Our liberals are very much about keeping in balance with nature - which means that they’ll have a hard time figuring out how to respond to this:
A new report by the British charity ActionAid indicates that unborn baby girls are being disproportionately aborted in some areas of India, while significant numbers who live until birth are being deliberately neglected and left to die. In one area in the state of Punjab, there are only 300 girls for every 1,000 boys among high cast families, the report claims.
ActionAid joined Canada’s International Development Research Center (IDRC) to produce the Disappearing Daughters report, the BBC says. After interviewing more than 6,000 households in sites across five states in northwestern India, researchers found that the proportion of girls to boys was noticeably below the natural rate of 950 girls to every 1,000 boys.
In three of the five study sites, the ratio of girls to boys was under 800 per 1,000. Researchers found the ratios of girls to boys were declining fastest in relatively prosperous urban areas, leading ActionAid to suggest that the increased use of ultrasound exams may be a factor.
Though a 1994 law banned selective abortion based on the sex of the unborn child, many families still use ultrasound scans to detect and abort female children.
ActionAid says other outlawed practices, such as allowing newborn girls’ umbilical cords to become infected, have also contributed to the sex imbalance.
“The real horror of the situation is that, for women, avoiding having daughters is a rational choice. But for wider society it’s creating an appalling and desperate state of affairs,” said Laura Turquet, women’s rights policy official at ActionAid, according to the BBC.
According to the British medical journal The Lancet, about 10 million unborn baby girls have been aborted in the past 20 years.
This is what the Culture of Death and its handmaid, “pro-choice” brings - and there is no liberal argument against it, because if abortion is really a fundamental human right, then there is no grounds for arguing against any particular reason for having an abortion - including sex selection. On the other hand, if there is no right to an abortion (and there isn’t), then the whole thing is disgusting and will soon cause a catastrophic drop in population because if there are, say, only 500 girls for 1,000 boys, then there’s no way for even zero population growth to happen - down, down, down it will go (though a lot of liberals will be temporarily happy about this, given that they believe in the concept of “over population”…but once the tax base shrinks and the government can’t support liberals via grants, then they’ll start singing a different tune about lower numbers of people). India isn’t the only place with this problem - from what I’ve read, its even worse in China where China’s brutal and anti-human “one child” policy has cause such an imbalance between numbers of men and women that women are de-facto kidnapped in poor Asian nations and sold into marriage in China.
There is a need for balance and for keeping in tune with nature - but keeping in tune with nature isn’t about donating to Greenpeace and pretending that recycling actually does something for nature…no, its actually about keeping in tune with nature, including human nature. Human nature isn’t about greedily thinking only of our selves and considering unborn children as disposable - human nature is about living in a community and being willing to sacrifice for same, while at the same time having a massive respect for the rights of the individual within the community - including the unborn individual.
Tags: abortion, demographics, India, sex selection
June 25th, 2008
Interesting and rather alarming article over at First Things by Steven W. Mosher about the collapse of birth rates around the world - the article is written in the form of an argument between Mosher and a lefty who insists that the concerns about the brith rate are actually just racists worried there aren’t enough white babies being born, but as Mosher points out, the demographic winter is spreading rapidly around the globe:
The unprecedented fall in fertility rates that began in postwar Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every corner of the globe.
Take Latin America, for example. The image of the loving Mexican mamacita surrounded by a passel of barefoot children remains scratched on the minds of Americans, even when it has largely vanished in the dusty pueblos of Mexico itself. Government-enforced sterilization campaigns, along with simple modernity, have dramatically shrunk family size south of the border in recent years. When I speak to American audiences, they are invariably surprised to learn that the average young Mexican family now numbers no more children than its American counterpart.
But Central and South American countries, too, are seeing their birthrates fall. Most Latin American countries are now rapidly approaching replacement rate fertility, if they are not already there, according to the United Nations Population Division (UNPD). Women in Brazil, the largest South American country, currently average only 2.3 children. The inhabitants of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile are even less fertile.
Across the Pacific, China has become a byword for forced-pace population control. Since the early eighties, Chinese women have been allowed an average of only 1.7 children, a birthrate so low that by 2020 China’s median age will be older than that of the United States.
India’s de facto two-child policy is neither as well known nor as brutal as China’s. But this policy, in conjunction with simple modernity, has effectively brought the fertility rate down to about 2.8 or so. India is projected to reach replacement rate fertility in a decade or so.
The voluntary childlessness of the Japanese exceeds even the forced-pace population reduction of China’s one-child policy. With a total fertility rate of only 1.25, Japan is on the brink of a major demographic meltdown. Its population of 127 million has stopped growing and—if the birthrate continues at this low level—will soon begin to shrink at an alarming pace. A population bust, like an explosion, proceeds in geometric progression.
The old-age tsunami that is about to hit Japan will not spare other Asian countries. The Four Tigers—Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore—are already getting long in the tooth.
Wherever we turn in the world, we see the same general picture. The only seeming exception is Sub-Saharan Africa, where birthrates are still fairly robust. But Africa has another problem: It languishes in the grip of an HIV/AIDS pandemic, which is sending some nations, such as South Africa, into absolute population decline.
The latest forecasts by the UNPD show the number of people in the world shrinking by mid-century, that is, before today’s young adults reach retirement age. I am speaking here of the UNDP’s “low variant” projections—historically the most accurate—which show that the population of the world will continue to creep up until about the year 2040, peaking at around 7.6 billion people. This is only a fraction more—one-sixth or so–than the 6.5 billion that the planet supports at present. Then the global population implosion, slow at first, but accelerating over time, begins. We fall back to current levels by 2082 and then shrink to under five billion by the turn of the next century.
I first took note of this around the year 2000 - when I came across the “low variant” projection and noted that the global population in 2150 could be 3 billion people, less than 50% of what it is today. From what I understand, the “low variant” revolves around whether or not birth rates will continue to fall at their current rate - and since that time, I’ve seen no indicators of a reversal of the demographic trends. In short, the “low variant” does seem to be the way things are going - though we must always keep in mind that things may change.
But, of course, things won’t change just by accident - it took a consistent effort by governments and pressure groups to bring us to this condition, and it will take a similar effort to swing things the other way. In my view, we live in a pretty wrecked world - a century or more of leftwing influences have entirely destroyed the basis for civilization; and not just our civilization, but all civilization. That we still have a semblance of civilization is akin to the way the Romans had civilization in the late 4th century - only because the final crash hadn’t happened, yet.
We’ve bought a lot of lies over the past century - that we can in the normal course of events engage in uncommitted sexual liasons; that we can in the normal course of events divorce for the most trivial of reasons; that we can in the normal course of events consume massive amounts of pornography; that we can in the normal course of events use abortion and birth control to decouple sex from its procreative aspect; that we can in the normal course of events farm out the raising of children to day care and public schools…the net result of all this lying to ourselves is what you see in front of you: random school shootings; massive illegitimacy, serial divorce when people even bother to marry…and, most devastating, the lack of willingness to produce the next generation. And, by the way, how do I plead? Guilty - I bought the lie, too.
We can rebuild our world and reclaim our civilization from the ruins - but for us to do so, it will take a conscious decision on our part to stop lying to oursleves, and to start acting like real men and real women.
Tags: demographics, population decline
March 14th, 2008
Oh, sure, they talk and talk and talk about it - and throw in the obligatory, “we can’t explain US higher birth rate than Europe because Europe has more ‘family friendly’ policies”, but the answer to the puzzle is at the bottom of the article:
There are regional variations in the United States. New England’s fertility rates are more like Northern Europe’s. American women in the Midwest, South and certain mountain states tend to have more children.
The influence of certain religions in those latter regions is an important factor, said Ron Lesthaeghe, a Belgian demographer who is a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. “Evangelical Protestantism and Mormons,” he said.
And where is religious observation weakest in the United States? Surprise, surprise, surprise - its New England! Now, why do religious people have more kids? The story suggests that it is a function of ignorance, poverty and lack of abortion access - which are monmentally stupid statements to make. Its hope - hope is what makes babies. When you have a worldview which includes hope in the life of the world to come, then having babies is a way cool thing to do. As an aside, I’ll bet my fellow Catholics had a bit to do with this bump in child birth…and not just my hispanic brothers and sisters! All I can say is that we’re having baptisms at a rapid clip at St. John Neumann parish - baptisms of children of every imaginable ethnic group. This, of course, would be more true of observant Catholics than of nominal Catholics.
A civilization cannot outlive its religious underpinnings - Europe and Canada are proof positive that when you cut off a society from its religious roots, that society starts to die. While birthrates are slightly rising in France (where there is a very large and very fertile Islamic minority), birthrates elsewhere in Europe are collapsing…no hope in the world to come, no motivation to even continue the species. Its really as simple as that.
Tags: demographics
January 16th, 2008
