There is a report that appeared on CBN back in May 2014 claiming that the “Low Birth Rate is a Signal of Economic Woes Ahead” but is that report accurate or is it a myth? The report said:
The global birth rate still hasn’t bounced back after the massive recession of 2008. Now there are new fears that those lagging births will deal a new blow to the economy down the road. Economists say one-third of economic growth comes from more people joining the workforce than leaving it each year. The result is more producing, earning, and spending.
Russ Koesterich, chief investment strategist with Blackrock, the world’s largest money manager said:
For the first time since World War II, we’re no longer getting a tailwind….You’re going to create fewer jobs.
After the downturn in 2008, birth rates tumbled as fears grew. And births are still falling, especially in the world’s five biggest developed economies: the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. There were 350,000 fewer babies born in 2012 than in 2008, a nearly 5 percent drop in the birth rate.
Sexual Revolution and Demographic Winter
Another speech was given by Bon Feder in Moscow September 10-12, 2014 about the Sexual Revolution and Demographic Winter: Large Family and the Future of Humanity. He said,
The greatest crisis humanity will face in the 21st century isn’t global warming, or declining resources, or regional conflicts or a super-virus ravaging the planet or any of the other disasters – real or imaginary – that national governments and international bodies agonize over.
If current trends continue, we won’t run out of energy or other resources in the foreseeable future. We will run out of people. This global catastrophe will be the result of rapidly declining fertility, designated Demographic Winter.
The fertility rate refers to the number of children the average woman has in her lifetime. A rate of 2.1 is needed just to replace current population. In 1960, worldwide, the average woman had 5 children. Now, that number is 2.6 and falling.
Today, 59 countries with 44% of the world’s population have below-replacement fertility – in some cases, well-below replacement. Many developed nations have fertility rates of 1.5 or lower.
There are very few people who have taken the time to evaluate the issues that affect our sexual culture in a deep and meaningful way. So the question is: How did we get here? According to Don Feder:
The principal culprit is the Sexual Revolution – a phenomenon first manifested in the late 1960s, not coincidentally, about the time birth rates began to decline.
It was around this time that Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey (1894–1956), an American biologist and researcher, claimed that pornography was natural and healthy. His research is considered the first “scientific” look at sex that became the foundation of the sexual revolution, having a profound effect not only on the Western world but also the entire world.
His works are foundational to sex education in the West and have been instrumental in advancing the acceptance of pornography, homosexuality, abortion, and birth control throughout the world. Kinsey believed it was vital for children to engage in sex by age six before they picked up the “cultural taboos” based on “religion.”
Dr. Kinsey worked at Indiana University and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, collecting data about sexual practices and published two books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953.
In these books he claimed that all forms of sexual behavior were acceptable to both young and old. He argued that any sexual practice that was not harmful or dangerous to another person should be permitted. Of course this seemed very attractive without any desire to have children, or at least a sure way to protect against unwanted pregnancies. Kinsey said that 95 percent of American men were not sex offenders, and the laws should be set aside.
He worked to end public resistance to obscenity, pornography, pedophilia, and homosexuality. Sexual activity often leads to pregnancy but, in Kinsey’s view, there was no connection whatsoever between sexual activity and having children. People who wanted to enjoy sex without any consequences were very much interested in his views.
“Make Love, Not Babies.”
Birth Control Pill Container — Image by Beathan
By the 1960s sexual activity seemed very attractive without any plans for children. It was the time the hippies urged the world to “make love not war.” Don Feder further noted in his speech that:
The dogma of the Sexual Revolution – which has become ingrained social wisdom in Western nations – might be summed up as follows: 1. Sex is the most important aspect of existence. 2. When sex is consensual, it’s always good. 3. The primary purpose of sex is pleasure, not procreation or spiritual connection. 4. The primary purpose of life is pleasure 5. Inhibitions lead to neuroses and must be overcome. 6. Sex has nothing to do with morality or values and 7. Sex should not only be guilt-free, but free of consequences – hence contraception, hence abortion, hence the abandonment of marriage.
My wife and I were in Montreal a few years ago. In a store window, we saw a T-shirt that said “Make Love, Not Babies.” That could be the motto of the Sexual Revolution – except, it’s not even making love anymore, but what’s called “having sex.”
The prophets of the Sexual Revolution include “researchers” (and I use the term advisedly) like Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, pornographers like Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and feminists like Margaret Sanger, Betty Freidan and Simone de Beauvoir.
The effect of the Sexual Revolution on fertility has been profound, far-reaching and possibly irreversible. For the first time in history, just under half the world’s population of child-bearing age uses some form of birth control. By 2015, the global contraceptives market will generate an estimated $17.2 billion annually.
Generally, this is financed by governments, businesses or international agencies. Many species have become extinct. Ours may be the first to finance its own extinction. Worldwide, there are roughly 42 million abortions a year. That’s more than twice the number of military deaths in World War II – the bloodiest conflict in human history – except that, instead of a country’s soldiers killed in battle, these are casualties a nation inflicts on itself.
From a demographic perspective, we’re not just losing 42 million people annually, but also their children, grandchildren and other descendants down through the ages. We are, quite literally, aborting our future. The decline of marriage has affected fertility far more profoundly than contraceptives.
In the United States, in 2009, 41% of all births were out-of-wedlock. As these children mature (most in single-parent homes), they’re likely to continue the family tradition of not forming families.
Childbearing does not thrive in a climate of uncertainty. In 2008, in the U.S., 40% of all marriages ended in divorce. And fewer and fewer are marrying in the first place. In France, in 2010, more people began living together than married.
In 1960, 72% of all U.S. adults were married. By 2008 the figure had dropped to 51%. Among 18-to-29-year-olds – those in their prime childbearing years – 59% were married in 1960, compared to only 20% today.
Once a central reality of existence, marriage is now optional. We marry because we choose to, not because we ought to. Not surprisingly, fewer marriages result in fewer children. Just as the declining birth rates are the result of the Sexual Revolution, the later is a product of something called Cultural Marxism – a movement associated with Antonio Gramsci (he of the “long march through the culture”) Georg Lukacs, the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse.
Cultural Marxism was their answer to the failure of worldwide revolution after the First World War. Gramsci theorized that the family and the church gave workers a “false class consciousness” that made them immune to the appeals of Marxism.
The solution, then, was to destroy family and religion – and what better way to do that than to foster licentious (“free love” in the vernacular of the era), and a society oriented toward mindless pleasure, rather than childbearing, family formation and the search for higher meaning.
While there’s no proof that dramatically declining fertility is what Cultural Marxists wanted, if you think about it logically that’s the natural consequence of undermining faith and family and a highly eroticized society where family is viewed as an obstacle to self-fulfillment and children as a burden.
The Decline of Christianity
As we’ve already seen, in the 1960’s and the years that followed, there were numerous technological advances that occurred which played a part in showing that sex without procreation but used only in the context of recreation would be okay. Officially 1965 was the year that use of contraceptives became legal for married couples and in 1972; they were legalized for unmarried couples as well.
The following year in 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S.113, the court ruled 7-2 that a right to privacy under due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman’s decision to have an abortion. This divided much of the United States into pro-choice and pro-life groups. In the United Kingdom abortion was made legal in 1967. Since then 82% of abortions have been carried out the National Health Service.
Many are of the opinion that the reason why the church has seemed to have so little effect when it comes to stopping legal abortion in the West is because knowingly or unknowingly “contraceptive” practices used by Christians have robbed the church of her moral authority to speak against abortion.
Most Christians don’t know that their birth control is aborting their babies before they have time to even implant. Christian women are estimated to be just as likely as non-Christian women to be using abortifacient birth control methods. Dr. Bo Kuhar, founder of Pharmacists for Life International, estimates that between 9 and 14 million babies are aborted yearly in the U.S. by pills and IUDs.
In fact, as documented by Mary Eberstdt, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and who spent five years researching and writing her book Why the West Really Lost God, argues that family decline is a big part of why Christianity is declining in the West. She says,
The indifference to religion and the sexual revolution in the 1960s owed much of its force to the approval of the birth control pill, which would change relations between the sexes and the natural family as never before. The pill and its associated movement, the sexual revolution, contributed to the weakening of family bonds as no other technological force had done in history.
Surprisingly, most evangelical Protestants also welcomed the arrival of modern birth control technologies with appreciation and relief. Once the genie of the pill was literally out of the bottle, extramarital sex became easier and free without the immediate consequence of pregnancy.
Divorce rates increased as never before. The sex industry flourished with every woman who took the pill or related technologies, which made it less likely that men would marry simply for the sake of a sexual partner. The more people had sex outside of marriage, the less incentive there was to form marriages and families.
Ultimately, the pill would increase sexual temptation for many people, adding new and unprecedented pressure to what was already one of the most demanding jobs on earth: keeping a family together.”
Mary Eberstdt explains that although the Eastern Orthodox churches sided generally with Rome on the issue of contraception, most Protestant churches ended up following the same script as the Anglicans, moving one by one from reluctant acceptance in special circumstances, finally to a complete theological compromise.
Eventually, even the evangelist Billy Graham embraced birth control to cope with what he called the “terrifying and tragic problem of overpopulation.”
This is precisely why the change in doctrine over contraception has been used repeatedly by Anglican leaders to justify proposed changes toward homosexuality. For example, Robert Runcie, former archbishop of Canterbury, defended his decision to ordain homosexuals on the same grounds.
In a BBC radio interview in 1996, he cited the Lambeth Conference of 1930, observing that:
Once the Church signaled…that sexual activity is…pleasing to God in itself, then what about people who are engaged in same-sex expression and who are incapable of heterosexual expression?
Similarly, former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams observed:
In a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same sex relation of intimacy must rely on…either a number of very doubtful texts or a non-scriptural theory…without regard to psychological structures,” which is hypocritical to say the least.
The consequence was that it has weakened the churches demographically, and the injunction to be fruitful and multiply has resulted in graying parishioners and empty pews across the Western world. It has also weakened them financially, as the failure of worshipers to replace themselves has left those churches with an ever-shrinking base of contributors; and it has weakened the same churches in a wider sense of mission and morale.
The video below, which pertains to the times before abortion was legalized, demonstrates how much views changed during the sexual revolution and what women’s views were prior to it.
Don Feder concludes by explaining that:
We won’t find our way out of the forest of demographic winter until the Sexual Revolution is overthrown – its premises rejected, its prophets exposed and its dogma debunked. Ultimately, the Sexual Revolution is about death – abortion, contraception (preventing life from happening), sexually-transmitted disease, pornography and promiscuity, in place of marriage, fidelity and childbearing. To combat Demographic Winter, we must embrace a philosophy of life.
And as the Bible says:
I have set before you this day life and death, blessing and curses. Therefore choose life, so that you may live, you and your children.
