Hopelessness and the Fear of Welcoming Children

For decades now, pro-life activists like Human Life International’s founder Fr. Paul Marx have warned that the real threat facing the world isn’t overpopulation, but rather underpopulation. 

In making this claim, such prophetic voices were going against the grain, to put it mildly. Their views were drowned out by a cacophony of voices proclaiming imminent and apocalyptic catastrophe if nations did not concentrate their resources on reducing the birth rate. 

The pro-life prophets saw the enormous energy that was being poured into disseminating this doomsaying overpopulation propaganda, alongside the massive investment in contraception and abortion and the promotion of a new sexual ethics based entirely on concepts of “freedom” and pleasure. They knew this would eventually catch up with us. 

They saw that the inculcation of an anti-life mentality at the very heart of our culture would eventually yield the rotten fruit of a hopeless and consequently childless (baby-less) society – a culture that would eventually find it difficult to replicate itself. 

The politicians and bureaucrats who had bought into the overpopulation hysteria were so focused on the apparent overpopulation problem of the moment that they couldn’t conceive of the possibility that in trying to “solve” this problem, they were, in fact, creating the conditions for a much worse problem down the road. 

How things have changed over the past few years! Now, one finds that the very same liberal publications, politicians, and bureaucrats who were most loudly proclaiming the end of all things due to overpopulation, are beginning to wring their hands over the numerous economic and social problems posed by the shockingly (to them) sudden drop in birthrates, and imminent population collapse.

Efforts to Raise Birth Rates Have Failed

Across the developed world, numerous nations have begun rolling out expensive social programs designed to increase the birth rate. Such programs offer all manner of incentives to couples to welcome more children, including generous tax breaks, access to low-interest loans, subsidized vehicles, and cash payments. 

This comes after decades during which many of these same nations poured trillions of dollars into “free” contraception and abortion. Some funded programs that flooded their schools with overpopulation propaganda and perverse sex education that emphasized sterility rather than the importance of marriage and family and the connection between sex and procreation. 

However, a sobering recent article in the Wall Street Journal recounts how these frantic efforts by governments of developed nations are falling flat. 

As the article begins: “Imagine if having children came with more than $150,000 in cheap loans, a subsidized minivan and a lifetime exemption from income taxes. Would people have more kids? The answer, it seems, is no.” 

The article goes on to note that the drop in birth rates “hit Europe harder and faster than demographers expected.” In fact, the drop hit so hard, that Europe’s population has already begun to fall and is expected to plummet by some 40 million people by 2050.  

At the political level, the response to the drop in birth rates has been to follow a similar approach used to combat overpopulation. They are attempting to use the power of the state to incentivize behaviors that could fix the new problem. But these efforts have, so far, failed to yield the desired result. 

As the WSJ reports: 

Europe and other demographically challenged economies in Asia such as South Korea and Singapore have been pushing back against the demographic tide with lavish parental benefits for a generation. Yet falling fertility has persisted among nearly all age groups, incomes and education levels. Those who have many children often say they would have them even without the benefits. Those who don’t say the benefits don’t make enough of a difference. 

This is true even in those nations that have poured the greatest number of resources into raising the birth rate. Hungary, for example, is often touted as a model case of a nation that is taking the demographic question seriously and is aggressively implementing pro-family policies that make it attractive for couples to have more children.  

Hungary has annually spent more than 5% of its GDP – more than its military expenditure – on programs to increase family sizes. And yet, for all that, the birth rate is currently sitting at about 1.5 children born per woman. This rate is higher than many other European nations, but it is well below the replacement birth rate of 2.1 children born per woman.

Why Don’t Incentives Work?

So, why are extremely generous government-funded programs making so little difference in moving the needle on birth rates? After all, on surveys, a significant number of couples point to economic struggles as a leading reason for why they are hesitant to welcome more children. Shouldn’t reducing the economic friction of having children induce those couples to have more children?

The answer to the question is summed up in a startlingly frank fashion by one young, Hungarian woman interviewed for the WSJ article. Orsolya Kocsis, a 28-year-old living in Budapest, told the paper that she realizes that if she and her husband had two children, they would immediately be able to buy a larger house, thanks to a generous government-subsidized loan program. 

“If we were to say we’ll have two kids, we could basically buy a new house tomorrow,” she said. “But morally, I would not feel right having brought a life into this world to buy a house.” 

While she is right that the ability to buy a house isn’t the best possible reason to welcome children, what her comment betrays is an underlying conviction that welcoming children isn’t a good and desirable thing in itself. The point of the government program isn’t to make it easy to buy a house. The point is to make it easier to welcome children (for which a house is needed). But she doesn’t want to! 

The problem may be that the assumption that couples often want to welcome children but are hesitant due to economic obstacles may simply be wrong.

The fundamental problem isn’t so much an economic one as it is a cultural (and, ultimately, a spiritual) one. As the sub-headline for a recent article in The Week put it, “America’s fertility decline is about more than money. It’s about a society that doesn’t like kids.” 

The author of the article, a young mom of one, lists a litany of anecdotes about how people she knows have expressed a visceral dislike of babies, which they seem to view simply as disruptive and unpleasant. The point of her article is to highlight how, as a culture, we no longer view children as normative and beautiful, but rather as an encroachment upon our free and easy adult lifestyle.

Hope Combats Underpopulation

As is so typical of our public conversation these days, the whole discussion about birthrates is notable for one glaring absence: any kind of deeper, spiritual analysis. When it comes to something as deeply human as parenthood, analyses that focus simply on external measures, such as economic or environmental trends, are going to miss the point. 

In reading through so many of the articles on the demographic winter, one detects a deeper, often-unspoken assumption, alluded to above. Many couples interviewed will talk about the economic challenges of welcoming children or express their fears about the environmental degradation of the planet and how welcoming a child might impact that. But what quickly becomes obvious is that, at the root, they simply don’t want to welcome children. Why? Because they are afraid. 

In recent comments, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, put his finger on the root of the problem. Responding to a question from the interviewer about the Holy Father’s concern about the low birth rate, Cardinal Parolin first responded by urging states to take proactive, practical measures to increase the birth rate. 

But then Cardinal Parolin pivoted his remarks, emphasizing the urgent need for the Church’s pastoral approach to inculcate the virtue of hope in people. “Without hope, without the deep conviction of Providence’s help in our lives, without this openness to the help that comes from God, every difficulty, though real, will seem magnified, and selfish impulses will have greater free rein to impose themselves,” he noted.  

There is a great deal of wisdom contained in these short remarks. The reality is that many couples clearly do not have hope, in large part because they lack any transcendent vision for their lives. Their whole lives they have been steeped in the fundamentally secular and individualist presuppositions of our culture, until they cannot even fathom that there might be an alternative. 

To them, relationships are fundamentally about the pursuit of self-fulfillment and a shallow sense of happiness. Furthermore, without any belief in a God or Providence, they assume that they must plan their lives perfectly in order to achieve this happiness. They must, to the greatest degree possible, expunge from their lives any hint of the unplanned or unexpected. They certainly must avoid all circumstances that might lead to unexpected suffering. 

As such, many couples simply cannot fathom taking the risk of welcoming children, just as so many couples can no longer bring themselves to take the risks of getting married in the first place. In both cases, they are terrified of the unknowns. They are terrified that, if they should meet challenging circumstances down the road, they will lack the strength to face them and to overcome them. 

Hope, ultimately, is a theological virtue. But without belief in a God, young couples are not able to receive this virtue. Their vision lacks the transcendent narrative that allowed generation after generation of our forefathers to accept risk as an inevitable part of life, but seen from the viewpoint of the Divine, only adds additional meaning to our lives. Yes, suffering may come, but “with God all things are possible.” Even the worst sufferings can be precursor to a new resurrection if they are accepted with faith and courage. 

Such is the energy that the religious worldview, and the grace of God, can impart. But in our spiritually bereft society, couples have been robbed of access to the spiritual riches that would give them the hope and courage to embrace uncertain paths, including that most meaningful path of founding a new family. And until the spiritual roots of this problem are addressed, it is highly unlikely that any number of generous government incentive programs will be able to thaw our demographic winter.