If only the damn liberals will have babies!

I read the NY Times column that had a polemical title: Are Liberals Against Marriage? 

I got ticked off.  I am a damn liberal and I have nothing against marriage.  I don't care if it is a heterosexual or same-sex marriage.  If people want to marry, fine.  If they don't want to, fine.  Isn't the whole point of conservatism to leave people alone and not interfere with their lives?

Conservatives want to interfere when they want to.  And, oh boy, there are lots of instances when they love to tell the rest of us what to do!

So ... I emailed the paper a version of the following:

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Ross Douthat argues that the downward trend in the fertility rate can be reversed if only the population were religious and conservative. Mr. Douthat assumes that conservative and religious societies favor higher fertility rates, and his entire column is woven around that assumption.

Evidence does not help his case, however. 

In the southern part of India from where I immigrated a long time ago, fertility rates have been considerably below replacement--at 1.6 to 1.7.  This region is not “liberal."  Instead, the more than 250 million in the five southern states, have high levels of religiosity, and with significantly low divorce rates. Yet, very few kids! 

The explanation for decreasing fertility rates comes down to a simple phrase that the conservative pundit Milton Friedman popularized--”Free to choose.”  If women, in particular, are free enough to choose, then, on an average, they choose to have fewer kids, or even forego motherhood entirely.

Ross Douthat should stop chasing the red herrings of liberalism, “out of wedlock”, and LGBTQ activism.

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If this topic interests you, here are a couple of posts from the past:

This from 2013, in which I wrote:

Tamil Nadu, where my people hail from, has fertility rates that are lower than the rates here in the US.  Americans, who are long used to images of too many babies in India, might find it a shocking revelation that we in the US have, on an average, more children than women do In Tamil Nadu, or in Kerala, or in Karnataka, or in .... These are not states with small populations either.  As this Wikipedia entry helpfully points out, Kerala's population makes it a Canada-equivalent. Tamil Nadu is like Turkey. With its low fertility rate, Karnataka is really like Italy!

From 2017, in which I argued that immigration will help counter low fertility rates:

As reported by the Pew Research Center, “were it not for the increase in births to immigrant women, the annual number of U.S. births would have declined since 1970.” While immigrants accounted for only one in seven Americans in 2015, a quarter of all the births in America were to immigrant women. “Births to women from Mexico, China, India, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, Honduras, Vietnam, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico accounted for 58% of all births to immigrant mothers in the U.S. in 2014.” Even here in Oregon, births to immigrant mothers have offset what would have otherwise been a decrease in births from 1990 to 2015.

From 2009:

The fascinating aspect to this story of decrease in fertility rates is that it has happened without strict government mandates. While public health messages do advocate for smaller family sizes, there is no strict government-imposed one-child policy, a la China.

All the more why I think that it is a lazy political argument that Douthat has written!