When I was in high school, the bogeyman in social trends was “the population explosion.” Everybody knew that it was irresponsible to have more than two children in these modern, enlightened times. Anyone who did have a large family was just selfish, adding to the surplus population, using up the dwindling resources of the planet. Now, according to this article, Demographics and the Culture War by Stanley Kurtz in Policy Review Online, we’re heading toward a worldwide population implosion, a decline in population that is “set to ramify geometrically.”

As population falls, the pool of potential mothers in each succeeding generation shrinks. So even if, well into the process, there comes a generation of women with a higher fertility rate than their mothers’, the momentum of population decline could still be locked in. Population decline may also be cemented into place by economics. To support the ever-growing numbers of elderly, governments may raise taxes on younger workers. That would make children even less affordable than they are today, decreasing the size of future generations still further.

Kurtz uses information from the following recently published books to spin several possible scenarios that might result from a decreasing population.
The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It by Phillip Longman
Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future by Ben Wattenberg
The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America’s Economic Future by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns
Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It by Peter G. Peterson
Kurtz says the choices are:
1) a new conservatism: Population decline might be halted and even reversed by a change in cultural values, what GWB calls creating a culture of life. We could have a revival of traditional religions which oppose abortion, birth control, feminism, and the sexual revolution and which support traditional families with children.
2) a new eugenics: In this scenario, populations could be stabilized as traditional families were replaced by bioengineered breeding systems, as in Brave New World. He doesn’t think we’re so very far away from this “eugenic nightmare.”
3) “endless and compounding population decline:” This choice has some fairly scary implications as the population ages rapidly and fewer and fewer young people are forced to support more and more elderly people (who are living longer to boot).

None of the above is palatable to social liberals who value freedom, but it may be that we’ll all have to pay the price for the choices that we as a society have made and continue to make. (We should all pray for our children, even those of us who don’t have any.)

. . . population decline cannot be reversed in the absence of major cultural change, and the prospects of a significant religious revival must not be dismissed. In a future shadowed by vastly disproportionate numbers of poor elderly citizens, and younger workers struggling with impossible tax burdens, the fundamental tenets of postmodern life might be called into question. Some will surely argue from a religious perspective that mankind, having discarded God’s injunctions to be fruitful and multiply, is suffering the consequences.

I found this article via Arts and Letters Daily, a very useful website, by the way.