A slowing trend is not a 'reversal'

noting that the recession has slowed migration to the Sunbelt, The New York Times gets it wrong:

More broadly, however, the recession that began in 2007 has significantly slowed the great American migration toward warmth and sun. It was a move, earlier in the decade, driven as much by quality of life as easy credit, according to demographers and economists. But the reversal is nearly as striking.

There has been no "reversal." Nevada and Florida have had a net outflow of residents in this recession, but the general trend -- population shifting southward and westward from the Northeast and Upper Midwest "Rust Belt" -- continues. Can't the people at the New York Times even read a press release?

Wyoming showed the largest percentage growth: its population climbed 2.12 percent to 544,270 between July 1, 2008, and July 1, 2009. Utah was next largest, growing 2.10 percent to 2.8 million. Texas ranked third, as its population climbed 1.97 percent to 24.8 million, with Colorado next (1.81 percent to 5 million).
The only three states to lose population over the period were Michigan (-0.33 percent), Maine (-0.11 percent) and Rhode Island (-0.03 percent). The latter two states had small population changes.

So if Michigan, Maine and Rhode Island are losing population, while Wyoming, Texas and Colorado are gaining, the alleged "reversal" of the trend is non-existent.

Congratulations to the Duggars!

Their first grandchild, Mackynzie Renée Duggar, is welcomed into the world by her grandparents, Jim Bob and Michelle, and by 17 aunts and uncles.

Babysitters? We don't need no stinkin' babysitters!

'Hey, baby, let's destroy the planet'

Making babies? You're raping Gaia!

Unchecked population growth is speeding climate change, damaging life-nurturing ecosystems and dooming many countries to poverty, experts concluded in a conference report released Monday.
Unless birth rates are lowered sharply through voluntary family-planning programmes and easy access to contraceptives, the tally of humans on Earth could swell to an unsustainable 11 billion by 2050, they warned. . . .
"Continued rapid population growth in many of the least developed countries could lead to hunger, a failure of education and conflict," said Malcolm Potts at the University of California in Berkeley, which hosted the conference in February.
The papers, authored by 42 specialists in environmental science, economics and demography, are published by the Royal Society, Britain's de-facto academy of sciences.
"There is no doubt that the current rate of human population growth is unsustainable," summarised Roger Short, a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
"The inexorable increase in human numbers is exhausting conventional energy supplies, accelerating environmental pollution and global warming and providing an increasing number of failed states where civil unrest prevails."

Don't argue -- they're experts and you're not. So just turn down the lights, put on some soft music and tell your sweetheart, "Hey, you want to contribute to environmental destruction, energy depletion and civil unrest?"

Father of six -- trying to my part!

Massachusetts: The Gay State

Associated Press celebrates the five-year anniversary of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts:

According to the latest state figures, [from May 2004] through September 2008, there had been 12,167 same-sex marriages in Massachusetts -- 64 percent of them between women -- out of 170,209 marriages in all

.No figures are cited on gay divorce, of course. If you read the 2,700-word story, you will see that AP reporter David Crary tells a sunshine-on-a-cloudless-day tale, elaborated with picturesque anecdotes about wonderful couples.

Crary won second place in the 2006 National Lesbian & Gay Journalist Association competition. This year, he's going for No. 1, baby!

I would very much like to be able to compare state-by-state marriage data to demonstrate that Massachusetts has one of the lowest marriage rates, and one of the lowest birth rates, in the United States. Unfortunately, as the NCHS bluntly admits, the federal government stopped providing even a semblance of comprensive data on marriage and divorce more than a decade ago.

However, birth data continue to be collected, so let's look at the 2003 total fertility rate for Massachusetts, as well as four other states -- Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and Maine -- that have legalized same-sex marriage, as well as New Hampshire, where legislation is currently awaiting the governor's signature.

Massachusetts......1.74
Connecticut..........1.92
Iowa.....................1.99
Vermont...............1.68
Maine...................1.75
New Hampshire...1.77

You see that in none of these states is the total fertility rate at or above the 2.1 average lifetime births per woman necessary to prevent demographic decline. Now, let's look at the states with the highest fertility rates:

Utah..................2.57
Arizona..............2.39
Alaska................2.37
Texas................2.35
Idaho................2.32

The fertility rate in Utah is 53% higher than the rate in Vermont, and the rate in Idaho is 33% higher than the rate in Massachusetts.

My point is that the popularity of same-sex marriage is strongly associated with low fertility rates. If adequate state-by-state data were available, I'm sure you'd see a similar association with low marriage rates.

Don't mistake the direction of causality, however: The decline of the traditional family caused the rise of same-sex marriage, and not vice-versa. It was America's embrace of the Contraceptive Culture -- detroying the natural connection between love, sex, marriage and parenthood -- that has made possible the radical triumph.

Gays did not do this. It was the God-haters, with the help of self-righteous fools who claimed to be religious even while they disobeyed one of God's original commandments: "Be fruitful and multiply." They thought they could embrace the Planned Parenthood lifestyle without consequence.

"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . ."
-- Romans 1:22 KJV

Mother's Day, the Planned Parenthood way! Declining birth rates mean an aging population. One of these days, we'll all be as gay -- and gray -- as Massachusetts, and they'll call that "progress."

UPDATE: Pundette says, "Move over, Mark Steyn." No, no, Pundette. It's more like, "Please link me, Mark Steyn!" BTW, Pundette is a mother of seven, and has an excellent Mother's Day linkfest round-up.

UPDATE II: Linked at Creative Minority Report and by Dad 29, who notes that my pro-natalist traditionalism is unusual for a Protestant. I get this all the time, as does Mark Steyn, who is Jewish and, indeed, one will find that nearly all Muslims share a similar attitude. (Dinesh D'Souza caught holy hell a couple years ago for a book in which he suggested that the Muslim world's anti-American rage is a reaction to the decadence of Western pop culture.)

The feminist-infested progressive Left would doubtless characterize this ecumenical pro-natalism as a function of the patriarchal phallocratic desire to oppress The Sisterhood. Rather, I think what accounts for the similarity of perspective is a skepticism toward the truth-claims of modernism. Confronted by the arrogant assertions of the elite consensus, from which dissent is forbidden, we skeptics detect the unmistakable aroma of bovine excrement.

The disciples of Progress look at tradition -- including the traditional belief that a large family is a blessing -- and see everything they despise as obsolete and unjust. The traditionalist agrees with G.K. Chesterton:

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

Once an intelligent person begins to question Progress in this way, once he starts wondering whether everything old is bad and everything new is better, he will soon discover evidence that contradicts the modernist truth-claims. At that point, he is likely to become a full-blown reactionary and, unless counseled by men of reason whom he respects, will soon be arguing for the divine right of kings or some other embarrassing anachronism. (The informed reader will smile in recognition of the hint of autobiography here.)

Extremism of one form or another -- and Osama bin Laden will suffice as an example -- is too often the result of the traditionalist's resentment of modernist arrogance. Being a Bible-thumping hillbilly myself, I have sometimes thought the Islamic radicals have the better of the argument with their "moderate" antagonists within the Muslim world. If the Koran is true, if Muhammad was a divine Prophet who spoke on behalf of the Almighty, then jihad against the infidels is the True Faith.

But please note the hypothetical; I certainly do not accept that Mohammed was an agent of divinity, except in the sense that the Babylonian conquest was an act of God. The Israelites were God's chosen people, but disobeyed him, and the Babylonian armies were thus the temporal means of chastisement. In the same way, one might say that the errors and unfaithfulness of the 6th-century church inspired Muhammad's ignorant anti-Christian theology, which from its beginnings in a rebellion of Arab tribesmen, advanced thence by conquest until at last Christendom rallied.

Students of history will find that the Christian world did not defeat the Ottoman Empire (in the 1683 Battle of Vienna) until after Martin Luther had struck the spark of Christian reform. Make of this what you will. The relevant point here, however, is that any crisis or tribulation suffered by Christendom must be seen as the chastisement of human failing, a call to greater faith and greater obedience to God's commandments.

God will not abandon us, if we are faithful and obedient, but if He desires to call us to repentance, He will work through means at hand, and we must pay attention to understand wherein we have failed.

PREVIOUSLY:

• 5/3: The Demographics of Dhimmitude
• 4/22: 'Forbidding to marry'
• 2/11: The taxpayer shortage

The Demographics of Dhimmitude

DEMOGRAPHIC CRASH

'Forbidding to marry'

Laura from Pursuing Holiness wrote a post at the Hot Air Green Room that inspired me to respond at great length:

Christians believe that marriage is an institution ordained by God, and every marriage is thus blessed. However, in ordaining marriage, God commanded man to "be fruitful and multiply." This commandment has never been repealed or amended, no matter what any Malthusian population-control fanatic tries to tell you. One trend that has undermined marriage has been the rise of the Contraceptive Culture, which celebrates sterility as the norm and views fertility as a pathology requiring medical prevention.
How many Christians have embraced this false -- dare I say, evil -- worldview? How many young Christian married couples use contraception because "we can't afford children now"? And how many married Christian couples have unwittingly subscribed to the Zero Population Growth ideal of exactly two children per couple? Did you know that surgical sterilization (tubal ligation) is the No. 1 form of birth control for American women? It's the "two and tie 'em" mentality: Have exactly two children, then get yourself surgically sterilized. . . .

You should read the whole thing.

UPDATE: In the comments at the Green Room, Anna writes:

My husband and I were married at 21. . . .
What galls me is the anti-child atmosphere nowadays. We have 3 kids (including a set of twins), and we'd love to have another. We aren't really in a position to have another right this minute, but the door is not shut. However, mention this to my (devout Lutheran) in-laws, and they rant about how they'll kill my husband if I get pregnant, and how they don't 'need' any more grandchildren. We even hear from other members of their church about how we're too young to have so many kids - how are we going to pay for college/cars/etc for not only them, but for ourselves. We’re 26/27! How is that too young? There are only so many times that I can retort with "We're old enough/it's our family/you can take out loans for college, but not for retirement!" before I have to run to the bathroom to cry.

Anna, once you understand that their criticisms of you are actually a defense of their own decisions, this anti-baby attitude becomes more comprehensible. People can always justify their own behavior, and people who embrace the Contraceptive Culture typically display these attitudes. Negative conceptions of others -- the "trailer trash" stereotype of large families -- are a defense mechanism to enhance their own self-concept.

Believing that their way is the only way, they must necessarily believe that, by marrying young and having lots of babies, you are dooming yourself (and your children) to misery and poverty. The "how will you pay for college" question is meant to be the ultimate "gotcha." My daughter's working her way through college. Next question?

UPDATE II: More wisdom in the comments (here) from father-of-five Larry:

I cannot count the number of times we have been unintentionally insulted by well meaning, self-identified Christians, asking if we know what causes that (pregnancy) . . .

To which I always answer, "Yes, and we're very good at it." That shuts 'em up quick.

The taxpayer shortage

(BUMPED; UPDATES BELOW) For years, pro-life activists have warned that abortion and the contraceptive culture were leading us toward a demographic crisis. At least a decade ago, Jim Sedlak of the American Life League was warning: "In order to turn things around . . . young people getting married have to be thinking of having four or more children."

Well, the crisis is now upon us. Today, Conservative Grapevine linked my reaction to Obama's Monday press conference:

Suppose a pipe-dream hypothetical: Somehow, this "stimulus" actually produces a sort of dead-cat bounce in the economy, so that unemployment is down around 5% again by 2012. Is that good? No, not really, because government will have produced that bounce by borrowing massively against the future in a society that's about to sustain a serious demographic shock.
The first Baby Boomers turn 65 in 2011, and every year after that will see more and more retirees going onto the Social Security and Medicare rolls. Even if we raise the retirement age, there is still the net drain of productive labor. The average 67-year-old can't produce goods and services as efficiently as the average 38-year-old and (due to certain legal decisions circa 1973) after 2011, we'll have a growing shortage of 38-year-olds and a growing surplus of 67-year-olds.
We are on the verge of a taxpayer shortage, you see, and what the Democrats want to do is take out a massive loan that will have to be repaid by a shrinking pool of taxpayers, who will be expected to support a burgeoning population of increasingly sickly Baby Boomer retirees.

Yet, even as America reaps the disastrous economic consequences of the Culture of Death, the misanthropic Malthusians continue to scream about "overpopulation." As I've said elsewhere, some people at least have the excuse of ignorance. Others are merely evil.

UPDATE: A 12-year-old pro-lifer speaks:

"I was stunned by how good this video is," says Cassie Fiano. (Via Melissa Clouthier, who isn't sure that 12-year-olds should be voicing their opinions on political issues.)

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin reports that House Democrats have reached a backroom deal on the "stimulus," excluding Republicans from the conference negotiations. Which is good news, because now they've given Republican Senators a valid excuse to filibuster the conference report. This "stimulus" abomination might blow up yet!

UPDATE II: Thanks to the commenter who informs me that YouTube commenters are saying vile things about the girl who made this video. You stay classy, "progressive netroots"!

UPDATE III: Welcome Ace of Spades readers.

UPDATE IV: Allahpundit:

[Y]oung talent in the service of a righteous cause deserves some extra publicity. Worth watching for the sheer precocity of the performance, which suggests she’s destined someday for Hollywood.

Destiny? Kind of a religious concept, eh?

UPDATE V: "She's more articulate than most people I know, and even our teleprompter president." Heh.

"[I]f this girl is this good at 12, just imagine what she’ll be like in high school and college. Politics is clearly in her future." Heh -- and once again, happy birthday, Sarah Palin!

UPDATE VI: Linked at JillStanek.com.

Imported poverty

Immigration has consequences:

Utah's Latina teens have an alarmingly high birth rate: They are nearly four times more likely than other 15- to 17-year-olds to have a baby.
The Utah Department of Health is releasing the report on Latino health disparities today as part of a series exploring the challenges facing Utah minorities.
It shows that while nearly 18 of every 1,000 girls ages 15 to 17 in the general Utah population had a baby in 2006-07, 66 of 1,000 Latinas had one.
The implications go beyond those teens' immediate futures. National data show Latina teen moms are more likely to drop out of high school than other teen mothers, and teen mothers are more likely to be on welfare. Children of teen mothers are more likely to live in poverty and have educational and social problems and are more likely to become teen parents themselves.

I've written about this seldom-acknowledged consequence of our immigration problem, but our political system can't address it, because any politician who opens his mouth about the demographics of teen pregnancy is immediately targeted as a racist xenophobic nativist bigot.

"Teen pregnancy," per se, is not the problem. As Maggie Gallagher has pointed out, the real problem is unwed pregnancy. Yet as a society, we spend millions to discourage "teen pregnancy," even while celebrating single motherhood (a subject that Ann Coulter addresses in her new book).

There is a cultural factor involved that nobody wants to talk about, even when you have 14-year-old brides being bartered for beer in California. And the fact that this story about Latina teen pregnancy rates is coming out of Utah highlights the unaddressed double standard. On the one hand, when the polygamous FLDS cult relocated to Texas, the Texas legislature actually raised their state's age of consent from 14 to 16, in order to outlaw the cult's known practice of marrying off young teenage girls. And yet Texas led the nation in teen pregnancy in 2004 -- and it wasn't because of fundamentalist Mormons, OK? Like I said, if Texas is going to stage a paramilitary raid every time a 15-year-old gets pregnant, they're going to need to hire a lot more SWAT officers.

Given the seriousness of our nation's demographic crisis, one could argue -- and I actually have argued -- that we probably need more teen pregnancy, and if it weren't for Hispanic immigrants, the U.S. birth rate would still be below replacement level. Yet while liberals demand that we spend millions of taxpayer dollars on teen-pregnancy prevention, they simultaneously demand that we have open borders, so as to import more teen pregnacy. And if anybody tries to talk about this in a realistic way, they're denounced by liberals as "hatemongers."

Given these contradictory messages from liberals -- unlimited immigration, good; teen pregnancy, bad; honest policy discussion, hate -- one must question either their sanity, their intelligence or their bona fides.

Childless cities

In writing a post on the demographics of Portland, Ore., Steve Sailer linked to this 2005 article about (relatively) childless cities:

Portland is one of the nation's top draws for the kind of educated, self-starting urbanites that midsize cities are competing to attract. But as these cities are remodeled to match the tastes of people living well in neighborhoods that were nearly abandoned a generation ago, they are struggling to hold on to enough children to keep schools running and parks alive with young voices.
San Francisco, where the median house price is now about $700,000, had the lowest percentage of people under 18 of any large city in the nation, 14.5 percent, compared with 25.7 percent nationwide, the 2000 census reported. Seattle, where there are more dogs than children, was a close second. Boston, Honolulu, Portland, Miami, Denver, Minneapolis, Austin and Atlanta, all considered, healthy, vibrant urban areas, were not far behind. The problem is not just that American women are having fewer children, reflected in the lowest birth rate ever recorded in the country.
Officials say that the very things that attract people who revitalize a city - dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary - are driving out children by making the neighborhoods too expensive for young families. . . .

Worth reading the whole thing.

Obama's population bomber

Yuval Levin points out that Barack Obama's science advisor John Holdren included in a 2007 speech a respectful reference to Paul Ehrlich's utterly discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb. He might as well have referenced phrenology or necromancy.

The Population Bomb -- named one of the worst books of the 20th century by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute -- began with one of the most infamously mistaken prophecies ever published:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.

Wrong. The mass famines never happened. World population, which was about 3.5 billion when Erhlich wrote that, is now about 6 billion, and humanity has never been more well-fed than it is today. Far from a population "explosion," what the world now faces -- especially in industrialized nations -- is a population implosion. In Europe, birth rates in recent decades have been disastrously below what demographers call the replacement rate (2.1 average lifetime births per woman) needed to maintain a stable population size.

Yet many people (Ted Turner notoriously among them), continue to pretend that Ehrlich's misguided warning that "mankind will breed itself into oblivion" was accurate, and to push programs based on Ehrlich's 1968 ultimatum:

We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out. Population control is the only answer.

To speak of population growth -- i.e., people having babies -- as a "cancer" reflects an almost genocidal misanthropy. That Obama would choose as his science adviser Holdren, a believer in such malevolent hokum, is a disgrace.

UPDATE: Via Memeorandum and Ross Douthat, I learn that I'm arriving a little late to this dance. John Tierney is all over the Holdren appointment, revealing that Obama's advisor was one of the "experts" consulted by Ehrlich in his ill-advised bet with the late Julian Simon. Reason magazine's Ron Bailey has even more on the consistently wrong Dr. Holdren.

One global-warming fanatic recognizes Holdren as a kindred spirit: "Obama is dead serious about the strongest possible action on global warming."

I hate to pick a fight with the Obama administration over science. After all, I'm hoping to get federal funding for my own research.

UPDATE II: Obama makes it official. And in his radio address, he declares:

"Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. . . . It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology."

This eye-rolling is giving me a headache.

Here's video of Obama's speech:

Chambliss and the growth factor

In analyzing Sen. Saxby Chambliss' impressive victory in Georgia -- he defeated Democrat Jim Martin by more than 300,000 votes in Tuesday's runoff -- it is important to understand where that Republican margin comes from. While liberals will try to explain Martin's defeat as a product of retrograde rural backlash, the decisive factor for Chambliss was his large margins in the prosperous, fast-growing suburban and exurban counties around Atlanta.

As usual for Republicans in Georgia, Chambliss piled up huge margins in the mega-suburban counties of Cobb and Gwinnett, beating Martin by nearly 50,000 votes in each. But Chambliss also piled up a combined margin of nearly 150,000 votes in nine "outer ring" exurban counties. Here are those counties, showing Chambliss' margin and each county's population growth rate (April 2000-July 2006) according to the Census Bureau:

County... Margin...Growth
Barrow......7,184......38.1%
Bartow.....10,948.....20.1%
Carroll.......6,642......23.0%
Cherokee...33,274......37.6%
Coweta......15,002......29.2%
Forsyth......30,624.....53.4%
Hall...........20,625.....24.4%
Paulding ....12,795.....48.9%
Walton.......12,681....30.8%

Please note that the margins are based on results available at 8 a.m., when 97% of precincts statewide were reporting, and the vote is not complete in all counties.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

1 in 5 women childless

New York Times:

Twenty percent of women ages 40 to 44 have no children, double the level of 30 years ago, the report said; and women in that age bracket who do have children have fewer than ever — an average of 1.9 children, compared with the median of 3.1 children in 1976. . . .
Suzanne Bianchi, chairwoman of the sociology department at the University of Maryland [said:] "The interesting question is, has it stopped? Is this it, or
will we see even higher rates of childlessness among future generations?"

(Via Hot Air Headlines. Full report is here.) Well, obviously, Dr. Bianchi, the trend will continue, and demographers estimate that by the time today's 18-year-olds reach their mid-40s, 1-in-4 will be childless. The cause of the trend is not mysterious: Fertility delayed is fertility denied.

Let me quote a 1997 study:

Median age at first birth increased from 21.3 to 24.4 between 1969 and 1994, and the proportion of first-time mothers who were age 30 or older increased from 4.1% to 21.2%.

What demographers refer to as prime childbearing age is 18-to-24. Fertility begins to decline by age 25, and by age 35, the likelihood of pregnancy is only a fraction of what it was at 18. By the mid-1990s, more than 20% of U.S. women were waiting until their 30s to try to have children.

The 1997 study found that 21.2% of first-time mothers were over 30 -- but it doesn't tell us what percentage of women tried to have children after age 30 and found they couldn't.

In reporting the Census Bureau data, the New York Times pretends as if the increase in childlessness were entirely voluntary. It's not. Advanced age is highly implicated in infertility, as are sexually transmitted infections (including chlamydia) that cause scarring of the fallopian tubes. The Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute has recently published Sense & Sexuality, a pamphlet by Dr. Miram Grossman that addresses some of the related health issues.

Fun with demographics

Here are some interesting Gallup numbers:

• John McCain leads by double-digit margins among all educational subgroups of white voters except those with postgraduate degrees, where Barack Obama has a double-digit lead.
• Black voters support Obama by a whopping 90% to 3%.
• In age subgroups, McCain's strongest support (47%) is among those 65 or older, while Obama's strongest support (59%) is among those under 30.
• White guys love them some Maverick -- McCain gets a 22-point margin among white males.
• Single chicks love them some Hope -- Obama gets a 29-point margin among unmarried females.
• Racist Democrats? McCain gets 14% of the votes of white Democrats.
• Whistling Dixie? Obama leads by double digits in every region except the South, where McCain leads by 10 points.
• Ruh-roh: Obama has a 6-point lead in battleground states.

And as of 6:52 p.m. ET, they still haven't posted the Gallup daily numbers.

Our Hispanic baby boom

Fox News headlines its story: "Teen Pregnancy Rate Hits 15-Year High." Bet dollars to donuts that this misleading angle will be repeated in dozens of op-ed columns blaming the rise on abstinence education.

But before everyone hits the panic button and buys into the Planned Parenthood propaganda, let me point out that the recent rise in teen birth rates is entirely a function of the increased Hispanic population.

The federal report that is the basis for the Fox News story doesn't mention this fact in its summary, but look at the statistics from the report:

Teen Birth Rates 2006
(Per 1,000 females 15-19)
White* 26.6
Black* 64.3
Asian 16.7
Hispanic 83.0
(*Excluding Hispanics, who may be of any race.)

Compare these figures to 15 years earlier:

Teen Birth Rates 1991
(Per 1,000 females 15-19)
White* 43.4
Black* 114.8
Asian 27.3
Hispanic 104.6
(*Excluding Hispanics, who may be of any race.)

So, since 1991, the teen birth rate for whites and Asians has decreased 39%, while the black teen birth rate has decreased 44%, but the Hispanic teen birth rate has decreased only 21%.

The report describes the demographic impact of the continued Hispanic influx:

In 2007, 57 percent of children were White, non-Hispanic, 21 percent were Hispanic, 15 percent were Black, 4 percent were Asian, and 4 percent were of all other races (Figure 1).The percentage of children who are Hispanic has increased faster than that of any other racial or ethnic group, growing from 9 percent of the child population in 1980 to 21 percent in 2007.

In other words, the proportion of U.S. children in the demographic group with the highest teen birth rates has increased 133% since 1980. So, despite 39%-44% declines in teen births among other ethnic groups, we now see teen births on the rise again. The change in the birth rate is not due to a change in teen behavior, but a change in teen demographics.

What these statistics make clear is that, if U.S. officials seriously wanted to decrease the number of teen births, they could do so merely by enforcing its immigration laws, since a substantial share of the current Hispanic population is here illegally.

As I've written before, however, I am not a "teen pregnancy crisis" alarmist, and view such alarmists with suspicion.

UPDATE: Jessica Grose at Jezebel reports that this story -- also reported as news Friday by CNN and Bloomberg -- is based on statistics originally released nine months ago by the CDC.

In praise of teen mothers

Having viciously mocked Jamie Lynn Spears as trailer trash, today's post by Richard Fernandez on the collapse of European fertility reminds me to be grateful for teenage mothers.

Fernandez links a New York Times article in which Russell Shorto seeks an explanation for Europe's demographic meltdown. Shorto speculates on why the United States, almost alone among industrialized democratic societies, now has replacement level (i.e., average 2.1 children per woman) fertility rates:

Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families.

There are glaring problems with that explanation. First of all, 37 percent of U.S. births are to unmarried women, which isn't the sort of data that the "conservative and religiously oriented" theory would require. Secondly, it's hard to explain higher birth rates on the "nature of American society," when the people making the difference are newcomers:

Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country -- over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. . . . Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births.

Do a demographic breakdown of U.S. births by ethnicity, and it becomes obvious that not every group is contributing equally to that 2.1 TFR:

Total fertility rate (2006)
White: 1.86
Black: 2.11
Asian: 1.91
Hispanic: 2.96
(Source: National Center for Health Statistics, see Table 1; the "white" and "black" categories shown here exclude Hispanics, who may be of any race.)

The Hispanic TFR is 59% higher than that of whites. What does that mean? While non-Hispanic whites accounted for 66.4% of the U.S. population in 2006 (source), they accounted for only 54.1% of U.S. births. Hispanics, who were 14.8% of U.S. population in 2006, accounted for 24.4% of U.S. births.

OK, so why -- beyond the mere fact of having more babies -- is the Hispanic birth rate so much higher? The explanation involves a demographic truism that Ben Wattenberg made famous: "Fertility delayed is fertility denied." Let's look at Table 2 of that NCHS report, shall we?

Birth rate age 15-19 (2006)
White 26.6
Black 63.7
Asian 16.7
Hispanic 83.3
(Birth rate is births per 1,000 females.)

The Hispanic teen birth rate is 213% higher than the birth rate for white teens. The higher birth rate of Hispanic teens is a major reason why the overall fertility rate of Hispanics is 59% higher than the white rate. And the higher Hispanic fertility rate is the only reason the United States is at "replacement" fertility.

In other words, while Russell Shorto of the New York Times suggests that "the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society" explains why we aren't following Europe's downward spiral toward demographic collapse, what he really should be saying is: "Thank God for 16-year-old Maria Lopez getting knocked up in the barrio of East L.A.!"

Now, let's refocus our attention on Europe's problem, shall we? Because it so happens that our "teen pregnancy crisis" mongers just love to compare America to Europe. Take a gander at this little item on "adolescent sexual health" from Advocates For Youth (AFY), where they report:

Teen birth rates 2001
U.S. 48.7
France 12.5
Germany 10.0
Netherlands 4.5

However, what AFY doesn't do is compare TFRs of those same countries:

Total fertility rates
U.S. 2.10
France 1.98
Germany 1.41
Netherlands 1.66

In other words, by making these invidious comparisons about teen pregnancy, the enlightened progressives at AFY are essentially urging Americans to emulate European nations that are on the path to demographic collapse. Teen mothers account for 10.2% of U.S. births. Subtract teen mothers (61% of whom are non-white) from the equation, and the American fertility rate would be lower than that of France.

Conservatives contemplating demographic trends, like Mark Steyn and Pat Buchanan, usually end up in a mood of Spenglerian gloom, issuing jeremiads about the impending apocalypse. In the optimistic, can-do spirit of Ronald Reagan, I say, "God bless Jamie Lynn Spears -- and God bless America!"

UPDATE 7/23: This has proved a surprisingly popular post, and I've updated with a new post, "Famous teenage mothers," you might also want to read.

'Children are expensive'

Peter Robinson offers an explanation of the demographic death-spiral of Europe:

Children are expensive, and they require a sacrifice of time and interest by parents. ... Prof. Thornton says Europeans are not reproducing because “the dolce vita lifestyle does not include children.” A Europe that is drawn to instant pleasure has little interest in investing in either children or the future of the Europe.

That's a major point, and might be a sufficient explanation if the demographic decline was only an upper- and middle-class phenomenon, but it's not. Probably the most startling cultural shift in Europe over the past 40 years is the disappearance of large families among the working class, where big broods were once commonplace. (If you've seen Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, you may recall the hilarious image of the Yorkshire woman with so many children she doesn't even notice the birth of another.)

Childlessness may be relatively rare among working-class and poor women, but it is no longer common for such women to have four or more children, as was quite customary in the past. The fact that the birth rate has declined sharply even among the European poor (and the trends are similar in America, even if the decline has not been so drastic) indicates that Professor Thornton's dolce vita explanation is insufficient.

Many other factors might be cited. The use of oral contraceptives -- "The Pill" was viewed with some moral skepticism back in the '60s and '70s -- has now become widespread, even among women raised in Catholic homes, and condom use has also become much more common.

One factor in declining birth rates that is seldom discussed is increased practice of surgical sterilization. In the United States, tubal ligation -- surgery that renders a woman permanently infertile -- is now the most common method of contraception in America. (You can look it up.)

Understand that most of the women who undergo tubal ligation already have children, and the fact is that the OB-GYN community actually encourages such surgery once a woman has two children -- the "two and tie 'em" mentality.

When my wife was pregnant with our twin sons (we already had a daughter), her OB-GYN tried to pitch her this way: "You know, if you want to get your tubes tied, it's cheaper to do it at the time of delivery and your insurance will cover it. If you wait until later and do it as a separate procedure, it's more expensive." My wife managed to maintain her composure in the doctor's office, but by the time she got home, she was crying: "It was like he was telling me I'm not a good mother and I shouldn't have any more kids!"

I resisted the urge to do what I should have done, but I guess the headline "Journalist Beats Local Physician Into Coma" wouldn't have been so good for my career.

The fact that such "helpful" advice has become standard practice typifies the kind of culture shift that underlies the demographic changes that Peter Robinson and Professor Thornton seek to explain. Fifty years ago, most women would have recoiled with horror at the thought of undergoing surgery that would render them permanently infertile. But years of careful work by the obstetrics community have steadily increased the acceptance of this practice. Once most OB-GYNs became active agents of the population-control agenda, it was hard to find an "expert" voice to oppose that agenda.

Of course, it's not just about OB-GYNs and contraception. The culture shift is everywhere. Young people, especially, seem to just take it for granted now that the maximum number of children is two. And since almost no one nowadays has four or more children -- you should see people's faces when I tell them my wife and I have six -- the possibility of having that many kids strikes most young people as some kind of science-fiction fantasy, like flying to Mars. They can't even imagine it.

So while I think that the dolce vita factor -- the desire for leisure and luxury -- has some role in the demographic decline of Europe, I think this problem is deeper, wider and more generalized in the culture. It took a long time for this anti-family culture to take root, and if it is ever to be uprooted, that too will take a long time.

Oh, one more thing: Children are not expensive, not really. The notion that children are massively expensive is rooted in certain modern middle-class conceptions of what is necessary to childhood.

For example, many people think that it is absolutely essential that their children be raised in an owner-occupied single-family detached home in a "good neighborhood" with "good schools." When our oldest child was born in 1989, we lived in a small $300-a-month rental home, and then moved to a $275-a-month apartment. Our next address, in 1992, just before the twins were born, was a house we bought for less than $33,000 in a blue-collar neighborhood. Then in late 1997 we moved to the DC area, where we lived in a 3-bedroom apartment for five years as our next three children were born. Then in 2003 we moved into faculty housing on the campus of a Christian school.

So, no, children are not expensive. What is expensive are the material expectations of the suburban middle class -- and screw all that. I'd rather have six kids.