I’ve done my bit by having six children, so now you do yours”, Jacob Rees-Mogg demanded of GB News viewers recently. Not so long ago, politicians were panicking about overpopulation. Now many worry that there are – or will be – too few people in the world. “There is one critical outcome that liberal individualism has completely failed to deliver and that is babies,” one of the rising stars of the Tory party, MP Miriam Cates, told the National Conservatism conference in May.
The resurgence of such natalism has been provoked by falling birthrates across the globe. In 1950, according to a study in the Lancet, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. By 2017, that had fallen to 2.4 and is predicted to fall below 1.7 by 2100. England and Wales are almost at that figure now, the birthrate having dropped from 2.9 in 1964 to 1.61 in 2021, marking, in Cates’ view, a “population collapse”. » | Kenan Malik | Sunday, August 6, 2023
It is indeed true that the birthrate needs to go up significantly. But how are we going to achieve this in the West with current values? For women to give birth to more children, we need to return to the values of yesteryear, maybe the 50s – a time in which women, wives, wanted, even expected to stay at home to be good housewives and mothers. To achieve that state of affairs again, much would have to change, not least attitudes. It is hard to imagine how the West can ever expect to increase birthrates significantly when most women insist on going out to work, either because of necessity or out of choice. There was a lot to be said for the status quo ante. Not only did it feed the needs of commerce and industry without the need for droves of immigrants, but it was also conducive to cohesive communities. It is an undeniable fact that we have lost much that was good in our quest for modernity. – © Mark Alexander
