“Why women aren’t having children”

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/why-women-arent-having-children/390765/

I’m not sure that this essay actually overcomes Pope Francis’s declaration — to which. along with the book from which it draws, it’s responding — that a fertile couple’s conscious decision not to have children is “selfish.”

In fact, at one or two places, it comes close to confirming his point.

And it might even give support to the Pope’s idea that a society in which deliberate non-celibate childlessness is widespread is “depressed,” and it seems to suggest that such a decision might be linked, in many cases, to a  rejection of God and of transcendent purpose.

Deliberate childlessness is spreading, though, in the West — traditional Europe, for example, is aging and perhaps altogether dying — and particularly among the more highly educated.  Which means that, relatively speaking, the proportion of uneducated people in the West and worldwide seems destined to rise, as they continue to multiply at higher rates, over time, than their higher-degreed “betters” do.

Worthy of contemplation.

Incidentally, for what it’s worth, one Lillie Freeze reported once having heard Joseph Smith make the following prophecy: “He said the time would come when none but the women of the Latter-day Saints would be willing to bear children.” (Young Woman’s Journal [November 1890: 81])