Is It Really About Sex?

I could be persuaded to think so, given the trends. Three articles from the past week lean in that direction:

Then today, there was a scattering of articles about the “pro-natalist movement,” which apparently has the Left even more incensed. Now, I don’t keep company with any leftists, so I can’t conduct a survey of my own. But if we stipulate that the movers and shakers of the Left regard the above with alarm, it might profit us in the Right to conjecture about the reasons.

There are several threads worth pondering: the trend away from urban residence; young Americans’ renewed interest in home ownership; the noticeably growing interest among young women in a traditional “wifestyle;” and concern about the sunken birthrate among native-born Americans, particularly whites. Most of those things are relevant to the most conservative of all orientations: a belief that America’s decline is not inevitable; i.e., that the future can be better than the present.

Youth and fertility are essential to a growing nation. Of course there will always be a place for us gray heads – someone has to tell stories about walking eight miles to school through hip-deep snow every morning – but growth requires increasing numbers as well as brisk capital formation and technological improvements in productivity. Everything starts with people, people start with birth, and birth requires young, attractive, fertile women who’ll marry, form families, and add to our race.

The record of history says that as a nation becomes prosperous, its birth rates will decline. This is not a new subject here at Liberty’s Torch. It’s certainly not a simple one. The number of influences that tend that way is considerable. But history only records what has been. If conditions today differ greatly from those of the past, the anti-natal trend might be reversed.

The most important difference between today and yesterday is that renewed confidence in the future. Confident people are more likely to reproduce than their opposite numbers.

While I think there are good reasons to believe that confidence in the future is swelling among young Americans, it’s not something one can put calipers on and measure. Granted that barriers to family growth remain. Granted also that counter-incentives to family formation remain what they’ve been for several decades. But those things are not infinitely powerful. Families do form and endure, despite youth’s tendency to live in the moment. Children are deliberately conceived and born despite the attendant inconveniences and expenses. Confidence has power, too.

It’s reasonable that the Left should oppose this trend. Leftism requires a kind of longsuffering despair: a willingness to surrender. Those who seek power over others find it difficult to subjugate confident, optimistic people; they’re far more likely to flip their would-be rulers the bird and get on with inventing the next uber-widget. Families of size give their adult members big reasons to fight for a better future, as well.

So campaigns that denigrate those “thin, fertile Republican women” and the thematically related pro-natal, pro-family currents are to be expected. The major media remain the boughten allies of the Leftist power-mongers. They’ll propagandize against anything that seems to favor growth. They’ll have allies in the Death Cults, as well, for reasons that require no explanation.

And God willing, the rest of us will get on with living, and creating more life: