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Headline from Newsweek:
Women Are Getting Sterilized After Donald Trump's Victory: 'Only Option'
Really? Apparently so:
It's not a procedure you'd expect a 28-year-old to be planning. But for Lydia Echols from Texas, having her fallopian tubes removed is the price she's willing to pay to ensure her reproductive rights.
I would doubt that Ms Echols was planning to give her fallopian parts much of a workout over the next four years, but, if I follow what passes for her logic here, because Trump won't let her abort her baby, she's sterilising herself. Happy Advent!
It is a melancholy reflection on the state of what we used to call Christendom that in this season of new life we are instead focused on the express check-out. On Friday at Westminster the House of Commons voted to legalise "assisted dying" for England and Wales. In both countries, deaths already outnumber births. The Anglo-Welsh fertility rate is at its lowest ever: 1.44 children per woman.
2.1 is the number needed to maintain a stable population: no growth, no decline, just chugging along staying the same. So 1.44 is quite a shortfall - and in almost every English city of any size (London, Birmingham, Manchester) most of those births are to non-native mothers. Which may be why Gatekeeper Farage has now declared that "if we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose".
Not so subtle subtext from Nigel: it is too late.
I keep getting asked what I think of this. If you mean putting the English state formally into the killing business, well, I think the NHS will prove at least as good at that as its Canadian cousins. If you mean the broader civilisational challenge, well, as I wrote twenty years ago...
Actually, I think I need to stop using that phrase. Not because it's faintly obnoxious and not really healthy for chaps on the hamster wheel of daily commentary, but because it may be better to formalise it and simply introduce The Twenty Years Ago Show to our line-up. But, just for the record, here is what I said in my Tuesday column for Britain's biggest-selling broadsheet daily, The Daily Telegraph, two decades back. Here is how I characterised the piece:
It ties together two of the weirder phenomena of our time - the obsession with 'climate change', and the total non-obsession with the fact that the peoples who built the modern world are going out of business. The fertility rates of Britons, Europeans, even Americans have cratered, and soon-to-be extinct peoples will have little say in the future of the 'climate' or of anything else.
But, because their homelands have desirable infrastructure, they will be taken over by others - as is happening before our eyes, so self-evidently that the obligation not to talk about it has become even stronger.
And here's the pertinent passage from December 2004:
What we do know for certain is that the krill's chances of survival are a lot greater than, say, those of the Italians, or the Germans, or the Japanese, Russians, Greeks and Spaniards, all of whom will be in steep population decline long before the Antarctic krill. By 2025, one in every three Japanese will be over 65, and that statistic depends on the two out of three who aren't over 65 sticking around to pay the tax bills required to support the biggest geriatric population in history.
How's that paragraph holding up exactly twenty years later? Well, it's not yet 2025, but here's The Japan Times just two months ago:
Japan's elderly population grows to record 36.25 million
That works out at, oh, 29.3 per cent of the public, so just a smidgeonette under one in every three Japanese. So you could have read a certain "niche Canadian" a generation back or waited for the "mainstream" media to catch up. And the Empire of the Sinking Sun's future is not as grim as the one Gatekeeper Farage implicitly predicts for the United Kingdom: Japan will at least die as Japan, or as some creepy transhumanist simulation thereof, as opposed to betraying its entire civilisational inheritance and becoming (Europe) an Islamic stan with better infrastructure or (America) the world's largest Latin-American favela.
You write these things in hopes someone who matters will notice, and do something about it. As I put it in that Telegraph column from 2004:
Does the impending extinction of the Japanese and Russians not distress anyone? How about the Italians? They gave us the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, Gina Lollobrigida, linguine, tagliatelle, fusilli. If you're in your scuba suit down on the ice shelf dining with the krill and you say you'd like your algae al dente in a carbonara sauce, they'll give you a blank look. Billions of years on Earth and all they've got is the same set menu they started out with.
But try and rouse the progressive mind to a 'Save the Italians' campaign and you'll get nowhere. Luigi isn't as important as algae, even though he, too, is a victim of profound environmental changes: globally warmed by Euro-welfare, he no longer feels the need to breed.
Two decades later, who will 'Save the Italians' from themselves? No region of the country, north or south, urban or rural, is anywhere near that 2.1 fertility rate. The nearest is Trentino-South Tyrol at 1.42 births per mother. Everywhere else is 1.3 or below, which is what demographers call "lowest-low fertility", from which no society in human history has ever recovered. Sardinia, which is one of the loveliest places on earth, comes in at 0.91 births per mother, which means its population is halving with every generation.
I explained all this twenty years ago, and in a bestselling book, which prompted various princes, presidents and prime ministers across the west to call me in to discuss it further. Which was mildly flattering. Except that, as soon as I'd left the building, they went back to doing nothing about it.
Two decades later, the peoples who built modernity are a generation nearer extinction. The good news is that one of the world's most influential men, Elon Musk, has now belatedly taken up the cause. I wish him better luck than I've had with it. But our entire civilisation is choosing "assisted suicide", and those women interviewed by Newsweek are voting with their foetuses.
I did that joke twenty years ago, too.
Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)
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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)