Have More Babies! One Woman’s Regret and the Demographic Apocalypse
Of course, I qualify this exhortation with if you’re married and able to have babies. If not either one or both, encourage other married couples to have more babies. The blessings are worth every sacrifice.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, the environmental hysteria of the day was too many people—overpopulation. There were predictions of massive famines by the 1980s because of too many mouths to feed. This started the trend among environmentalists of never having to say they’re sorry for their mistaken predictions which are always blatantly wrong. This mentality or worldview of the earth not being able to sustain the life upon it goes back to Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). The poison he inflicted into the stream of Western ideas has caused untold misery because it is based on an anti-biblical, anti-God lie. According to Britannica and put simply,
Thomas Malthus was an English economist and demographer best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that the betterment of mankind is impossible without strict limits on reproduction. This thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism.
The Power of Assumptions
One of the best things I’ve learned in developing my apologetics skills over the years (i.e., my ability to defend the truth claims of Christianity), is the pernicious power of invisible assumptions. I get into this in some detail in my book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, because understanding the nature of assumptions, and how pervasive they are, is critical to developing a life-long faith in our children and ourselves. Never forget, everyone has assumptions. In other words, they have points of view that cannot be proved, and are most likely unexamined. In fact, people generally don’t even know they have assumptions! A fantastic exercise with your children when you’re watching TV shows or movies is to stop them (the clicker is your apologetics friend) and ask them to identify hidden assumptions. In due course they will realize assumptions are everywhere and inescapable, and more often than not, mistaken.
Let’s look at something that likely informed the assumptions of Thomas Malthus. From the Britannica bio:
His father, a friend of the Scottish philosopher and skeptic David Hume, was deeply influenced by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book Émile (1762) may have been the source of the elder Malthus’s liberal ideas about educating his son.
No wonder Malthus became Malthusian! If you’re familiar with the thinking of Hume and Rousseau this won’t surprise you, if not, you’ll have to trust me. Even though Malthus was ordained in the Church of England when he was 31, it was the skepticism of Hume and hedonism of Rousseau, and not the Bible, that informed his worldview assumptions. If it had, he would never have become a “Malthusian,” and the lie that God can’t provide for his creatures would never have become a common assumption in the modern world. His non-biblical assumptions also display a lack of foresight. He obviously couldn’t imagine food production would ever change, and thus would always be limited. In the modern world the problem is obesity and too much food.
Can you identify the assumption in Malthus’s assertion: “the food supply and that the betterment of mankind is impossible without strict limits on reproduction”? I haven’t read his “Essay on the Principles of Population,” so I’ll have to take it from the many other people I have read that this is an accurate reflection of his thoughts. He believed there are limits on the ability of creation to sustain the creatures God created. Thus he saw the necessity of “strict limits” on having babies if we’re to have a good life. I can’t think of anything more biblically upside down than this. In Scripture children are blessings that lead to human flourishing, full stop.
Why did Malthus get it so wrong? When he wrote his treatise, world population was likely less than a billion people. Today there are 8 billion people, and fewer people starving than at any time in history. Why? Human ingenuity and the technology has allowed food production to grow exponentially, something Malthus thought was not possible. Read Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder to see the contrast between a scarcity and poverty mindset and a wealth one—assumptions make all the difference.
One last point about assumptions before I get to babies. I recently read a book, The Black Swan, and the author is clearly not a Christian, nor likely even a theist. He uses the phrase “mother nature” a lot. Anyone who uses such a phrase, no matter how intelligent they may be, does not understand their own assumptions. First, the phrase is dishonest. If someone doesn’t believe in creation, that the world had a designer, then it’s disingenuous to introduce purpose by using such a phrase. I see and hear this all the time, and it’s amazing what “mother nature” can do even though “she” is mere material randomly thrown together. “She” can’t do anything! Everything just is, and the only valid explanation on this worldview and its assumptions is that it’s all a fortunate coincidence. I will hand it to the author, though, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He ends the book with this bit of honesty:
We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.
That’s it. We’re lucky dirt! And that’s all we are. So his conclusion? And I’m not kidding: “So stop sweating the small stuff.” As much as he might try, life in a universe as a meaningless concoctions of atoms that fell together for no reason at all is a very difficult place to find meaning.
We, on the other hand, don’t believe we are merely lucky dirt. I started a saying with my children I hope they use when they are raising theirs, God willing. My daughter has two very young ones, so she’ll be able to practice soon. I know she got it when we were texting about the most recent incredible full moon, and my response was, “God!” Her reply, God bless her, was, “Praise chance!” I used this phrase with them growing up all the time, and even now as they are grown. Children know intuitively that it is silly to attribute all the beauty, complexity, and sheer awesomeness of creation to chance. BTW, bonus tip: I never use the word nature because in our secular world people can read their God-less assumptions into that word. They can’t do that with creation. Now to babies.
The Pain of Regret
The inspiration for this post was an article by a British woman, Mary Wakefield, with the title, “Why I should have had more children.” That is clickbait for me! She spent her twenties and thirties pursuing her career and didn’t give any thought to having a mate or children until she was almost 40, and had a child at 41. Then it was too late to have more. Women in their 40s have a difficult time getting pregnant. She didn’t realize the assumptions driving her younger lifestyle until it was too late:
The tacit assumption was always that children are an obstacle to the noble process of self-actualization.
As if “self-actualization” is a worthy goal for creatures made in God’s image. Jesus said if you want to find your life, lose it for his sake. If you want to be first, be last, and those who want to be great must be servants—kind of upside down from self-actualization. You can see here someone going through much of her life never questioning assumptions because she likely didn’t realize she even had them. Only in hindsight (life is very often 20/20) did she realize there were reasons she never even thought about having babies until it was almost too late. She writes, “The single-child family is a popular subject in magazines these days,” with headlines such as “One and Done.” She reads such articles and they leave her empty. The message being, having one is easier. Her reply reveals the shallow and unfulfilling nature of the secular worldview:
But what’s ease got to do with having children? If ease is your aim, why have kids at all? And why does no one ever mention the only-child situation from the child’s perspective? What if your one child would like there to be others?
To those driven by the sovereign self where personal gratification is all, it doesn’t matter what a child wants. It only matters what the mother and father want. She finds it surprising, although she shouldn’t:
It’s just curious, given all the hand-wringing over birth rates, that regret is taboo. Perhaps it’s because although we all face the same predicament, every nation has its own preferred explanation. In some countries the received idea is that childcare is too expensive, in others that women work too much or men too little.
I would suggest the answer is that talking about regret in polite secular society is not acceptable. Editors determine what is allowed in those magazines, and regret might get people thinking the me-first lifestyle isn’t working out so well.
The Demographic Apocalypse
The word apocalypse has come to mean ultimate disaster in Western culture, but it’s a biblical word meaning “an unveiling, uncovering, revealing, revelation,” thus the name of the Book of Revelation in English (coming from the Latin revelationem). The revealing reflects what I wrote about recently, the death of secularism. Because of feminism, and many other things in the modern world, anti-natalism not only came to be accepted, but something worthwhile and good. The poverty stricken worldview of secularism is apparent in the idea that having babies is an option. Non-Christians can do whatever they want, but Christians understand that God made man male and female for a reason, and marriage to populate heaven and earth. Having babies is most certainly not an option for followers of Jesus. I believe far too many Christians have accepted anti-natalist assumptions, and limit the number of children they have. I was guilty of that. If I knew then what I know now we too would have had more blessings from God.
Demographers, those who engage in the statistical study of human populations, have realized for a while that humanity is not having enough children. We’re told that human global population will stabilize and shrink at some point in the 21st Century. We will see an inflection point in the not too distant future as the number of old people will soon exceed the number of young children, and that creates all kinds of problems. Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson commenting about dropping birth rates around the world writes, “nothing less than the future of humanity is at stake.” As he says, he is not exaggerating. This piece titled, “A World Without Babies,” is a sobering read of what that world might look like.
The flourishing of a society can only happen when more people work and produce wealth than don’t work and only consume. That is the way God intended it. Not to mention loneliness kills. The stories of Japanese old people without families dying alone in their apartments is sickening (watch this documentary if you want to see what that feels like). God has different plans for his creation, and His people must lead the way. When God commanded, not suggested, Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, it implied He never intended there ever to be more older than younger people. When Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (that would be the devil), but that he came to give us an abundant life, life to the full, that life includes lots of babies.
The left, whatever we call them (liberals, progressives, Marxists), are masters of unintended consequences. For instance, they believe giving people something for nothing is “compassionate.” This gained steam with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, which didn’t get rid of poverty but destroyed the black family and created intergenerational dysfunction. Good intentions without wisdom leads to suffering. We’re not exactly sure what the consequences of the demographic apocalypse will be, but we know it won’t be good. The solution is, as God told us, have more babies!
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