Topic: Wombs, talk amongst yourselves

Kerry Howley writes cogently on the fertility panic meme and touches the nerve of what, to my mind, drives much of the cultural conservative angst about this topic:

Modern fertility panic stems from a desire to reshape polyglot cultures, to regain control over women’s reproductive choices, and to locate a single, easy-to-understand culprit for disparate social problems. As they have for hundreds of years, societies are projecting their deepest anxieties onto empty wombs.

The "fertility fears" are a manifestation of the cultural anxiety by those holding traditional social and strong religious views in a society where such values no longer maintain the unquestioned primacy that they once did. And, where many feel (justifiably) that their traditional values are being actively undermined by others, both in word and in deed.

The sense is that we are committing cultural suicide, both philosophically in turning away from tradition and God, and literally in terms of declining birth rates.

Dreher exposes the root of such concern here in a post that is not specifically about the decline in population per se, but rather the decline in Christianity across England:

Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests.

The fall - from the four million people who attend church at least once a month today - means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable. A lack of funds from the collection plate to support the Christian infrastructure, including church upkeep and ministers’ pay and pensions, will force church closures as ageing congregations die.

In contrast, the number of actively religious Muslims will have increased from about one million today to 1.96 million in 2035.

[snip]

The report predicts that by 2030, when Dr Rowan Williams’s successor as Archbishop of Cantebury will be approaching retirement, there could be just 350,000 people attending just 10,000 Anglican churches, with an average of 35 worshippers each. The next Archbishop after that could find his position “totally nonviable”, the report says, with just 180,000 worshippers in 6,000 churches by 2040.

[snip]

I believe this is an utter catastrophe, for reasons that go far beyond caring about the fate of individual souls. The nation and the culture that gave the world so much Christian art, Christian philosophy, Christian prayer and above all, Christian witness in word and deed, is dying. People will still live in the British Isles, obviously, but they won't be the people of the Book. They will be some other people. And our children and their children's children will all be much poorer for it. [em: mine]

As Dreher would readily admit, the fertility panic is as much about the identity of the people who remain as it is about total population size, a point that Howley summarizes well:

At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change. [em: mine]

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

We are not running out of people. The world's population is still growing. But, we may be running a little short of the right "type" of people, depending upon your perspective.

All of which is not to be dismissive of the real issues associated with population declines in certain countries, or in certain demographics within countries. There are serious economic implications to the aging of society. Further, we are tribal creatures and questions of identity strike a very deep chord.

Things will be much easier (though by no means easy, see recent let's kick out all the Mexicans tropes) in the US, where we are relatively open to immigration and the Statue of Liberty ethos (give us your poor, huddled masses yearning to be free, etc...) forms a core of our national mythology.

In European countries, or others which emerged from ethnically homogeneous foundations, and are less immigrant friendly policy-wise, navigating issues of national identity will create sharper edges. Swedish people live in Sweden and speak the Swedish language. Can a second generation immigrant from northern Africa be fully "Swedish" even if their legal rights are identical to those who are ethnically Swedish? The "otherness" of immigrants in such an environment is more difficult to erase and will always be available for various stripes of demagoguery.