Why conservatives should care more about birth rates

The intelligentsia’s anti-natalism is spreading through society. Conservatives should be concerned.

According to recent data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), more deaths than births were recorded for the first time in 50 years last year. This story, like everything these days, was given the ‘due to Covid’ stamp. But look at ONS data and you see that the ratio between births and deaths per year has been consistently declining for at least a decade.

So what? What’s the problem?

First, there’s economics. If trends continue and deaths outnumbering births becomes a yearly pattern, there will be less tax revenue for the public services that keep us going. Living in an era where increased spending is becoming (or has become) the economic approach of the day, governments will be left with several anti-conservative policy choices in this scenario: raise the rate of tax people pay to cover the shortfall, or raise the population through open-door border policies.

But, apart from this, I think the problem is the Biblical principle that what is bad cannot produce good fruit. And that’s precisely it. This reduction of the birth rate is the ‘fruit’ of intrusive social liberalism, and its dogma that sex should not be aimed at producing the next generation, but is instead an activity to be engaged in by anyone who chooses to.

The progressive has demanded liberation of the body at the cost of the total domination of your mind. Pushing, for example, for relentless sex education at even younger ages. The complete obsession and promotion of social liberalism in every media outlet and public sphere seems to have even tricked those who identify as conservative that a conservative can support such things. 

And in the intelligentsia, we have the philosophical theory of anti-natalism, its founding principle being explicitly that simply being born creates a negative total value – the world is harmed from the very birth of an extra individual. Spend just five minutes looking into this phenomenon in any detail, and a specific family of philosophies raise their head, showing themselves to be the foundation: Kantian liberalism, utilitarianism, modern environmentalism. This family of philosophies are Christianity substitutes and replacements: Kantian liberalism wanting man to be intrinsic value without the ‘God stuff’, utilitarians thinking that intrinsic value lies in pleasure alone, modern environmentalism combining classic socialism and faux virtuousness under the pretence of ‘being green’.

I hope the mention of these philosophies makes the point: we have reason to be concerned with falling birth rates, and reason beyond Covid.