to remain single or childless; nor is it to self-piteously bemoan my own situation, though I’m sure some readers will take it that way. It’s merely that such choices have an impact beyond the individual, some of which are inescapable and could well be for the worse, which needs to be forthrightly considered in the overall cost/benefit analysis. And if it be true that demographics is destiny, that we ignore those effects at our peril as a civilization.

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