Big Surprise for Mothers Day

The reality of Mother's Day in years past has been fewer American women giving birth and the prospect that the United States would soon join Europe in depopulating its continent. The European numbers are eye-popping. Whereas it takes 2.111 children for each woman of child-baring age to just sustain the existing population level, the old world is now down to a 1.5 population-replacement rate and trending further downward toward Italy's anemic 1.2 rate. In a few years, Europe will be half its current size and soon will be empty or populated by North Africans seeking better conditions across the narrow Mediterranean.

Something remarkably different is happening in the U.S. After years of declining population rates, American women are starting to have children once again. After moving down almost to the then existing European levels in the late 1980s, the American rate began slowly moving up starting in 1990. In the year 2000, for the first time in decades, the birth rate exactly hit replacement even for the U.S. European-American population, those with the lowest replacement rate. Preliminary data since then suggest the rate has been sustained over the following years. No one seems to know why.

Few have even noticed either the downswing or the upturn. Most on the left are still panicked that there will be a population explosion that will deplete world resources, missing the downturn in births completely. Those on the right, obviously, cannot believe that anything relating to the family or to the cause of human life could be getting any better. The few who have commented on the increase in births have attributed it to 9/11 and the patriotism and élan resulting from it. Yet, the trend started beforehand and the breakthrough of actually reaching replacement came at least one full year earlier. The author's guess is that after a whole generation raised in broken homes--with mothers (and fathers) more interested in work and additional income than babies --their own children have decided from personal experience that there must be a better way.

Running off to a glamorous job and leaving the messy and uncooperative infant to be cleaned, loved and disciplined by someone else admittedly appears to be the more logical choice for a rational woman. It is difficult not to sympathize with those trying to escape. Certainly, potential mothers have received encouragement from the "modern" women rights revolution and its stalwarts in liking homework to "sh-t work" and in decrying any family obstacle to seeking self worth or self-development. As early as the 1920's, Virginia Woolf had ridiculed the self-sacrificing "angel in the house" mother role and taught women the superior value of selfishness. By the 1970's, the lesson had been well learned and the birth-replacement rate plummeted. The Supreme Court followed by discovering a right to abortion to depress the rate further.

Divorce followed a similar progression over time. It was practically unknown before the suffrage movement in 19th Century America, with a fraction of one person per thousand obtaining a divorce in 1860. This rate grew steadily through the 20th Century, hitting a rate of 3.5 per 1,000 in 1970 (ten times that of one hundred years earlier) and increasing fivefold over the next decade to its peak of 5.2 per 1,000 in 1980. Yet, here too, something happened. Again, the year 2001 appears to be a critical juncture, as the divorce rate dropped back to 4 per 1,000 population. While this was a modest break at best, only back to the rate in 1973, that was a reduction of one-fourth from its peak. This was partially offset by a fifteen percent decline in the marriage rate but it was an overall decline nonetheless.

Not all of the demographic data show a return to traditional maternal roles. On the other side of the ledger, the number of women in the workforce with children under the age of six exploded from 37 percent in 1975 to 61 percent in 2002. Yet, most mothers only work part time. The proportion of children living with two parents continues its decline from 85 percent in 1970 down to 68 percent in 2002. Yet, again, while abortions increased from 13.2 per 1,000 population before the Supreme Court decision legalizing it to 21.7 per 1,000 in 1975--and then to a 29.3 per 1,000 peak in 1981--by the end of the century, the rate had lowered modestly back to the rate in 1975. While some negative trends continue, clearly something has been improving too.

Today, almost no one outside the cultural fringe directly denigrates motherhood, with the young especially preaching its virtues, if they do defer making the commitment. Even some delay may be a positive development, as many traditionalists have preached the benefits of a later, more nature decision. A majority of the population also supports a law or even a Constitutional amendment to enshrine marriage as between one man and one woman. Religious denominations supporting traditional marriage have boomed in membership relative to those supporting liberal manifestations. Religious activity generally among evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditional Catholics and orthodox Jews, has increased in recent years and even reported general membership and weekly attendance has remained stable for the total population since the nineteen thirties.

As Dr. Ted Baehr of MOVIEGUIDE® has documented, even anti-marriage and anti-traditional motherhood Hollywood has been tamed to a degree that did not seem possible in the 1970s and 1980s. The film moguls were only convinced to change because it was proved to them that more people would pay to see such movies, that is, that traditional roles and themes were more popular by the late 1990s. It looks like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ will be the largest popular success of any motion picture ever made, and by a wide margin. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin earlier noted in these pages, this production by itself has the possibility to energize more traditional values generally among Christians, still the vast majority of the U.S. population, and maybe others too.

The good news on traditional motherhood is balanced by the fact that television is still generally negative about motherhood, although some see a modest retreat from past extremes even there, and more and more children are left to fend for themselves for much of the day without parental supervision. One-third of children are brought up without two parents in the home at all. On the other hand, millions of mothers have decided to make a more than full time commitment by even schooling their children at home and even more arrange their work schedules to coincide with the hours their children are at home.

On this, her holiday, it is not possible to conclude that all is well with American motherhood today. But the fact that American mothers are now accepting the challenge of childbirth and that, as a result of these self-sacrificing decisions, the U.S. population is now replacing itself represents a demographic earthquake of historical proportions. This has the potential to turn the century-long culture war in the favor of children, and that would be an event of the greatest social importance.

Donald Devine, editor.