Demographic Winter: The Fatal Fall of Fertility Worldwide – Don Feder

Don Feder examines Demographic Winter: The Fatal Fall of Fertility Worldwide and examines how that will impact our world.

Earlier this month, I saw the new Jurassic World movie – “Jurassic World: Dominion.” In the latest installment in the series, cloned dinosaurs come close to becoming the dominant life form on the planet. It’s hard to compete with creatures which are up to 40 feet tall, weigh 12,000 pounds and have a mouthful of gigantic teeth – even if they do have a brain the size of a politician’s.

There is a phenomenon scientists call an Extinction Level Event –or ELE—something which could wipe out humanity or radically alter life on Earth. This might include a comet hitting the planet, a super-virus, a nuclear war or a shift in the earth’s magnetic poles.

Thankfully, none of this is more than a remote possibility.

If you want something to worry about that’s real, think about Demographic Winter, which isn’t science fiction but science. It’s not something that could happen in the future. It’s something that is happening now.

Demographic Winter could be the greatest disaster of the 21^st century.

The science behind it is called demography which is the study of populations – their rise or fall. In the Northern Hemisphere, winter is a time of ice and snow – a barren landscape where nothing grows. Hence, “Demographic Winter,” which refers to the fatal fall of fertility worldwide. 

A nation’s fertility rate is the number of children the average 

woman will have in her lifetime. 

We start with the number – 2.1. For industrialized nations, that’s replacement-level fertility. In other words, the average woman must have 2.1 children during her lifetime to maintain population stability. She has to 

replace herself and a man. The .1 recognizes the fact that some children will never reach maturity to have their own children.

Fertility rates are falling fast all over the world. Africa is the only continent with above replacement fertility. Every industrialized nation now has a fertility rate below replacement – in many cases, well-below replacement. 

For the European Union as a whole, the fertility rate is 1.5. In some parts of the continent, it’s much lower. In Italy and Spain, it’s 1.3. Sometime in the next few years, worldwide population growth will end and de-population will begin – slowly at first, then (like a stone rolling down hill) picking up speed.

There was a time when if you talked about the demographic disaster in the 

making, you’d be accused of spreading pro-natalist propaganda in order 

to bolster the case against abortion. 

Now, even the establishment media is beginning to acknowledge reality, witness a story in The New York Times on May 24 of last year – headlined “Long Slide Looms for World Population.” The article conceded, “Toward the middle of 

this century, as deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to 

 fathom.” We’ll explore those changes shortly.

Elon Musk, reputed to be the world’s richest man and an entrepreneurial genius and space pioneer,  

says: “If people don’t start having more children, civilization is going to crumble.” 

He’s not being alarmist. Unlike most of the rich and powerful, Musk understands the reality of Demographic Winter, 

and the danger it poses.

When discussing Demographic Winter, here are a few facts to bear in mind:

• Worldwide, the fertility rate fell by almost 50% in less than 70 years – from 4.7 in 1950 to 2.4 last year. Let me repeat that for emphasis: The fertility rate – the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime – was cut almost in half in 70 years. Within the next decade or two, we will arrive at below-replacement fertility worldwide.

• In America, I was part of a generation called the post-war Baby Boom which started in 1946 and ended in 1964. In the United States, fertility fell from 3.5 in 1950 to 1.78 today – the lowest on record – and it’s still falling — from boom to bust, as they say.

• Japan, which has a fertility rate of 1.3, saw its population decline by 640,000 last year. By the year 2050, it’s expected to lose an additional 27 million people – or almost 20% of its current population. 

• Japan’s over-65 population is expected to increase to 38% of the total by the year 2065. The Japanese now buy more adult diapers than baby diapers. In May, Elon Musk tweeted that, “Japan will eventually cease to exist” – sooner rather than later, so it seems

• So many Japanese are dying at home alone, because there’s no one to care for them (no children or grandchildren), that there’s a business devoted exclusively to removing their remains. The Japanese have a name for the phenomenon. They call it “lonely death.” 

• You might say the sun is setting on the Land of the Rising Sun. During World War II, Japan’s objective was getting more land and resources for its burgeoning population. (Germans of the era called it “living space”). Today, that’s all a distant memory. A demographic Pearl Harbor is happening all over the country.

• Thanks to its insane, one-child-per-family policy – which included forced abortion and sterilization — China also has a fertility rate of 1.3. Last year, the number of children born reached a record low – 10.6 million, down from 12.2 million in 2019. That 10.6 million births may seem like a lot, but it isn’t in a nation of 1.4 billion. 

• The proportion of those over 60 in China’s population will go from 18.9% today to 39% by the middle of the century. China got rich; now it’s getting old.

• The People’s Republic began abandoning it’s one-child policy in 2016. Now it’s moving rapidly in the opposite direction – expect for racial and religious minorities, like the Uyghurs. Recently, it started limiting vasectomies. Some hospitals require proof that a man seeking the procedure is married and has children. Sadly, it all comes too late.

• Geopolitically, this makes China not less dangerous, but more of a threat to world peace. Like Russia, the People’s Republic knows the window of opportunity to achieve its territorial ambitions s closing fast.

• Due to declining fertility among traditional Europeans and immigrants with large families from countries like Turkey, Iraq and Iran, Europe will eventually become Muslim, probably sometime in this century. Thanks to Demographic Winter, this is to be the fate of a continent which once was known as Christendom. The European Parliament recently passed a resolution lecturing the United States on maintaining unrestricted abortion. Why not? Look at how well abortion has worked for the Europeans.

In “Game of Thrones,” the motto of House Stark is – “Winter is coming.” You’d better believe it.

This is where we are now – trudging into the snows of Demographic Winter. How did we get here? People didn’t just wake up one morning and say, “Hey, let’s stop having kids. That’d be cool!”

The roots of Demographic Winter are sunk deep in the barren soil of the Sexual Revolution, which first became visible in the 1960s, but whose origins can be traced decades earlier – perhaps all the way back to Antonio Gramsci and Cultural Marxism.

Pornography, premarital sex, promiscuity and perversion were all normalized. Abortion was legalized and then, in most developed nations, enshrined as a basic human right.  Consider the rage that’s greeted the disclosure that the U.S. Supreme Court may soon overturn Roe v. Wade.

First we were told we didn’t have to have children (that we could be fulfilled without them), then that we shouldn’t have children — due to something called “overpopulation,” which would lead to declining resources, accelerated climate change and, ultimately, starvation.

Cultural critic Professor Jordan Petersen says: “There’s going to be a terrible shortage of young people…there is nothing more implicitly genocidal than the idea that the planet has too many people on it. I’ve seen people shaming others out of having children. It’s unbelievable.”

By the way, while population controllers lecture us about it, no one actually knows what overpopulation is. If there are too many people in the world today, how many should there be – and on what basis is the calculation made? Some say we’re running out of natural resources and land. And yet new methods of agriculture with higher crop yields (like the Green Revolution of the 1970s), and new, more efficient methods of extracting resources (like fracking) — are being discovered all the time.

In 1980, free-market futurist Julian Simon and neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich made a bet — based on Ehrlich’s prediction that rising population will make resources more scarce, hence, more expensive. They picked five metals in quantities which were then worth $1,000. If the inflation-adjusted cost went up after 10 years, Simon would pay Ehrlich the difference. On the other hand, if the price went down, because the metals were more abundant, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ten year later, Ehrlich sent a check for $576.07 to Simon.

Again, there’s that all-important question: How did we get here? 

Thanks to the Sexual Revolution, in a few decades, starting in the 1960s, three millennia of Judeo-Christian civilization were erased and we’re back where we started, with human sacrifice. First there was widespread contraception, then normalizing pre-marital sex, then no-fault divorce, then legalized abortion, then same-sex marriage and now transgenderism. It’s a short walk from civilization to Armageddon.

• For the first time in history, just under half of the world’s population of child-bearing age uses some form of artificial contraception – much of it paid for by third parties including governments and employers.  Other peoples have become extinct — the Babylonians, Phoenicians, Etruscans and Aztecs to name few. But this is the first time a people have subsidized their own extinction.

• Worldwide there are 73 million abortions a year. That’s more than three times the number of military deaths in World War II – the bloodiest conflict in history — not spread over six years, but each and every year. In America, we are losing one million a year through legalized abortion. 

• Fewer and fewer people are getting married, and more and more who do don’t want children.

• In the United States, among those 18 to 29 years old (those in their prime childbearing years) 59% were married in 1978, versus 20% last year. 

• To confirm this, watch a few hours of commercial television. Count the number of commercials for diapers, car seats and toys. Now compare this to the number for pet products, retirement communities, in-home care and medication to treat a variety of ailments of the elderly. You’ll get the point very quickly.

• In a Pew Research Poll released last November, 44% of Americans ages 18 to 49 who don’t have children said they don’t want them.

• In the United States, by 2060 there will be more Americans over 65 than under 18. This means too few workers to pay for pensions and health care for the elderly. In other words, a demographic train wreck is heading our way.

• Taxes on young workers will take so high a percentage of their income, that they’ll revolt and shrug off the burden, or government will inflate the currency to such an extent that it will become practically worthless. 8% inflation will be a memory of happier times.

•  There will also be a push for the rationing of medical services for the elderly, along with legalized euthanasia. 

• Why do so many Americans want a life without children? Pope Francis provided a partial answer when he observed late last year: “We see a form of selfishness. People don’t want to have children. Maybe they’ll have one child and not more than that. And many couples don’t have any children because they don’t want any…. But they have two dogs and two cats.” The Pope   was excoriated for these comments. Truth hurts.

• Shmuley Boteach, an Orthodox Rabbi and the father of nine, writes: “A world that has lost its innocence has trouble appreciating beings that are innocent. A world that has become selfish has soured on the idea of a life of selflessness. A world that has become grossly materialistic is turned off to the idea of more dependents who consume resources. And a world that mistakenly believes that freedom means lack of responsibility is opposed to the idea of needy creatures who ‘tie you down.’”

Add to this, the population-control cultists have been wildly successful. 

This mania started with Thomas Malthus in the late 18^th century. An English economist, Malthus believed that population growth would always outstrip increases in food production leading inevitably to mass starvation, unless the herd was thinned by war. Starvation or war – quite a choice. No wonder they used to call economics the “dismal science.”

Malthus wrote his famous essay on “The Principle of Population” in 1798, before chemical fertilizers, crop rotation and mechanized farm equipment. Population alarmists have always been somewhat short-sighted.

In 1969, the Malthusian torch was passed to Paul Ehrlich with the publication of his book “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich, a Stanford University zoologist whose specialty was the study of insects, predicted mass starvation in the 1970s due to overpopulation. If you were alive then, you may be forgiven if you missed mass starvation, because it never happened.

Past failures never dampen the enthusiasm of the next generation of Malthusians who keep making the same crackpot predictions. In the meantime, their influence continues to grow. Like man-made global warming, cataclysmic population growth is resistance to reason and has evolved from theory to incontrovertible truth.

For more than half-a-century, governments everywhere have been fighting a war on families, led by International Planned Parenthood, The Sierra Club, The Club of Rome, Bill Gates, George Soros, the U.N. Population Fund and other misanthropic elitists. 

War is an apt metaphor, because the struggle against procreation always involves coercion. Under the auspices of totalitarian regimes or prodded by international aid-givers (like the U.S Agency for International Development), poorer nations have fought a bloody, if undeclared, war on fertility. 

Nations like Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh and India have forcibly sterilized millions of women. In Peru, under the Fujimori government, more than 314,000 women were sterilized in this small, mountainous country.

After crop failures following the disastrous war with Pakistan, then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi came to Washington in 1966 seeking aid to buy grain on the open market. As a condition, Washington required the Gandhi government to engage in massive population control.

Using police-state tactics, women were forcibly sterilized or had IUDs implanted. Lower castes were targeted. As a result, the number of vasectomies and tubal ligations in India shot up from 105,000 in 1966-67 to 1.8 million in 1967-68.

In the United States, Malthusian hysteria was abetted by the popular culture. 

One example is the 1973 movie “Soylent Green,” starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. 

It’s set in a dystopian future where the earth is so overcrowded that people sleep on the stairs of apartment buildings and que up to receive their weekly ration of a cracker called Soylent Green which, unbeknownst to them, is made from the remains of the deceased. Who can forget the end of the movie, where Heston runs through the streets shouting, “Soylent Green is people!”

 That was another population-control scare tactic. Reality is quite different. The world of tomorrow will consist of one where the earth is made up not of more and more people but fewer and fewer.

We can compensate for any shortage except people. 

Declining fertility is a downward spiral. Obviously, the children who aren’t born today won’t have children or grandchildren of their own tomorrow. Each generation will start with a smaller childbearing base than the last, until (as Musk predicted) civilization crumbles.

The world will grow older and older and move slower and slower. 

Modern technology requires robust population growth. With fewer and fewer to care for it, the mighty industrial engine we’ve built over the past two centuries will grind to a halt and rust.

With depopulation, where will we find the workers of the future? Who’s going to work on the farms and in the factories? Where will we get the essential workers – the police and firefighters, the soldiers, teachers, and caregivers? 

As our population shrinks, the infrastructure won’t shrink with it. We’ll still have the same farmland and factories, the same transportation system (roads, bridges and ports). What we won’t have are the people to work the land, operate the machinery, drive the trucks, repair the roads and do the thousand and one other things needed to keep society functioning.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the wolves howling in the background, as we race across the frozen wasteland of Demographic Winter.

Global population went from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in the year 2000 (now it’s 7.8 billion) – and the legion of Chicken Littles — following blindly in the footsteps of Malthus and Ehrlich — forecast the end of the world.

But look at the progress we made in the last century. 

In 1900, most homes were still lit by gas or candles. Most Americans still lived on farms. We went from the horse and buggy to automobiles, supersonic jets and rockets to the moon. Television, home computers and microsurgery became commonplace. The generals who dominated the last century weren’t Patton and MacArthur, but General Motors and General Electric.

From the industrial revolution to the space age, every advance in human history has been driven by robust population growth. But what happens when we begin running out of people? Then we enter what used to be called on Medieval maps terra incognita – unknown territory, which was often accompanied by the legend, “Here dwell monsters.”

Demographic Winter is a human tragedy in the making – and it’s not confined to the dismal science. To properly understand what’s coming, I urge you to read, “The Children of Men.”

Written by British novelist P.D. James and published in 1992, it’s set 25 years after the last child on earth is born, due to a worldwide plague of infertility. Because it’s a world without children, it’s a world without hope. Everyone knows that in a few decades, humanity will be extinct, and earth will be an empty planet spinning silently in space.

In “The Children of Man,” kittens have taken the place of newborns in human hearts. The Church of England even conducts baptism ceremonies for the tiny creatures. 

Women with frustrated maternal instincts buy expensive, realistic dolls which they wheel around in baby carriages. The voices of children are only heard on television and in recordings. There are mass suicide ceremonies for the elderly to save a dwindling population from the burden of caring for them. People await the end with a sense of helplessness.

The world of “Children of Men” is happening right now, but so slowly that few can discern it.

What’s the answer to the fertility crisis? How do we climb out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into?

To start, look at who’s having large families – traditional Catholics, evangelicals, Mormons and Hasidic Jews among them. The average Amish family has seven children. I’ve yet to meet a family with more than three children that didn’t have a strong religious orientation.

These are all people who have faith in the future. Faith in the future comes from faith in a higher power.

At the dawn of history, the first commandment given to mankind was, “Be fruitful and multiple and replenish the earth.” Every generation has to replenish the earth. Not if you feel like it. Not if it doesn’t interfere with your career plans or buying a vacation home. Not if you decide it won’t contribute to climate change. But be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, period. End of story. 

Later in the Bible, God urges us: “Therefor choose life that you may live, you and your descendants.” That’s fair. You choose life and you get life, including living descendants. You choose death – death by contraception, abortion, singleness and selfishness – and you get death: suicide by Demographic Winter.

To counter declining fertility, we need to take the following six steps

1.    Encourage people to have large families. Help them to understand that the future of humanity depends on each generation creating the next. It doesn’t happen spontaneously but requires commitment and forethought. When I speak to college audiences on this topic, I often tell students that nothing they can do, nothing they can accomplish in their lives, is as important as having children.

2.    Explain the benefit of marriage to the young – On every index (including health, happiness and financial security), married couples do better than their single counterparts. More importantly, the fertility rate reflects the marriage rate.

3.    Make it easier for families to support children — with tax incentives and other pro-natalist policies. Hungary has lifetime tax breaks and favorable mortgage rates for families raising more than 4 children. Italy now provides monthly allowances for children from the 7^th. month of pregnancy until the child turns 18. The Russian Province of Ulyanovsk – (yoo.lun.naav.shuh) 800 kilometers east of Moscow — has designated September 12 a Day of Conception. Couples are given the day off from work to do what comes naturally. Those who deliver – so to speak – 9 months later, are entered in a lottery to win prizes like SUVs.

4.    End abortion, now! Whether or not a pregnancy is intended, every child is wanted – wanted by God and humanity. Abortion is a curse, a blot on the land. Perhaps declining fertility is God’s way of saying: “Okay, you don’t want children, then you won’t have them.”

5.    Stop the culture’s war on men. Children require women who are willing to have them and men who are willing to support them – emotionally a well as financially. Men and women aren’t interchangeable parts. Each has a unique role to play in the family. This is the foundation on which childbearing rests. Feminists have spent decades making war on fatherhood, under the guise of combatting what they call the patriarchy. Unfortunately, it’s taken a toll. If you tell men they’re dispensable, that’s the way many will behave.

6.    Promote religion. When he was president, Dwight David Eisenhower said: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religion, and I don’t care what it is.” Liberals of the day said, “Oh, Silly, Old Ike. He says we got to have faith, and he doesn’t care what it is.” Not quite. Our 34^th president affirmed that our nation needs religion to hold it together, whichever religion citizens choose to follow. Governments everywhere must stop stigmatizing and penalizing faith. In America, we need to recall that the Founding Fathers said “unalienable rights” are endowed by our Creator. Humanity finds its future in the cradle and the cradle is rocked by the hand of religion. 

Having children can be frustrating and aggravating. But it’s the most important thing you can do in this life. It’s also the most rewarding. To paraphrase, “Jerry McGuire,” it completes you. It’s often said that your Mercedes won’t cry at your funeral. It also won’t help to ensure the survival of the human race.

To solve the problem of Demographic Winter – before it’s too late and the world freezes over — we need a renewal of faith. Therein lies humanity’s hope.

Thank you.

And now, a special announcement. 

Ladies and gentlemen, the Ruth Institute has been deeply involved with the fertility crisis for the last three years. I spoke on the issue at a family forum in Kenya last year. On our webpage, there’s a Demographic Winter Resource Center with research, speeches and interviews on the fertility crisis. This is the third Survivors Summit which included a discussion of demography.

We’re in the process of taking this to the next level, with a new Demographic Winter Project. I can’t tell you at this time what that will include, but it will raise our level of activity in ways we couldn’t have imagined when we first got involved here.

We’ll keep you informed of future developments.

About the Ruth Institute

The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.

Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

To schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.

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