fertility

If a society places a low value on children, pretty soon there will not be enough of them. As a friend of mine likes to say, “That’s not magic, it’s just math.”

Only 3 percent of the world’s population currently lives in a country whose birth rate isn’t declining. According to a 2020 BBC report, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Thailand, and South Korea will lose half their populations by the end of this century. Within 75 years, virtually every country on earth will have a shrinking population. Those in the West will be among the first and fastest declining.

I hope we will always be amazed and humbled that God chooses to use the Colson Center to equip His people.

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims. Seven years ago, Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story told of a woman in her late 30s, single and successful in her career, who spent $19,000 to have her eggs frozen. She planned to focus on a career now and keep open the possibility of marriage and kids later. It didn’t turn out that way. Still single on her 45^th birthday, she decided to have a child with the help of a sperm donor. However, her eggs failed to produce a child. She was crushed.

According to a new book by Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, between 1973 and 2011 sperm counts in Western males dropped by 59 percent. In the ten years since then, things have gotten worse. As Swan writes, “If you look at the curve on sperm count and project it forward — which is always risky — it reaches zero in 2045 ... That’s a little concerning, to say the least.”