The disruptive results for individuals and society spawned by the
revolution in attitudes and behavior regarding sex, marriage, family,
and childbearing that erupted a half-century ago have become too obvious
to ignore. These things were predictable--in fact, some people actually
predicted them from the start--but by now their impact has grown so
painfully apparent that even secular voices are being raised in alarm.
The problems are increasingly visible in the United States. They include
an aging population with fewer young workers to support the elderly,
along with a disturbingly high incidence of disabilities among children
born to parents who put off having them until their 30s and 40s and
then, in many instances, resorted to drugs or reproductive technologies
to achieve pregnancy.
Between 2007 and 2010, the U.S. birthrate dropped 8%, to the lowest
level since 1920, when reliable data first became available. The
lifetime average of 1.9 children per woman is below the replacement rate
of 2.1--the number of children needed to keep population level. Granted,
some of this is due to the recession but some reflects longer-term
trends.
Religious sources, some of them anyway, began warning about such things
a long time ago. In his 1968 encyclical condemning
contraception,
Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI spoke of
"insurmountable limits" to what people can rightly do to and
with their bodies, and of the personal and social imperatives requiring
that those limits be ignored. The Pope was ignored when he wasn't
laughed at. But he was right.
Now, in their own way, secular sources have begun to make points very
much like those made by Paul VI and a few others. As fresh evidence,
consider recent articles in two very different opinion journals--the
neoconservative
Weekly Standard and the
liberal
New Republic. Both are required reading for people
who want to know the dismal demographic future that, barring a miracle,
lies just ahead.
Jonathan V. Last
focuses in
the Standard on the crisis in marriage. To put it
simply, large numbers of Americans just aren't getting married any more.
Up until 1970, Last writes, the percentage who were married at some
point in their lives never fell much below 93%. But now 67% of men and
57% of women in the prime childbearing years between 20 and 34 have
never been married, and more than half of voting age Americans are
single.
Over in
the New Republic, Judith Shulevitz, the magazine's
science editor and an older mother herself, notes that the age of
first-time mothers rose from 21.5 in 1970 to 25.4 in 2010.
As the age of mothers has risen, birth defects also have increased among
the children of older women who postponed pregnancy and then turned to
technology to catch up. (Lest you wonder: the incidence of birth defects
also is higher among children of older men.) Shulevitz suggests doctors
get busy spreading the word "that tinkering with reproductive
material at the very earliest stages of a fetus's growth may have
molecular effects we're only beginning to understand."
Jonathan Last sees two large explanations for what has happened in
recent decades: "the waning of religion in American life" and
the shattering of the "iron triangle" that previously linked
sex, marriage and childbearing. No doubt that is so. As Pope Paul VI
said back in 1968, "The honest practice of regulation of birth
demands…that husband and wife acquire and possess solid
convictions concerning the true values of life and of the family."
That was necessary then, and it's just as necessary today.