America is beginning to run out of Americans. We are breeding ourselves out of existence. Our fertility rate has plunged to 1.7 births per woman, the lowest it has ever been. Since the replacement rate is 2.1, this generation isn’t even making enough babies to replace itself.
And it’s not just an American problem. Japan’s fertility rate is so low that, according to Foreign Policy magazine, the last Japanese baby in history will be born before the end of this millennium. After that, the Japanese people will vanish from the earth.
Because of the use of abortion as a birth control method and a low fertility rate, Russia’s population is shrinking by 750,000 a year. The replacement rate in some European countries (Italy, for example) has dropped so low that they will never recover. According to demographers, once the fertility rate in a country drops below 1.3, it is biologically impossible for that country to recover.
Angela Merkel realized that Germany was running out of Germans because German families were simply not having children. Giving up on a homegrown solution, she decided she would let every Muslim in the world immigrate to Germany, no questions asked. This, in turn, is creating immense social problems, beginning with a complete lack of assimilation and ending with a skyrocketing crime rate and an ongoing battle with domestic terrorism.
China is now desperately trying to reverse the catastrophic effects of its “one child” policy on its demography. Because male offspring were more highly prized under the one-child regime, female babies were aborted or murdered by the millions. There are now 70 million more men than women in China. If a Chinese man wants to marry, have children, and settle down, where is he going to find somebody to do it with?
Chinese mega-billionaire Jack Ma is leading the cultural crusade for Chinese couples to have more sex and have more babies. And he reminds his fellow Chinese that marriage is not just about building bank accounts but about building families. “Marriage is not for the purpose of accumulating wealth, not for buying a house, not for buying a car, but for having a child together.”
Decaying cultural norms have certainly contributed to the drop in fertility in the United States. The aggressive warfare being waged by the regressive left against masculinity is having a huge impact. A whole lot of Americans have been convinced that there is something inherently toxic and oppressive about normative American masculinity, which consists of such things as strength, perseverance, dedication, commitment, risk-taking, providing for a family, protecting a family, carving out a career, and using masculine strength to confront evil.
Pornography is particularly pernicious, leaving many perfectly healthy college males functionally impotent, and robbing even apparently healthy marriages of sexual intimacy.
The result of all this is that we are not making men like we used to. In fact, as one writer said, we are not making them at all. Testosterone levels in American males have dropped an alarming 17% since 1987, and the average millennial male today has the grip strength of a 30-year-old woman. Some estimates are that only one in five American males now even has the biological capacity to father children.
[A central factor in the decline of American masculinity is the absence of fathers in the life of boys. A tragic 39% of school-aged boys live in a home without their biological fathers. We need to get dads more involved in mentoring their sons. I’ve made a modest effort to contribute to the solution with “The Boy to Man Book,” designed for fathers to read with their 12-year-old sons. You can pick up a copy at afastore.net.]
A dropping fertility rate has immense implications for the American economy. As FRC notes, “Fewer babies means fewer workers, and fewer workers mean less economic growth, and a smaller tax base, and even less consumer spending. If we continue down this path, the country will have a workforce too small to support their parents’ generation of retirees.”
The Wall Street Journal points out that because of illegal immigration and the drop in the birth rate of the native-born, the share of the workers in our economy who were not born here (17.5%) has reached its highest level in decades.
The bottom line is that America is already starting to run out of Americans. What’s the solution? As always, it’s found in Scripture. God says in Genesis 1:28 that we are to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” He’s never changed his mind about that.
Now if American families are going to “multiply” and not just replace themselves, if they are going to leave more people behind than they found, they need to have an average of at least three children. Large families are not a burden, nor are they the enemies of America’s future - they are America’s future.
