Where Three Or More Are Born...

...there is the key to demographic growth.

A while ago I came across this rather interesting study from Australia about why people have three or more children. A couple of very interesting statistics and trends (remembering that while fairly similar in cultural background, Australia is somewhat more liberal and less fertile than the US):

It cites another study with the following breakdown of who was having children from 1986 to 1996 based on a survey of women who were 30 in 1986.

By 1996 22% of these women (now 40 and so unlikely to reproduce further) had no children.
16% had one child.
35% had two children.
20% had three children.
7% had more than three children.

Now, of the children born to this group of women, more than 50% were born to the 27% of women who had three or more children.

Clearly, while the percentage of women having three or more children is small, their effect on the next generation is huge. Think about it. 27% of the population will be the parents of the majority of the next generation. While 73% of the population will have left behind a minority of descendants. Even accounting for children not following the cultural/moral/political paths of their parents, it looks like fifty years could create a huge change in a population base soley on who is reproducing and who is not.

Based on how important the women with three or more children are to the propagation of the species in Australia, this study sought to look at what factors were predictive of whether a woman would have three or more children. The study identified several factors that predicted whether a woman was likely to have three or more children:

1) Women who had their second child by age 27 were 3.8 times more likely to have three or more children.
2) Women who had not been in an 'other de facto relationship' (i.e. non married, live-in relationship) were 2.6 times more likely to have three or more children.
3) Women who said their first birth was unplanned were 1.6 times more likely to have three or more children.
4) Women who were Catholic were 1.6 time more likely to have three or more children.

It seems to me this gives us a pretty clear picture of the sort of women who are mothering more than half of the next generation in Australia:

Rather than going through a series of live-in relationships your typical mother of three or more married fairly young and had her children in her mid twenties through early thirties. Whether or not she uses artificial birth control, she has a less rigid approach to "planning" than the average woman, and her first child "just happened" not long after she got married. She's probably religious and quite possibly Catholic.

Now, there are two ways to look at this: The study essentially concludes that since early marrying religious women who have not had a previous live-in relationship are currently becoming less common in society, that Australia can expect to see fewer and fewer women have three or more children. In the short term, that seems to be pretty clearly the case. However, in the mid to long term, it may well be that what we are seeing here is the mechanism behind a social mores pendulum at work. As we work down to where a solid majority of children are being born to the minority of families with a more conservative religious and family ethic, the next two generations may see society in turn swinging back to a more generally conservative religious and family climate.

The Queen City

Because I know that you've been reading up on our vacation and have been thinking, "Gee, I really wish I could learn more about Cincinnati!", here is a site called Shall We Gather at the River? An Anti-Tourist's View of Cincinnati, Ohio. There is a page of the site explaining the origins of Proctor and Gamble's Ivory soap. My family lives just blocks from the old Proctor house, and when we lived in LA I directed a Christmas pageant at a small Catholic academy located right next to the Gamble house in Pasadena. Yet I use Dove soap... Obviously one's choices are not dictated by one's surroundings.

Seminarianalyzafying

Anyone wonder what seminarians these days think about? Well, here's a bit of blog from my favorite seminarian (disclosure: he ain't heavy, Father; he's my brother!) that ties in nicely to our theme here:

So I’m in the hotel room, watching a little thingy about little people. One of the dwarf women was asked whether she would consider having a child now that the technology exists to screen out the fetuses that have inherited the disabilities of the parent.
And what did she say? “At what point do we decide that a fetus has too many imperfections? If we screened out lives because they weren’t perfect, nobody would be alive.”

A very good point. Big wisdom from a little person. There is something I’ve been hearing lately that really disturbs me: this whole ‘quality of life’ thing. I’ll describe it to you as I know it: If a life is not worth living, it shouldn’t be lived. And its advocates will never leave it at that. No, they’ll tell you the worst story of a particular old fellow, wasting away, draining resources, wanting to die, because this particular obscures the flawed universal with which their argument began. But a particular cannot be considered without reference to a universal. It’s not that this shouldn’t be done, but that it can’t be done. If anybody figures out how, tell me and I’ll have a senior thesis.

Anyone want to help my brother out with his senior thesis? And in case you're wondering about the title of this entry, here's my brother's definition:

to seminarian-alize: to take something and comform it to the life of a seminarian;

to seminarian-aliz-ify: to take something and comform it to the life of a seminarian and make it much more complicated than it needs to be.

Tell Us What You Really Think

NARAL shows that liberals aren't in favor of promiscuity but rather health and strong relationships for young people by hosting (I kid you not) a "Screw Abstinence Party".




Can we haul this one out next time someone insists that chastity, faithfulness and morality are not exclusively owned by conservatives?

If one has the stomach to hear about it, Dawn Eden (currently converting to Catholicism) has done great work over the years reporting on the appauling stuff put out by people like NARAL and PlannedParenthood.

The Roe Effect, Redux

James Taranto has written again on the Roe Effect, the collision of demographics and abortion views:

The Roe effect, however, refers specifically to the nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion. It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents' values. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party--that is, Republican--than they otherwise would have.

I find his analysis fascinating, as this is a real demographic trend that has yet to be seriously addressed. There are consequences to population reduction, especially targeted reduction. Taranto points out:

More than 40 million legal abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973, and these are not randomly distributed across the population. Black women, for example, have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women, whose abortion ratio in turn is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Since blacks vote Democratic in far greater proportions than Hispanics, and whites are more Republican than Hispanics or blacks, ethnic disparities in abortion ratios would be sufficient to give the GOP a significant boost--surely enough to account for George W. Bush's razor-thin Florida victory in 2000.

Here's a question. If an activist group came across these figures and decided to protest the fact that black and hispanic women have abortions at higher ratios than white women, how would they wage this campaign? Would they demand that abortion be marketed more to white women? Would they cry "Eugenics!" (And they'd be entitled to, in light of Margaret Sanger's positions. Check out this article from blackgenocide.org.) Would they demand restrictions on abortion? Stuff to ponder.

My Father's House

At one point in our vacation after a delightful visit with old friends in the east of Ohio, I took the late night drive back to Cincinnati (you can tell it's my home town and not Darwin's because I can spell it). And though it had been years since I had driven that route and this particular evening everything was shrouded in a dense fog, I remembered much of it from the signs I could see.

As we drew nearer to town and the way grew more and more familiar, I was surprised at how much my heart leapt to see even the mile markers with the name "Cincinnati" on them. Someone was celebrating early; as I drove over the Ohio River at 4:45 on the morning of the Fourth of July, I saw a single firework explode. From then on, I knew the way so well I could practically drive it in my sleep (as I was very close to doing): downtown past the stadium, onto 75, then my exit, past areas where even the urban decay has urban decay, then to the neighborhoods where the stately middle-class homes of the last century have been subdivided once and again and allowed to slowly rot. From there up the hill to the working-class neighborhoods of the West Side (never to be confused with the East Side!) -- my old stomping grounds. And though I've not lived there for many years -- not ever, really, since the house was bought after I went to college -- I felt such joy as I drew nearer to the auld homestead and the neighborhood that I knew and loved.

If I was so delighted to come home to a house in which I never even spent much time, how moved should I be to move closer to the house of my Heavenly Father, and by encountering the signposts that point me on the way? "In my Father's house there are many dwelling places; otherwise, how could I have told you that I was going to prepare a place for you? ... You know the way that leads where I go." (John 14:2,4)

The Wood of the Cross

We returned from vacation late last night, and so it wasn't until this morning that we noticed that a portion of the fence between our back yard and the back yard of the neighbors behind us was hanging askew (perhaps blown over by the heat wave?). And it wasn't until this evening that we went out to fix it. Fortunately, Darwin could simply step over the fence into the neighbors' yard, because a) they're never home, and b) they're the sort of renters who don't really care what the place looks like. The posts of the fence are on our side, and the boards on theirs, so it was my job to brace while Darwin hammered.

I pushed against the post and grasped the tops of the boards, and I steeled myself (cringed, rather) at the thought of the rough wood vibrating under the blow of the hammer. Thank goodness, I thought, that none of my fingers were remotely in the path of the hammer. Then, of course, I thought of Christ laying on the cross, waiting for the first hammer blow. How many times did the hammer slip and hit his hand? And I found that if I held the fence firmly, with no trepidation, that the vibrations were lessened and the task was completed sooner.