Douthat on Birthrates

One of the very few conservative columnists at the New York Times, Ross Douthat, has written an important piece on birth rates in the United States. His conclusion:

Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

This sounds exactly right. The west has become hedonistic and narcissistic in this day and age. Children are too much of an inconvenience now, requiring the great amount of money, time and energy that they do. There is little emphasis on looking to the future and deferring gratification. Whilst children are damn hard work in the early years they provide for more of a full life in one's twilight era. But this is irrelevant to those that live in the here and now. The same goes for abortion - its an inconvenience to live with the consequences of one's actions. The American economy is now loaded with debt and too weighted on the consumption side, producing little but receiving much from the government. Less emphasis on production means less wealth and freedom in the future.

Such are the times we live in now...