ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Nov. 22 2007

Giving thanks for the next generation
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

More than 4 million American babies will celebrate their first Thanksgiving
today. As we stroke their cherubic cheeks and fuss over their tiny features, we
may imagine that their births matter only to the families they join. But in
graying Western nations like ours, each new bundle of joy is also a sign of
collective hope.

It was not always so. Three decades ago, population-control alarmists were
warning us to stop our reckless breeding, lest we overpopulate the planet.
Women pregnant with baby number three or four routinely endured scoldings for
squandering scarce resources on superfluous children.

Now demographers fret over a new problem: the birth dearth that is afflicting
industrialized nations, leading to labor shortages, declining tax revenue,
underfunded government safety nets, pension shortfalls and fewer active adults
to care for the burgeoning ranks of the elderly.

Since 1972, the world's fertility rate has decreased by roughly 50 percent,
from 5 births per woman to 2.6 today. By 2050, the United Nations predicts,
that rate will fall below 2.1, the number of births needed to replace
ourselves. In some 60 countries, births already fall below that threshold.

America's fertility rate of 2.09 births per woman falls just short of
replacement level. Coupled with the impending retirement of 76 million baby
boomers, it is cause for concern. Yet our fertility rate outpaces that of such
nations as Turkey, Australia, Canada and Japan. And it far surpasses the
European Union's average of 1.5 births per woman — an abysmal rate that has
reduced officials in several European countries to offering couples cash
payments for procreation.

The same trends that dampened birth rates abroad have affected America:
increased use of contraception and abortion, later and fewer marriages, more
educational and career opportunities that convince women to defer or pass on
motherhood and mass migration to cities where children are a financial
liability rather than a financial bonus. Immigration and teenage pregnancies
contribute to higher birth rates here, but experts say those factors cannot
fully explain America's greater fecundity.

Some demographic analysts have begun considering another explanation for our
fruitfulness: our faith. Studies show a strong connection between religious
practice and larger families. Religious Americans tend to have more children
and express more approval of large families than their secular counterparts,
and regions brimming with conservative churchgoers tend to boast more robust
birth rates than those where more secular and liberal attitudes prevail. This
link between faith and fertility helps explain the gap between birth rates in
religion-saturated America and those in more secular Europe.

Not all Americans find this explanation comforting. In "The Empty Cradle,"
author Phillip Longman warns of a "fundamentalist future" in which America's
pious progeny overruns the offspring of secular liberals. But faith-based
fecundity also can benefit even an intentionally childless secularist who
explicitly rejects the child-friendly and religious views that drive it, since
he can reap the rewards provided by more taxpaying citizens without making the
sacrifices required to raise them.

Of course, the most valuable contributions of America's faith-based larger
families are cultural and spiritual, not material. Their existence is a rebuke
to the hyper-individualism and materialism that have convinced many Westerners
that children are more trouble than they are worth. And the generosity of
parents who welcome children, even when time and money are tight, is a poignant
reminder that life's greatest joys are found in self-sacrifice, not
self-gratification.

As Americans gather today to celebrate faith and family, we should give thanks
for the many new faces around our nation's dinner tables and for the parents
whose willingness to nurture the next generation is a gift to us all.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.