This post originally appeared at https://wifamilycouncil.org/radio/needed_a_change_of_heart/
2025 | Week of February 10 | Radio Transcript #1605
Last week, the online Federalist, highlighted an article with this gut-wrenching title: “Pro-Natalist Policies Fail Because People Don’t Want Kids.” “What? People today don’t want children? Prove it!” I almost shouted out loud.
Sickeningly, the article went on to do just that, citing polls and research that show that around the world, including here in America, more people are saying they don’t want to have children—and the main reason isn’t the cost of raising a child, a lamentable reason in itself. The main reason is far more disturbing: “they just don’t want to.” To me, that’s the height of self-centered, even selfish, living.
For millennia, the innate human desire to have children was baked into our public policies and cultural expectations. It wasn’t until recently – within the last fifty years – that the notion of living an entire life without even so much as entertaining the effort to get married and raise children was an acceptable form of thinking.
Here’s how the Federalist article kind of sums up where we are, quote, “In the 14th century, the Black Death wiped out almost one-third of Europe’s population/ Nearly 700 years later, we do not face the peril of a deadly pathogen, but a malady in the human heart, which often no longer wishes to love and nourish posterity.” End quote.
Did you catch that? “A malady in the human heart, which often no longer wishes to love and nourish posterity.” That’s like a dagger in the heart of anyone who loves children and who understands their role in God’s grand design for humankind. And unsurprisingly, this “malady” has very real-world consequences with falling birth rates here and internationally, despite governments offering financial incentives for couples to have children.
Not having enough children eventually catches up. Right now, a sizeable number of colleges and universities in America have closed or are facing that possibility, in part, because the number of 18-year-olds has been declining and is set to decline even more soon dramatically impacting the ability of these institutions to stay financially solvent. Most school districts in Wisconsin are dealing with declining enrollments. At some point all of this gets reflected in the bigger economic picture with a reduced workforce and taxpayer base, at a minimum.
A number of other factors also contribute to a dangerously falling birth rate, at least in our country. For instance, more and more Americans are delaying the age of marriage. One hundred years ago, the average age of marriage was 24 for men and 21 for women. Today, the average age of marriage is 30 for men and 29 for women.
This decision, statistically speaking, puts significant downward pressure on birth rates, as married couples simply have fewer years left, biologically, in which they can have children.
Fifty years ago, the average woman gave birth to her first child at age 21 and a half. Today, the average woman has her first birth at age 27 and a half. In 1980, an average woman had 3.65 children; today, an average woman has just 1.6 children, well below the 2.1 children required for population replacement.
Did you catch that the average age of first birth for a woman today is lower than the average age of marriage for an American woman today? That results in what we call “bad fertility,” because babies born into these single-parent homes have a high likelihood of experiencing many pathologies, including poverty, low academic performance, run-ins with the law, addictions, and more.
Genesis 1:28 is very clear. God called us to marry, to be fruitful, and to multiply. He called us to have strong, healthy marriages, and to raise children within the framework of marriage. That results in “good fertility,” that which puts children in the very best situation to grow up healthy, well-adjusted, and productive.
Having and raising children is one of the greatest blessings of life, and it’s a necessary part of keeping a society growing and moving. We support all policy measures that encourage strong, loving marriages between a man and a woman and those that promote having children—either biologically or through adoption—within those marriages. But most of all what we need is a change of heart in people…a change of heart towards God’s plan for marriage and certainly towards children, whom God says are a gift of the Lord, not an inconvenience. They are a blessing, not a burden.
Wisconsin will be best served when Christians do as God tells us in Genesis 1:28: marry and be fruitful and multiply and multiply well.
For Wisconsin Family Council, this is Julaine Appling, reminding you that God, through the Prophet Hosea, said, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
Sierra John