Taking the Long(man) View

Last week I referenced a piece by Mark Steyn on the potential consequences of falling birth rates in the West. Today, Foreign Policy offers a somewhat different and, from a conservative perspective, more hopeful analysis of the issue. Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation argues that since populations with more patriarchal views on family tend to reproduce at a higher rate than social segments with liberal or modernist views, societies will inevitably become more conservative. You cannot pass along values to children that you don’t have. Liberals are selecting themselves out of the social gene pool.

Longman says:

[In] the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of modern societies married and had children. Some had more than others, but the disparity in family size between the religious and the secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. Tomorrow’s children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents’ values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

This is a somewhat more nuanced and more developed version of the argument that James Taranto at Opinion Journal has been making for sometime now about what he calls the "Roe effect": people who believe in abortion have abortions; those that don’t, don’t. The net result is that every year there are more more people who are likely to oppose abortion rights and fewer to support that right. As Longman says, the ruling in Roe could very well turn out to be a Phyrric victory -- in more ways than one.