As both Zen and Bruce Charlton have pointed out here, having low birth rates is bad but having low birth rates that are dropping is worse.

It’s bad if your expenses exceed your income.  Its worse if every year your income gets smaller and your expenses get larger.

Here’s the bottom line.  Based on recent trends, the really low American birth rates are declining by about 1.5% per year.  Based on recent trends, the low LDS birth rates are declining by 3.43% per year.

At these rates of decline, it will take America 52  years to get to the catastrophically low unprecedented birthrates of South Korea.  YtSK=52.  For the LDS, 34 years.  YtSK=34.

However, there is some small glimmer of hope in the LDS numbers for the last couple of years.

(Figures are based on limited data, should be treated as ballpark and directional only).

From here.  There was another drop in 2023.  The number of births per is now 54.4.

The  implication is that every year more people look around and decide to have less children, or no children.

I don’t believe we will continue to decline at the same rate.  It will slow once we catch up (catch down?) to the Gentile population.  The gospel is true and beautiful but for many LDS in First World countries the fruits of the gospel are increasingly only in areas that are unmeasurable and intangible.

Analysis below for those who are interested.

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An interesting article I was linked recently about Israeli TFR (decent) has led to some speculative, preliminary thoughts on why the LDS TFR is what it is (bad).

First of all, don’t just accept everything the article says, at least when applied to non-Israeli fertility.  I’m just using it as a jumping off point to look at various explanations folks have offered for low fertility and see whether they apply to us.  This is more an attempt it is to find possible causes than it is a call for action.  Just because something is a root cause doesn’t inherently mean that it ought to be fixed or can be fixed.

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Here’s a follow up to yesterday’s 2023 LDS Birth Update.

Like Mansfield pointed out, the summary of our data and rough analytical methods is either we have comically low activity rates, comically low birth rates, or a combination of low activity and low birth rates.

My guess is that our actual TFR is around 2.4 – 2.7, since we seem to track Gentile TFR with a plus one.

Let’s see what that implies for our activity rates as a rough and ready plausibility check.

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Down, down, down.  From here.

Bonneville County is Idaho Falls.

Here is an interesting contrast.  I just picked whatever years came up first on a search.

1979 LDS Statistical Report

Members  4,439,000

Children of Record 107,000

24 children per 1,000

(Children of record is the number of babies blessed, which means its the birthrate among people who still have some connection to the Church.)

1986 LDS Statistical Report

Members  6,170,000

Children of Record 93,000

15 children per 1,000

2019 LDS Statistical Report

Members  16,565,000

Children of Record 94,000

6 children per 1,000

2020 LDS Statistical Report

Members 16,660,000

Children of Record 65,540

3 children per 1,000

What strikes me is that we have fewer children now than we did in the late 70s with a quarter of the Saints.

Babies won’t wait.

A feisty essay by a mother of 5.  Hardly a line it that I do not wish I had wrote.

For example,

There is no political ideology more vibrant these days than the baby-hating anti-natalist movement. It is pure No Lives Matter nihilism, dedicated to stopping humans from reproducing. It goes beyond abortion, even. Terminating children already in the womb is messy. This movement instead wants to convince you never to have them, and if you must, no more than 1.5. They wish to arrest potential children—those not yet conceived, the souls who exist as hazy figments in God’s imagination—from being willed into being.

 

It’s all the predictable result of 50 years of dual-income economic policies, anti-family social norms, abortion on demand, birth control pushers hooking prepubescents on the Pill, and climate harpies who see each baby as just another unwanted carbon footprint.

 

If you dare to visit mainstream millennial social media, like TikTok, you will encounter an army of self-sterilizing lunatics who shout their abortions, peddle their sex show livestreams, and brag about how many SSRIs they take. These young people, mostly girls, have been brainwashed into committing genetic suicide.

 

Even worse, they do it with joy. They are following the Pied Piper of Despair right over the cliff, along with the babies they’ll never have.

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I did a search for “BYU” on Twitter on Saturday night to look for articles about the Cougars’ thrilling basketball victory over Gonzaga.* Instead I got a steady stream of 17- and 18-year-old Mormon kids either celebrating getting into BYU or lamenting their rejection letters. It’s that time of year. (more…)

Those words would be as good an answer as I could give to the question originally addressed to Conan the Barbarian: “What is best in life?”

But they’re actually taken from this passage: (more…)

“Due to an aging population, non-Hispanic whites last year recorded more deaths than births.” (link)