“Behold, children are the heritage of the Lord,
And the fruit of the womb is His reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty warrior
So are the children of one’s youth.
How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.”
Psalm 127:3-5
Solomon, who penned this psalm is universally renowned for his wisdom. Indeed, in western culture he is regarded as the wisest person amongst mortal man. That being so, it is strange that in the current era, which its elitist apologists claim to be the wisest and most superior of any generation in the history of mankind, Solomon’s views on the matter of the value of children, are so poorly regarded.
According to a recent publication of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, current indications are that more than one in four girls will go through life without having any children at all. Unless present trends are reversed, 28 per cent of women will forgo the bearing of children. At the same time, those women who do choose to have children are doing so later in life and are having fewer children than ever before. In fact, the current reproduction rate, 1.75 children per woman, does not produce enough children to replace our existing population and falls well short of that requirement, which is 2.1 children per woman.
The reasons for not having children, or of restricting the number to just one or two, are many and varied. One is the economic conscription of women into the workforce, as a result of the bipartisan policies of successive governments, both State and Federal, over the last thirty years. During that time, the single income family has been so consistently victimised by public policy, that it is difficult to draw any conclusion other than that there is an anti-family spirit at work in high places. At the very least, what it says is that governments don’t really value the Australian family, preferring to make pro-family noises, such as those in last week’s Budget, while steadfastly pursuing policies that erode the freedom of women and men to embrace parenthood and have the number of children they would like. In the Rocky River district, we know the value of working wives, with many a family farm dependent upon the salary that the wife is able to earn at the local bank, school, hospital, council office or other government or business enterprise. With many of these jobs disappearing from the rural landscape, it only makes things tougher and further restricts the economic and social independence of country people, thus driving them to limit the size of their families.
Another reason for the declining reproduction rate is the advent of feminism and the impact on public policy and popular culture of the views of feminist cultural warriors. It is the clarion call of militant feminism to convince women generally that individual independence, as opposed to mutual interdependence, is more important than family, that having a career is more important than having children. Traditional marriage is lampooned on television, while all other alternatives are glorified. Women who want to marry and have children are portrayed as being feeble-minded and lacking in character, ambition and quality of life. Ally McBeal is the new model for women; cool, chic, single, promiscuous, self indulgent, hedonistic, career minded, materialistic, cashed up and responsible to no one. In other words, chronically immature and unfulfilled.
These changing cultural values are responsible for another factor behind the reduction in birth rates, not just in Australia, but throughout the western world; that is abortion. One hundred thousand babies are aborted in Australia each year, or, to put it another way, we kill almost thirty per cent of our babies, allowing the other seventy per cent to live. Ironically, those 100,000 potential citizens who are destroyed have their places taken by our annual immigration quota of about the same figure. Thus, we can statistically measure a future Australia in which the Anglo-Celtic majority will become a diminishing minority, something achieved not by conquest, but by the folly of a generation of puerile and pusillanimous politicians, who have built their houses on the shifting sands of moral relativism.
It is an axiom of war that truth is always the first casualty. The same might be said of cultural wars and, in the cultural battles of the last quarter century, distortions and lies of Goebbelsian proportions have surrounded the public discussions on that most sacred of feminist cows, abortion. The only issue permitted in the debate has been the shonky one of the right for a woman to have control over her own body, although this point of view conveniently ignores the argument that, if a woman exercised that control in the first place, then there would be no need for abortions. Ignored altogether are other, more pressing truths, such as, for example, that abortions kill babies, that babies have no choice in the matter and that women deeply grieve after having an abortion.
This last matter has been the subject of a book released recently, written by Melinda Tankard Reist, a Canberra writer, entitled “Giving Sorrow Words”. In it she has gathered together the stories of over 250 women who have undergone abortions and has allowed those women to tell of their experience and suffering. It is a sad story indeed, but almost compulsory reading. It puts to rest the lie, propagated by the abortion industry, that abortion is a simple procedure, just like a tonsillectomy, and that a foetus is really just a “blob of tissue”. It also puts to rest the lie that women can deny their deepest maternal and emotional instincts as nurturers and givers of life, and pretend that what they have done is of no consequence and will have no impact. In the book, women recount the devastating impact on their lives after having an abortion, with guilt and unquenchable sorrow driving many to destructive lifestyles and attempted suicides. Truth will out.
There are many reasons why we should be concerned about the declining birth rate, or the ‘birth dearth’, as it has been called. Not the least of these is the impact on the demographic makeup of Australia. In 1901, just 4% of the population was over 65. In 1998, that had grown to 12%. In 2050, it will be 25%. With a shrinking tax base of younger income earners, who is going to pay for the care and support of these elderly Australians? A significant number of them, having disdained the bearing of children, will have no children to accept responsibility for them.
As governments tinker around with the moral fabric of the nation at the behest of morally bankrupt elitists, many of whom are expatriates, they might give some thought to the consequences of their folly. And so might the rest of us, for while it is our leaders who have sown the wind, it is the rest of us who will, inevitably, reap the whirlwind.
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