I have a great deal of respect for Crisis Magazine, as is evident from the fact that many of its articles have been posted to the Ink Desk as examples of Catholic wisdom in a world of folly. I also have a great deal of respect for Austin Ruse, who writes regularly for Crisis Magazine from a timely and potent pro-life perspective. On this occasion, however, I feel compelled to point out the weakness in one of Ruse’s articles.
In today’s Crisis Magazine, Ruse muses on the plummeting brithrate around the world in an ultimately shallow way. His article contains some fascinating figures on the falling brithrates of various nations around the world but his conclusions are not only inconclusive but are ultimately absent. Having given the figures and the projected fall in global population, he simply states that having chldren is good and that we don’t know what will happen if people don’t have children.
The point is that we do know what will happen if birth rates fall below replacement rates, as they are doing in much of the world and will do in much more of the world in the next few decades if demographic projections prove correct. What will happen is not merely that the population of the world will begin to decline, which many people might think is not necessarily a bad thing, but that it will begin to age. There will be more and more old people and fewer and fewer young people. The proportion of the population who are of working age will shrink and the proportion who are retired will expand. The welfare mechanism will collapse under the weight of fewer people working in relation to those who are not. The global economy, deeply in debt, will begin to contract because of shrinking markets.
The consequence of this nightmare scenario, the poisonous fruit of the culture of death, will be massive poverty, increased violence and crime, and compulsory euthanasia of the elderly and infirm.
The Pill, which is the seed of this poisonous fruit, will indeed prove bitter to swallow.
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