The Czech mathematician and educator Jakub Marian put together a colored map showing fertility rates by European region. The data comes from Eurostat, administered by the EU. (This map was referenced, today, by Giulio Meotti at the Geller Report.)
In developed countries, 2.1 children per woman (or per woman who will live through the end of her reproductive life) is considered "replacement level" - the rate necessary to maintain a constant level of population, not counting migration.
As you can see, much of southern Europe - Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece - and some of Eastern Europe, have a fertility rate approaching only half of that. That the actual population of Europe is not shrinking more rapidly is due to two things - the fact that Europeans are now living long lives (delaying the shrinking effect but steadily raising the average age of the population), and immigration.
But things are actually much worse than the map implies.
Why are the French, Swedes and Brits having more babies? One might think that perhaps the French are romantic, the nights in Sweden are long and cold and the Brits, well, who knows, maybe pints of lager and sexy newspaper spreads make people more amorous or whatever.
But, in fact, the stats include all woman giving birth in the particular region, including, of course, the fast growing population of Muslim woman in, among other places, France, Sweden and Great Britain. By one estimate, at least 50% and perhaps as high as 70% of all babies born in the greater Paris area are now born to Muslim parents.
Though the statistical censors at the EU don't measure these things by race or religion, one suspects that if you only looked at the fertility rates of non-Muslim woman, many of the green areas would go purple, and many of the purple ones would turn eggplant.
Maybe the Italians and Greeks would like that.
Why European non-Muslims, or post-Christians or whatever you want to call them have basically stopped having children is a complex question. Obviously, if they were all traditionalist Catholics or Mormons or Wiccan fertility cultists, things would be different. But they're not. And neither were they in, say, the late 1960's, before birth rates suddenly started to mysteriously go south, so to speak.
Americanist ideologues such as myself are fond of saying that Europeans have a "death wish." But If you've recently met any of them, perhaps jaunting around your city, smiling with their cameras and travel bags, this is not obvious on the surface.
Perhaps we might say, instead, that Europeans have a life wish. They don't particularly want to create more lives, that's true. but they want to live their own current lives "to the fullest." You only go around once in this one, as Schlitz once said. Children and, yes, even marriage, often get in the way. Or so many believe.
Speaking completely selfishly, I'm glad we have kids. Their benefits (again, speaking selfishly) far outweigh their costs. We eagerly intend to have more kids (increasing our net benefit gain). My only regret is that I didn't have them sooner. (Although, the fact that if I had, I wouldn't have had them with the best wife and mother that I could imagine, means it's not really a regret.)
My own view, based somewhat on an economics book I read a few years ago, is that many people underestimate the value of children - not their intrinsic value, which is of course infinite, nor even their value to society or the world or whatever, but their value in terms of their benefits to the parents. And they also overestimate their costs - economic and otherwise - to the themselves. But if this is true, then why it is true, or more to the point, why it became true in Europe forty or so years ago, is also a mystery.
Ironically, it's the anti-population people who make the claim that it's Muslims who are living under a sort of false consciousness. They (the Muslims) are the ones having children because (implicitly, according to the anti-population people) they want to do their duty to Allah or (implicitly, according to the anti-population people), they're tapping into some sort of latent tribal memory that tells them they need to have enough offspring to work on the farm. Or whatever, etc.
Or maybe Muslims (implicitly and explicitly, according to right-wing people) just want to maximize their welfare benefits.
Or maybe, despite all the false and dangerous things that Muslims believe, they just never got the memo that having more than 1.1 child would ruin their lives.
Most Europeans have internalized that memo. And many, if not most Americans have bought into it as well.
Happy May Day.
