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.

Chicken or the Egg: Family Size vs. Secularism

Interesting article from the Hoover Institute (so must be taken with grain of salt) that posits that the decline in family size may be a driver towards lower levels of religiosity in society, rather than the prevailing assumption that rising secularism in the modern age results in lower rates of child bearing.

[But look carefully at that common formulation, because it contains the same hidden assumption as that of secularization theory — i.e., it assumes that because people are more religious, therefore they have larger families. But where is the evidence for putting things in that order? It is at least as plausible — in fact, given the evidence, it is more plausible — to assume the opposite: that something about having larger families is making people more religious, at least some of the time.]

The article goes on to note that rates of child-bearing in Europe went down prior to declines in church attendance.

Not sure that this totally coheres for me. While acknowledging that the article is intentionally speculative in nature (note the rather weak claim of "at least some of the time" in the quote above -- could this be falsified??), the facts, such as they are, that are marshaled in defense of the claim are far from comprehensive or convincing.

The article cites the American experience as the exception for Western societies (i.e. we are more religious, therefore more children than Europe -- or alternately, that we marry and have children at higher rates therefore we are more religious, as the author would have it). But, I have seen other statistics before which claim that if one controls for immigration (i.e. Latino immigrants have higher birthrates than native-born in the US) that we are not significantly different than Europe.

Additionally, within Europe, one finds higher birthrates in relatively secular Scandinavian countries than in more socially traditional and religiously observant ones, such as Italy. It has thus been speculated that a society needs either a) a more open labor market, such as in the US, that makes it less onerous for women to leave/re-enter the workforce or b) a more generous social welfare policy, such as in Northern European countries, to ease the financial burden of child-bearing in a modern industrial economy.

In the sense that the author is simply calling to attention the general presumption that, "after all, religious people tend to have larger families; so what?" and suggesting that the lazy causality assumed therein is tenuous, then I can agree. But, the overall thrust of the article clearly aims for much broader claims and implications.

I think that one of the footnotes feels a little closer to the truth:

[Wilcox also suggests three reasons for “why churchgoing is so tightly bound to being married with children”: because they find other couples like themselves in churches — i.e., those navigating family life; because children “drive parents to church” in the sense of encouraging them to transmit a moral/religious compass; and because men are much more likely than women to fall away from church on their own.]

In short, for people with children, churches can form a natural community within which the burdens of childbearing can be shared and from which desired socialization of their children can be obtained.

Many statistics cite, in spite of the frequent claims of US religiosity, that many "religious" Americans are deeply ignorant about some of the most elemental facts of Christian doctrine. Thus, I am left to wonder if one can fully explain their church-going behavior as specifically "religious" in nature. It seems that the benefits one may get from church cover a far broader set of social needs, not simply spiritual ones.

Mostly, I don't think that the causality is clean in either direction. Clearly Mormons have a much higher birthrate that Americans as a whole. But, the author would imply that childbearing comes first, then religious faith follows (or "at least some of the time" -- snark). But, why would Mormons consistently have more children to begin with, before faith has taken hold? Something in the water in Utah?

More plausibly, it would seem that many Mormons are raised in relatively cohesive communities where church-attendance is the norm. And, a host of social expectations (both those imposed from without, as well as that one internalizes from growing up in such an environment) guide both the decision to have children and to attend church within the community.

In short, banning the pill isn't going to bring masses back to the Mass.