If science suddenly noticed that birds were laying fewer eggs, they would ring the alarm and warn of a coming bird-apocalypse. The assumption would be that humans were doing something to make the birds unable to reproduce. The same would be true of any species that saw its fertility decline. The starting assumption of biology is that all living things are built primarily to reproduce. That is the biological imperative. With one exception, a drop in an animal’s fertility must be due to some exogenous factor. That exception is humans.

In the West, human fertility rates have steadily fallen for over a half century. This is celebrated by our betters as the hallmark of human progress. Anytime the subject of fertility rates is raised, the knee-jerk response is to start hooting about women being more educated and having more options. The underlying assumption is that stupid people have lots of kids while smart people have few children. The implication of this is that the people who built Western Civilization were stupid, because they had high fertility rates.

The whole “women are more educated” argument is not really an effort to understand why fertility rates, especially white fertility rates, have fallen. Rather, it is an effort to not understand it. It is a deliberate distraction, a way of shifting the focus from a problem that cannot be addressed by the Left, whether it is the materialist Left of Europe or the spiritual Left on America. To even acknowledge that the purpose of women is to have children gnaws at the extreme egalitarianism that animates the Western Left.

To some degree, efforts to level off fertility in Europe make sense. There are lots of people on the Continent who do not always get along with one another. Generations of warfare pounded home the message that stable societies, respectful of national borders, is the way to keep the peace. Keeping fertility rates at something just above replacement was an understandable goal. In America though, that is not an issue. The country is mostly empty space with lots of room to expand. Americans should be breeding like Africans.

It really is an odd thing that has happened in America over the last fifty years. Starting in the 1960’s, motherhood became something close to a badge of shame with our cognitive elites. This rather quickly oozed into the upper classes and then the middle class. As a result, public policy has been altered to discourage childbearing. Just look at the hysterics from Progressive women anytime they do not get their way. They immediately start howling about how they will not get easy access to abortions and free prophylactics.

This came to mind when I saw a tweet by the left-wing political science professor George Hawley, commenting on the GOP tax bill. He linked to an essay he posted about public policy and fertility rates. For those familiar with this territory, the points he makes and the errors he commits are all familiar. France may have a TFR of 2.08, but the French people do not have that TFR. The invader population has rocket high fertility rates, but the French, well, not so much. Steve Sailer touched on one aspect of this in a Taki post.

A similar pattern, though less pronounced, is seen in the US. White fertility rates are below replacement, while black fertility is still above replacement. Although the homicide rates among blacks probably requires a different definition of “replacement.” Hispanics have the highest fertility rates. In other words, simply looking at TFR for a country that is slowly being overrun by a third world population will lead to errors. In majority white countries, the salient issue is not TFR, but white fertility rates, relative to the whole.

Putting that aside, we return to the original question. Two questions, actually. Is it simply that whites are choosing to die out or have whites simply wandered down a cul-de-sac, in terms of public policy, which is having adverse effects on white fertility? One way to tease this out is something that Steve Sailer did after the 2012 election. He looked at how white women voted, relative to their marriage habits. In places where white women can and do marry, stay married and raise children, whites vote Republican.

Another way of putting this is that where affordable family formation is highest, you get more families. Despite being run by a cult, Utah is a wonderful place to raise a family. It is like the set of Leave It to Beaver, but the size of a European country. At the other end, a state like Massachusetts is wildly expensive and hostile to family formation. Those who do choose to marry and start families, often move to other states. The decades long migration, north to south and east to west, has largely been driven by cost of living.

None of this answers the basic question. Is it crackpot public policy driving down white fertility or is some weird desire for extinction? The latter is impossible to know, so the prudent course is to assume the former is the correct answer. That is basic logic. This means any movement that is explicitly for preserving the nation’s racial character should promote public policies that are explicitly and overtly pro-family. That is the part of Hawley’s post that is correct. The GOP should be fanatically pro-family, not pro-business.

This especially holds for the dissident right. The alt-right is all over the map on public policy, because they get bogged down squabbling over aesthetics. Oddly, the best thing they could do, in terms of “optics”, is cast themselves as the extreme end of the pro-family spectrum. Redefining pro-women to mean pro-mother would go a long way toward rallying white Americans to their cause. After all, being for something always trumps being against something, even when the thing you oppose is awful. Positive always beats negative.