Just as I stopped blogging with a discussion of how fertility and proselytism shape the ideological landscape with a Bloggingheads discussion as its centerpiece, I’m returning with another Bloggingheads discussion, this time between two liberals, Allison Yarrow and Harry Siegel, the latter of whom co-wrote a Newsweek article concerning the future of fertility for the United States:
Unfortunately, the discussion is somewhat one-sided in terms of common sense. Allison Yarrow repeats the widespread myth that women do not receive equal pay for equal work and seems to think that continued work by the elderly necessitated by economic conditions will fuel innovation in our economy. However, the discussion is an interesting illustration of how liberals approach the issue of fertility.
Siegel expresses what is probably the largest liberal concern when it comes to matters of fertility and that is how age demographics will affect the stability of the welfare state. Like many liberals, he also sees immigration as a possible way of softening the blow to state coffers that will come with the wave of Baby Boomer retirements.
As for an explanation for the declining fertility rate, the conversation is a bit murky. Siegel proffers the notion that as more and more women are educated, many of them decide to strive for careers and decide that childbearing is unappealing while also discussing pessimistic economic prospects for couples in recent decades. While to some extent this may be true, I think that a shift in cultural values is playing a more important role. This comes out in a statistic from Siegel than among young people who do not think marriage is obsolete (those that do are 44% of the population), only 41% think that children are important for marriage, down from 65% in 1990.
I don’t think that materialist factors should be discounted entirely. For instance, Yarrow mentions that Obama’s Affordable Care Act doesn’t include many pro-fertility provisions: that employers must provide women a place to breastfeed their children is the only one she could think of, while it does require that all healthcare plans include funding for birth control. However, it seems like the arrow of causation may be moving more from the a culture that devalues having children while promoting careerism and consumerism to lawmakers’ favoring of policies that benefit the childless than those that benefit those with children rather than the other way around. If public policy were the driving factor, then pronatalist policies in various European countries from Sweden to Russia would yield replacement level fertility, a feat they have yet to achieve.
An interesting aside is what the two of them consider to be “normal”. At one point, Siegel, while arguing that the children of high fertility groups are more “normal than their parents, brings up a woman whose mother was an unspecified famous country singer who is now a childless anarchist tattoo artist. While I understand that famous country singers are not an everyday occurrence, anarchist tattoo artist hardly seem to be more normal to me, but then again, I’m not a writer for The Daily Beast.
The context for this was the discussion of high fertility subcultures such as Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and Mormons, who Yarrow had proposed as a solution for the effect of declining fertility on the public purse. Siegel found this unpromising, in part because particularly high fertility groups often abuse the welfare system to fund their families, but more importantly because of what he saw as negative views on homosexuality and women. The irony is that while Siegel wants higher fertility, the last thing he is willing to consider is a cultural outlook conducive to that end.
A Wandering Learner 
I don’t care WHAT programs governments did or did not have in these past 40 years. I saw the demographic writing on the wall in the ’70s in Baltimore, Philly, Camden, etc., and there was no way I was EVER going to have children to turn over to the ideological camps of schooling and media, to be poisoned with anti-white hatred, dumbed down, constantly threatened with violence by degenerates, and their best hope to be refashioned into consumers and debtors in an urban hive full of engineered distractions.
So thank god for Planned Parenthood, not only in my own life, but also for keeping countless millions of degenerate beggars from being born to panhandle the rest of us.
Some say I chose “white suicide,” and some have hated me for it. But I don’t agree. I was taught not to breed slaves for usurping/invading masters, and if necessary to spend my life amassing a good estate to bequeath to my own people in places where they still are free. I was taught that free men and women do NOT turn their children over to slavers. And if that means using high IQ to make sure they don’t get born, so be it; there will be other seasons. For starters, once white people die back to a minority, and lower IQ and lower innovative people have their way with the world, there will opportunities for us. Think of it as an entrepreneurial approach to breeding.
Also in my home area, it was difficult to find a white male partner who cared about anything other than TV sports, cameras, cars, computers, or stereo equipment. The ones with college educations were loathsome creatures who had all the moral fiber of calf scours and didn’t mature till well into their 30s, by which time their sperm was exposed to every mutagen under the sun.
So yeah, I put my career first, I worked, I saved, I finally found a worthy partner (he had made the same choices!), I retired early to marry late, and he won’t retire so long as we continue to be more productive than the whiiny-ass hipsters all around me who consider their employers to be their nannies and daddies. I manage our savings, and we live on a small fraction of our income.
The attack on white men like my father–a highly skilled industrial tradesman who eventually turned to labor unionism in a futile attempt to protect his job and family before dying of asbestos–taught me everything I needed to know about what direction Reagan’s handlers were taking this nation and the world. I.e., wholesale and quantity over quality, pandering to the mob rather than the pursuit of excellence, emotion over reason, and “intellectual” “property” over the production of real goods.
As for younger people, who seem to expect life to continue to be a picnic paid for by older people as in the Boom/Bubble decades–come back when you’ve figured out how to put on your big boy pants alone, and also tie your shoes. My parents endured the Depression and World War II, and they never complained that someone owed them anything. Women who can’t hold down jobs because they aren’t given baby care and breast feeding rooms, for the love of fuck! The women in my family raised babies and children while building Liberty ships, providing elder care at home, holding families together while their menfolk were at war….
I had full responsibilities for a household, a family, schooling, and jobs when I was 19…but today on my street, within 8 houses, three have “re-nesting” sprogs IN THEIR UPPER 20s, who went into the world with unrealistic fantasies of adult life, in the early Aughts. They found out it was hard out there, and not nearly as comfy as the parental digs. So back they came. The truth is, they’re soft, and the tragedy is, they believe everything the libprog media tells them. So do their parents, who view them as the ultimate class accoutrement, and who do them no favors by not requiring them to go battle their way into the adult world.