Praise, for the Christian, can never be an unmitigated pleasure.
For it must be taken with a large dollop of humility — castor oil
for the soul, as it were — lest the soul develop an inordinate
sense of its own worth. Like the pastor who, complimented on his
homily, responded, “The Devil was just telling me the same
thing.”
Attacked by the Enemy
Outrageous criticism, on the other hand, especially when it comes
from a far left, pro-abortion publication of secular bent like The
Nation, may be taken straight. The perverse pride that comes from
being attacked by the enemies of faith and reasoned discourse is
cancelled out by the criticism itself, like a poison that contains its
own antidote. So, more or less prepared to take criticism as veiled
compliment, I find myself reading the lead article in the March issue
of The Nation, entitled “Missing: The
‘Right’ Babies.” This begins with the eye-catching
sentence, “Steve Mosher is telling me about wolves returning to
the streets of European towns… . [during] the Black
Death.”
A Cautionary Tale
Nothing calumnious here. I did, over a lengthy lunch at a sunny Main Street cafe in Front Royal, Virginia, say this very thing — and much more — to the author, radical feminist Kathryn Joyce. In the context of falling birthrates in Europe, I told her a cautionary tale about Europe’s earlier demographic collapse — the one that was caused by the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages — that left the continent in a century-long depression. If the demographic winter that now holds Europe in its grip continues, I concluded, then not only its people bur its economies may be expected to wither and die as they did centuries earlier. A great depression will probably ensue.
So I said and Ms. Joyce reported. After this promising start, however, she gets nearly everything wrong. She ends, several interminable pages later, by implying that I and other abortion opponents are in a “panic for more white babies.” She is also upset that, during a recent speech in Poland, I encouraged the Poles to be more open to life by saying, “I want to see more Poles!”
Now of course I would like to see more white babies, whether from Poland or anywhere else. But, as Ms. Joyce should have known from our three-hour long conversation, I am partial to babies in general, regardless of how much pigment they happen to have in their skin. My view is that of the old Gospel song I learned at vacation bible school a long time ago: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight.”
Helping Women
Our effective opposition to coercive population control programs in China, Peru and elsewhere, which has benefited tens of millions of women in the developing world, left Ms. Joyce unimpressed. I guess she thinks that China is inhabited by Aryans.
The irony of Ms. Joyce’s attack on us is that population control programs — which we oppose and the Left supports — overwhelmingly target religious and ethnic minorities. They invariably lead to human rights abuses. At the same time they undermine primary health care and thus raise infant and child mortality rates. Isn’t the Left supposed to care about such things?
But her most amazing misrepresentation of our conversation concerns my call for pro-natal policies to help save social security and counter the coming demographic winter. This somehow became, for this feminista, a call for a world in which women are reduced to the role of helpless breeders. She actually suggests that PRI and other like-minded groups are intent upon out-reproducing secular humanists, Muslims, and any and all other groups. We Christians, she claims, are engaged in “a new cold war, a ‘clash of Civilizations’ to be fought through women’s bodies, with the maternity ward as a battleground.”
The Side Not Reported
Shame on Ms. Joyce, who should know better. In fact, I know that she knows better, because I told her so. We talked at length about my forthcoming book, Population Control: Real Costs and Illusory Benefits, in which I detail how birthrates are falling around the globe. Thus she knows this isn’t a white vs. yellow vs. black problem, but a human problem. She knows that it poses serious challenges to the survival of economies, old-age pension funds, and entire nations.
But she is also aware that the largely sterile readers of The Nation are unworried about the decline of the human family. Many, she understands, would welcome the self-extinction of whole populations in order to “save the kangaroo rat” or “stop global warming.” Others are filled with the self-loathing so typical of the Left. Still other readers, chief among them her feminist sisters, embrace abortion as a bloody declaration of independence at the same time that they regard pregnancy and childbirth with something approaching horror.
And so she passes over the reality of demographic decline in silence. Instead, she tells them the same sad old feminist fairy tale that they expect to hear; that PRI is conspiring to keep women — but only white women, mind you — barefoot and pregnant.
