It’s official. The U.S. birthrate sits at its lowest rate in a century. Last year (2023) 3.6 million babies were born in the U.S., where we have a total population of 335 million. In 1947, there were 3.8 million babies from a population of just 143 million. The conclusion is clear: The U.S. generated more babies in 1947 with 143 million people than today with 335 million people. Back in 1947, the US had 26.6 babies per 1,000 people, and last year it was just 10.7 babies per 1,000. That’s not a recession but a depression, a staggering fall of 60 percent, in just one lifetime.
Between 1947 and 2023, the US population grew 143 percent, but the number of babies born went down 6 percent. The rest of the new residents all came from immigration. Before President Joe Biden blasted open our borders and President Donald Trump’s appointees overturned Roe v. Wade, the U.S. aborted almost the exact same number of migrants as babies it aborted.
There’s something weirdly haunting about that, isn’t there? As if our country needed those people, and filled the vacuum the abortion machines had created by importing them.
What Good Are People, Anyway?
We Christians believe that human beings are more than animals. That is, we are animals, but we are more than that. By contrast, our secular counterparts seem to believe … well, a strange mishmash of contradictory things.
On the one hand, they claim that we are merely cosmic accidents of random mutation and natural selection. So human life isn’t fundamentally different from chimpanzee or dolphin life. We can strip rights away from impaired or inconvenient people, such as unborn babies or the critically ill, or even euthanize depressed people because we can’t figure out how to help them. But we must also grant rights to animals, ecosystems, and even rivers.
But at the opposite extreme, secular elites now also claim for us some of the attributes of gods. We can decide that we were born in the “wrong” bodies, and change our sex. We can hope to artificially enhance our consciousness via computers, maybe even to “upload” ourselves onto hardware platforms that will keep us “alive” for centuries or millennia.
Well, which is it? Are we trousered apes or incipient gods? We could demand of our opponents, “Pick one!” But they can’t bring themselves to see their own self-contradictions and incoherence. There’s a good reason for that.
The Maxim of Lucifer
The secular view of man seems to be driven not by evidence or arguments, but rather to consist of the systematic negation of ancient biblical truths. Whatever man is, he is not an amalgam of body and soul with God-given human dignity and moral responsibilities. They will argue against each tenet of Christian belief about the person, blithely unaware that their own beliefs can’t logically coexist in the same brain at the same time. Their ultimate impulse isn’t a rational one, or even an earthly one. They’re taking their cues (unconsciously) from principalities and powers, and their first principle is simple: “Non serviam” (“I will not serve”). It’s the maxim of Lucifer.
We can see this incoherence in the current anti-population craze, which is fed by the Climate Cult. If man were simply an animal like all the others, it would be very simple to determine how well he is doing: You’d look at the birthrate and life expectancies, and compare those to the death rate. If you’re a beekeeper wondering if the hives on your land are thriving or collapsing, that’s what you’d do. It’s what Jane Goodall does when she studies the apes she loves more than her fellow humans.
Likewise, if man were simply an animal, we’d see the rise of transgenderism as something like cancer, or a deadly mutation that threatens the species. When we see frogs in various ecosystems developing hermaphroditic genitals, we rightly get concerned that something nasty is getting pumped into the water. We don’t greet this development as a sign of liberation for the frogs from the suffocating “gender binary.”
So if the credentialed experts who claim to be our elites really believed in all the tenets of Darwinian materialism, they wouldn’t be shouting at us to cull our population — or making up new “genders” with each poorly conducted study.
“Curse God, and Die”: Worst Bumper Sticker Ever
No, the turn against childbearing and the embrace of depopulation comes from something profoundly prescientific, which can’t be derived from evidence or arguments. It comes from the fundamental decision that human life is a bad thing, that suffering outweighs joy, and that because our own lives are basically miserable, it’s not worth the effort to pass along the burden of existence to a new generation, period. The message of post-Christian culture is simple, and can be found in the Bible (on the lips of Job’s fake friends): “Curse God, and die.”
So when we look at plummeting birth rates all across the globe, we know as good students of biology that something is gravely wrong. Indeed, we could throw out every other indicator of wealth, well-being, and “happiness,” to rely on a single one: Do most people think life is worthwhile? If they did, they would pass it along. They won’t, so they clearly don’t.
Before contraception was widely available, our strong biological urges goaded us to reproduce even in hard times. But that genie’s out of the bottle:
The vast, compelling attractions of love and sex were given their strength precisely to drive us to do something hard and dangerous: to commit ourselves for life, to bear and nurture children. By cleverly splicing away the pleasure from the effort, we have done for sex what cocaine does for the brain. Now, modern men act like those rats that starve themselves in the lab, pushing the “pleasure” lever instead of the one that dispenses food.
We can hope to tweak social policy, to reward large families and stop enacting policies that make it harder to support and educate children. We can stop mass immigration designed to replace the existing population with foreigners borrowed from cultures less infected by post-Christian viruses. A mass influx of low-skilled aliens suppresses the wages of ordinary people, makes public schools unusable, and teaches American natives to feel like hateful oppressors in their own country. We can and should do the kinds of things that the government of Hungary is trying.
But ultimately no policy solutions are likely to make much difference. Either we rediscover faith in a loving, redeeming Creator who values human souls as good things in themselves, or we will see life as a miserable slog which is hardly worthwhile, which we’re certainly not going to break a sweat to replicate. Or as God tells us in Deuteronomy:
See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you this day, that you shall perish … .
We won’t just perish. We’ll want to. We’ll see it as an achievement.
Jason Jones is a film producer, author, activist, popular podcast host, and human rights worker. He is president of the Human-Rights Education and Relief Organization (H.E.R.O.), known for its two main programs, the Vulnerable People Project and Movie to Movement. He was the first recipient of the East Turkistan Order of Friendship Medal for his advocacy of the Uyghur people. Jones was an executive producer of Bella and an associate producer of The Stoning of Soraya M. His humanitarian efforts have aided millions in Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Ukraine, as well as pregnancy centers and women’s shelters throughout North America. Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream and the host of The Jason Jones Show. He is also the author of three books, The Race to Save Our Century, The World Is on Fire, and his latest book The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset. His latest film, Divided Hearts of America, is available on Amazon Prime.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.