Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Mohler on The Economist's Falling Birthrate Article

Here is a quote from Albert Mohler's editorial on the recent article in The Economist:

The bad news is that the girls who will give birth to the coming, larger generations have already been born. The good news is that they will want far fewer children than their mothers or grandmothers did.
Do they really mean what they say here? The fact that these girls have already been born is "bad news." The good news is that they are likely to want fewer children, offers the essay.
...In the end, the economic calculations and forecasts are less important than the moral concerns raised by this cover story. The assumption of the article seems to be that human beings are primarily economic agents, who should be moved into the workplace as soon as possible. This is a sadly deficient understanding of human nature and what it means to be human. The depreciation of family life (and specifically of motherhood) found in this essay reveal a great deal.
A society that celebrates a falling fertility rate is a society that is trading maternity wards for nursing homes. There is something very troubling and very sad about that exchange. Not least among the troubling questions is this: Just who will come visit and care for the aged when the aged outnumber all the rest?
Read the full article here.

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