Want More Babies? Stop Needlessly Terrifying Pregnant Women

By Carrie Lukas
Culture of Alarmism

Western democracies face a growing problem. No, it's not the ballooning budget deficits, swelling entitlement programs, or expanding ranks of the permanently unemployed. This time the problem is what's not growing: Too few women are having babies to sustain the population.

European countries have long posted fertility rates far below 2.1 births per woman, the level required to replace the population absent immigration. The United Kingdom and France have relatively healthy rates of around 2 births per woman, but Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Austria all have fewer than 1.5 births per woman. The United States had been an exception in the Western world, but the fertility rate recently dipped to 1.9 births per woman.

Low fertility has enormous economic implications. Too few babies today means too few workers and taxpayers tomorrow, and a stagnant economy. World leaders know this, so have tried a range of policies, from tax breaks and cash payments to subsidized parental leave and childcare programs, to encourage procreation. Such efforts have had modest, inconsistent impacts.

Here's one idea that Western democracies ought to consider and it won't take a dime from their strained government budgets: Try toning down the alarmism heaped on expectant parents to make pregnancy and parenting more appealing. Sadly, too much of society seeks to scare would-be parents into believing that danger lurks around every corner for any child they foolishly bring into this toxic world.

The ocean of life: another Facebook Expat muses

By Mary C. Tillotson

h/t Laura for starting this conversation! And note: I'm musing here, not preaching, so if you want to stay on Facebook, I'm not judging you.

When I got off Facebook, a college acquaintance was seven months pregnant. I’m sure she’s had her baby by now. I haven’t seen photos, and I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl. Or twins, or a stillbirth, for that matter. I don’t have her email address, though I suppose I could ask around and find it without much trouble.

But she and I weren’t super close in college and haven’t gotten super close since, and if I never find out how her pregnancy ended, that’s okay. I keep in touch with some of my college friends, and one friend from St. Ignace (where I lived and worked after college before moving to Virginia), and that’s enough. With some of them, one of us will email a link to an article and we’ll get into a long email conversation about it (and the rest of life). With others, I exchange letters. One of my closest friends, we’ll forget about each other for a few months, play phone tag for a week, talk for a couple hours, then forget each other for another few months.

And that’s enough.

Like many in my generation, I’ve moved too many times and will likely move a few more times before we settle (if we ever do). Every time I move, I meet new people, and about the time I can’t imagine a routine that didn’t include these people, I pack up and leave town, off to another adventure. I graduated and moved; got married and moved; left the homeschool circuit and took a desk job. Or, back in my college years, the summer ended and I left camp or my internship.

Because She is a Person

By Rebekah Randolph
A Mad Tea Party

As I look at my beautiful little girl, I wonder what womanhood may come to mean to her as she grows up—how she will come to think of herself amid the frothing nonsense of our society. I hope she doesn't listen to American culture too much. Most of its messages about womanhood are terrible: you should try to be like a man. You should flaunt your body to manipulate men. You should shut up and do what men tell you. You should do whatever you want, because nobody cares.

I want her to know that she is valuable. But not for the reasons that the world plasters across its billboards, proclaims from its political rostrums, and teaches in its “enlightened” classrooms. Not because she is sexy. Not because she can do anything men can do. Not because girls rule and boys drool. Quite simply, because she is a person.

Michelangelo's "Creation of Eve" (Sistine Chapel)

Our daughter is a female person, of course, which is delightful for many reasons. However, her femininity affects neither her essential value nor her essential purpose. After all, when we first realized that our baby existed, we had no idea whether it was a boy or a girl. Why did we rejoice, then? Simply because a soul had been created. When I felt her first movements, I still didn't know but I praised God for giving us a child. No matter which way things developed, our joy would have been the same.

And so I don't want our daughter's primary identity to be "a girl." That is, I don't want her to tiptoe through life filtering everything through her gender, believing that she must be different in every way from men and that if she isn't, she has somehow failed as a woman.

Bringing humanity back to politics

By Mary C. Tillotson

I found myself back in the swing of full-time journalism, and now it's my job to pay close attention to the goings-on in the government, and to read lots and lots of news. Sometimes the most difficult part is sifting through the name-calling, the caricatures, the nonsense and distilling the actual truth of what's going on and why people believe it.

Let's take the issue of abortion, for example. That's controversial enough. If you make a statement one way or the other about it, either you approve of killing children or you're against women's health. From big-name liberal newspapers to conservative opinion journals to bloggers to average Joe on Facebook, many (not all) people are making this sort of claim all over. If you believe something else, your reasoning must be stupid because you're a complete and total idiot.

This is not how civilized people behave. This is not how civilized people treat each other.

Musings of a Facebook Expat

By Laura Christine
This Felicitous Life

I deactivated my Facebook account two years ago.  At first, the thought of getting off Facebook was terrifying.  How could I stand being so disconnected from everyone?  I hate feeling out of the loop.

But I knew Facebook was feeding too many of my baser instincts to judge, to compare myself to others, to pry into personal details that are none of my business.  Worst of all, I was not fully appreciating my daughters’ sweet, fleeting childhood moments.  Instead I was engrossing myself in the lives of people whom I did not care much about.  How does Facebook do that to us?

I really don't need to know everything going on in the lives of hundreds of people I barely know.  It’s nice that a person I went to school with but haven’t talked to in ten years just had a baby.  I’m misprioritizing, however, if I spend time reading about that instead of loving on my own babies, or instead of bringing a meal to a new mom who lives down the street.

Deactivating my account has been so freeing.  I used to know a lot about people.  Now I focus more on knowing people.  People are my vocation right now—primarily my husband and children but also my extended family and close friends.

Why I Went to College

By Catherine S.
Guest Contributor

courtesy Kevin Dooley, flickr

Last week, a friend sent me this article by Raylan Alleman, a conservative father who declares it is better for girls not to go to college. Alleman claims that college these days is expensive, morally dangerous, and academically disappointing, and that women can do better for themselves by avoiding it altogether and preparing themselves for their true purpose in life: marriage. Like any (or at least, many) college-educated woman, I immediately laughed it to scorn. However, as I mentally prepared my biting rebuttal, I came across other online reactions to the article, and I began to question my position. Anonymous snarky comments and my knee-jerk reaction only strengthen Raylan Alleman's original argument. Because I have a degree, I automatically know better than some man online, don’t I? Sadly, I’m the woman with the education, and yet I can't do any better than scream through cyberspace at a stranger. I reacted in an antagonistic, militant, feminist manner. This is why Alleman doesn’t want to send his daughter to college: because she will go to college and get her degree and fly her “educated woman” flag without having the initial decency to consider the opposite side of an argument, without being able to logically distinguish between an incorrect argument and a poorly-made one. Alleman has expressed his opinion with sweeping generalizations and what seems to be little knowledge of many conservative colleges across the country, but as a father, he has every right to express his concern with the dangers that surround a college-bound child.

That said, although I agree with his principles, I disagree with his points.

A Community Is Better than Experts

By Joy Pullmann

My three-year-old son learned a new word this week: Proud. I told him for the first time I was proud of him when he learned to ditch his diapers, all in three days. I'm not sure he understands what the word means--it's an abstract concept, after all, which is why he hasn't heard it before--but it was the best way I could think to express my approval.

My husband actually changes most of the diapers in this house, and makes most of the meals (we havesome role reversal going on because I'm currently the full-time breadwinner), so I wasn't as much relieved to get out of a big chore of mine as tickled pink my little boy managed to figure this out so fast. I mean, he went from peeing in his pants without thinking about it to marching himself to the bathroom at the right impulse, pulling pants down and up himself, doing his business, and cleaning up afterward. That was a lot to learn in six hours. But we haven't had an accident in two days (fingers crossed), and there were a few unintentional ones the two days before that.