"The cradle of the Reformation has become the crib of secularism."

Albert Mohler brought yet another fascinating article over on his blog regarding the falling birthrate of Europe. It seems that a lot of people don't want the constant interruptions of their fun filled lives that are inherent with having children. As a woman who can rarely have alone time in a bathroom without being interrupted, I can appreciate to a degree, that mentality. Honestly, though, if my husband and I had decided to not have children, we couldn't have possibly known what we'd have missed. Lack of privacy aside, it seems that the declining birthrates of many nations are beginning to alarm a lot of politicians.

On a geo-political tangent, what will happen to Europe, should this childless trend continue? That is a question asked by Steve Ozment in The Weekly Standard. According to Ozment, "In Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, native birth rates barely leave a single offspring behind to replace its two parents. As a result, large and growing numbers of foreign workers--predominately Bosnian, Turkish, and African Muslims--have immigrated to Western Europe to work the vacant, or unwanted, jobs native Europeans now lack the manpower to fill. The economic and social costs of European reluctance to be "fruitful and multiply," as the Bible puts it, are high and going higher for Europeans. Denmark's immigrant population is only 5 percent Muslim, yet that 5 percent receives 40 percent of the state welfare budget, and those families are just beginning to grow."

The International Herald Tribune / Europe reported that "...Throughout Europe, women have delayed having children, or opted out entirely, as they have become more educated and better integrated into the labor market. But the free fall in births is most precipitous and most recent here in Eastern Europe, where Communist-era state incentives that made it economical to have children - from free apartments to subsidized child care - have been phased out even as costs have skyrocketed."


So, what the Herald Tribune reporter is saying is that the fall of communism, and its free daycare, contributed to the declining birthrates of some European nations? Who knew?

What I noticed in many of the articles I read today about this phenomenon is that the young women interviewed felt that they couldn't afford to have more than one child, because they then couldn't have it all... a fulfilling career, travel, and so-forth. We can blame declining European birthrates on the fall of communism, or the increased availability of good education and good careers for women, but it seems to me that my generation of parents dropped the proverbial ball by not teaching their own children, from young on, that children were to be desired, and that raising them was a fundamental part of truly living life. Could it be that the basic tenets of feminism have inadvertently caused the crippling or demise of care for seniors... many whom championed the hardcore feminist line in the 60's? Who will be left to care for them?