OPINION:
Mother’s Day should be about more than cards and candy, flowers and fine sentiments. As we move into the desolate wasteland of demographic winter, mothers assume a role of paramount importance.
If humanity is to have a future, it lies with them.
The left can’t even say the word mother but instead prattles about “birthing persons,” so as not to offend the sensibilities of men who think they’re women but — how to put it — can’t deliver. Influencer Dylan Mulvaney can ruin the sales of Bud Light, but mom material he’s not.
Despite forecasts that countries like Japan and South Korea (with abysmal fertility rates of 1.3 and 0.78, respectively) could soon close up shop, and America — with significantly below-replacement fertility for more than a decade — heading in the same direction, the anti-human left still peddles its overpopulation delusions.
Author Paul R. Ehrlich is still trying to detonate the population bomb he wrote about in the 1960s. Climate czar John Kerry is still getting all Chicken Little over ice caps that don’t melt and sea levels that refuse to rise.
Harry and Meghan, the duke and duchess of “What’s Happening Now,” virtue signal by announcing they won’t have more than two children to sustained applause by the population-control crowd.
Having run out of ways to avoid confronting reality, in its May 4 issue, the pop-science Scientific American says that depopulation will be a boon for the ecosystem and will “help create a future with more opportunity” for everyone. But this is whistling past humanity’s graveyard.
What’s driving the birth dearth is no secret. People aren’t marrying. Those who do aren’t having enough children. A fertility rate of 2.1 is needed just to replace current population. America’s is 1.78 and falling. As a society, we are prioritizing careers, cars, vacations and IRAs — anything and everything over securing the future.
As a result, we are heading for a crisis few expected.
For the first time since the Black Death of the 14th century, sometime in this century, the Earth’s population will begin declining. Once it starts, the descent will become rapid.
Demographics will flip with fewer and fewer children and more and more old people. In the United States, the number of people over 65 will exceed the number under 18 in just 12 years.
Where will we find the workers to pay taxes to fund retirement benefits? Well before population decline begins, there will be severe shortages of essential workers.
Those who aren’t born today won’t have children of their own, resulting in a smaller childbearing base in each generation, beginning a downward spiral that could end in the end of industrial civilization, which Elon Musk predicted when he warned, “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble.”
And that brings us back to mothers. After decades of celebrating singleness and lives without children, it’s time to celebrate motherhood in earnest.
Mothers are an affirmation of life. Their praises should be sung not just on Mother’s Day but every day.
History’s warrior women — like Deborah, Boudicca and Joan of Arc — pale compared to the women who have the courage to have large families in an anti-child culture. In 2021, a writer for the British edition of Vogue asked if having a child is “a form of pure environmental terrorism.” It was a rhetorical question.
This is not the 1950s, when the value of children was taken for granted. Today, attacks on motherhood are ubiquitous.
Other passengers complain when mothers are unable to keep their children silent on flights. Parents of large families have told me they’re frequently accosted in stores by angry women who claim they are ruining the planet.
Childless millennials fume that they are paying for the education and health care of families with children. And who do they think will pay for their retirement when today’s children are grown and gainfully employed?
In Genesis, God speaks to Abraham of his wife, Sarah, saying: “I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”
From the mothers of today could come the researcher who finds a cure for cancer, the scientist who discovers an inexhaustible source of clean energy, the diplomat who ends a war or the writer who gives us a new way of looking at the universe.
Mothers are the gateway to tomorrow. Without them, there is no future.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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