American poet Carl Sandburg once wrote, “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” However, this view is not shared by doomsayers in the United States and Western countries who push “depopulation,” believing the world is overpopulated.
Their response to this “crisis” is to advocate for unhindered access to birth control and abortion. However, some people, such as business leader and billionaire Elon Musk, are raising the alarm about population collapse, saying that it poses a greater threat to civilization than climate change. Needless to say, this view is controversial. However, one needn’t agree with Musk’s prognosis to notice that something seismic is happening in our world.
Across the developed world, birth rates are plummeting. They have been for decades. They have dropped below replacement level, and still aren’t leveling out. In some cases, populations are already beginning to collapse.
Japan is perhaps the most extreme example. In 2022, Japan’s population dropped by over half a million people, marking the 12th consecutive year of population decrease. All signs point to an irreversible process—one that is only likely to accelerate with each passing year.
In a recent speech on the subject, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio arguably out-matched Musk in his apocalypticism. Japan, he said, is on “the brink of not being able to maintain a functioning society.” Something dramatic must be done, he said, to increase birth rates.
The only problem with this argument, however, is that it’s not true. Women aren’t welcoming as many children as they want.
However, there’s a tragic irony here. In my role as the leader of an international pro-life organization, I have traveled widely in the developing world. In many developing nations, roadways are lined with billboards advertising the latest, most-effective contraceptive methods. Television and radio ads pound home the message that welcoming fewer children produces greater happiness.
Typically, these ads are sponsored by Western-funded development organizations, e.g., the United Nations Population Fund, Planned Parenthood, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc.
In other words, at the very same moment when there’s alarm in the West over a demographic collapse, and Western women are confessing themselves unhappy due to a failure to meet their reproductive ideals, Western nations are spending billions of dollars imposing their “ideals” of fertility on the developing world.
Perhaps some women in the developing world welcome this “aid.” However, in my experience, many women are angry that wealthy, powerful foreign agencies and “philanthropists” view their fertility primarily as a problem to be “solved.”
In his monumental encyclical Evangelium vitae, Pope St. John Paul II compared these efforts to those of Pharoah who desired to control Israel by killing their first-born sons. Wealthy Westerners, he said, “are haunted by the current demographic growth.” They’re afraid of the fertility of poor countries, which represents “a threat for the well-being and peace of their own countries.”
So, the United States and other wealthy countries resort to what Pope Francis has called “ideological colonization.” That is, we impose our “values” on the developing world. Sometimes, we resort to outright bribery. Financial aid packages are made contingent on nations adopting population control policies, or promoting the values of the sexual revolution, whether they want it or not.
Such practices should universally be decried as appallingly condescending, at best. Instead, perhaps we should stop treating healthy women’s bodies as a threat and pause and listen to what many women say they really want: to be mothers.
Not only is there nothing wrong with that, but in creating the conditions in which women feel confident enough to welcome as many children as they say they would like, we’re also creating the conditions not only for happier women, but also for a healthier society with a bright future.