Elon Musk is right that declining birth rates will have catastrophic consequences for our economy and the world. He’s saying that abortion are indeed a threat to mankind’s existence.
The Daily Wire: Twitter CEO Elon Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson this week that birth control and abortions are keeping humans from reproducing, and warned that civilization could end “with a whimper in adult diapers.”
Musk, who has warned for years about declining birth rates, said that “there’s sort of a life cycle arc to civilizations, just as there are to individual humans.” He said he was concerned about declining birth rates and noted that Japan had twice as many deaths last year as births.
“In the past, we could rely upon simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate,” Musk said. “But once you have birth control and abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct, but not procreate. So we haven’t yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent, you know, the last 50 years or so, for birth control.”
Civilization literally relies on new blood for survival, Musk said.
“If we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization is going to crumble,” he said. “The old question of like, ‘will civilization end with a bang or a whimper?’ Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers.”
So, he’s right. Our economic system is essentially premised on the fact that we will have young people supporting old people but when the old people declined to make a next generation, things become rather more difficult.
And we are on that ride now. No getting off.
But to view abortion as a macro-economic problem as Musk does misses the point, in my opinion. He is not defending an individual human being in the womb, he’s attempting to defend “mankind.” I would argue that unless you’re willing to defend an individual human you can not defend humankind. The one is premised on the other.
What Musk is saying is that it used to be that people enjoyed having sex. That would, in the past, lead to babies. But now, people can enjoy satiating their lust, while on birth control and having access to abortion. So you get all the sex but none of the babies.
So what to do? And that’s where Musk ends. But the answer is…wait for it…Catholicism. When sex is for marriage, contraception is deemed sinful, and every life is considered sacred, then you get babies. Lots of them apparently, if you attend your local Latin Mass.
In short, this is a spiritual problem with economic consequences. Many countries have attempted to handle their birth dearth problem with government incentives, tax breaks, and even cash. But it hasn’t worked. You can’t solve spiritual problems with economic solutions.
Pray for America. That’s a spiritual solution. Get married, have babies. Save the world.
