
world population
Pat Fagan
April 4, 2012
Pat Fagan
February 13, 2012
Yet, this tome is not the product of an opponent of abortion. Hvistendahl herself admits in the preface that she endorses abortion even though “the finer points of the abortion debate elude me.” She then resorts to this redoubt of agnosticism in order to withhold her judgment on a practice whose ramifications she lambasts on every page: “Since I refuse to venture a guess at when life begins, this is not a book about death and killing… but about the potential for life—and denying that potential to the very group responsible for perpetuating our beleaguered species.”
With this preface, thus begins Hvistendahl’s 300-page endeavor to elucidate the defining demographic dynamic of our day—the global paucity of women and its attendant social disturbances. She primarily investigates the effects of this demographic inequality in
Furthermore, Henrich et al. postulate that this paucity of women will be equally deleterious toward the women themselves: “the reduced supply of unmarried women, who are absorbed into polygamous marriages, causes men of all ages to pursue younger and younger women.”
Nicholas Eberstadt of The New Atlantis elaborateseven further upon the negative social effects of a sex selection-induced decline of women and applies them globally to say that “sex-selective abortion is by now so widespread and so frequent that it has come to distort the population composition of the entire human species.” Thus the pernicious trends identified in Hvistendahl’s book as sweeping the Asian subcontinent presents serious hazards for the future of the entirety of mankind. If the international demographic data is to be believed at all, one must confess that all is not well with the global practice of abortion.
Dr. Henry Potrykus, Senior Fellow at the Marriage and Religion Research Institute, has also done work on demographics and the future of the West illustrating not only the effects of abortion or sex-selective abortion, but the decline in women’s fertility in general. He finds that “[t]he peoples of the West are self-depleting because of the adoption of extra-marital sexual norms coupled with a rejection of fertility: Negative trends in the openness to marriage and the openness to children drive an exponential decrease in the generations to come in Europe.”
To address this decline in fertility, Potrykus suggests that society must re-adopt stable marriage between a man and a woman as a societal norm. Governments and cultures must reject the non-sustainable model of society that is devoid of religion but open to polymorphous sexuality and serial polygamy. Placing religion and family at the center of a culture is the only way to make it thrive.
Pat Fagan
December 2, 2011
By Anna Dorminey, Staff
New MARRI Original Research is out! “Marriage, Contraception & The Future of Western Peoples” shows that the peoples of the West are depleting because of their adoption of extra-marital sexual norms and simultaneous rejection of fertility. The generations to come will decrease exponentially as a direct effect of declining trends in fertility and declining desires and expectations to have children, both in the generation currently having children, and in future generations. This trend is of one cloth with the West’s shift in economic orientation from family enterprise to individualist labor activity, and its simultaneous movement from religious to secular social values. Remediation lies in re-adopting stable marriage as a societal norm and in rejecting the non-sustainable model of society, which discards religion, traditional sexual norms, and lifelong commitment, and replacing it with a less secular, more traditional, family-oriented life.
Pat Fagan
August 31, 2011
We all like to believe that, as unique individuals, we’re masters of our own destiny and originals in our own right. We may still cling to this privilege in the
Figures and chart: Caroline Berghammer, “Family life trajectories and religiosity in