Reason Magazine - Topics > Family Issues

Would You Believe Five Underage Mothers? How About Two?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:38:00 EDT

In a column about the child custody case involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), I noted:

[Texas Child Protective Services] claimed 31 underage girls at the ranch were pregnant or mothers. It later conceded that at least 15 of them were in fact adults while a 14-year-old on the list was not pregnant and had no children. The Associated Press reported that "more mothers listed as underage are likely to be reclassified as adults."

After the column (which ran in the August/September issue of reason) went up on Friday, a couple of readers pointed out that the official tally of underage mothers has fallen to five, meaning the initial figure was off by a factor of at least six. According to a June 15 Salt Lake Tribune story, three of the remaining five girls "were 16 when they gave birth last year," "one girl was 17," and "the fifth girl, who turns 17 in August, is pregnant." Since the minimum age for marriage with parental consent in Texas is 16, in only two of these cases was there prima facie evidence of underage marriage, and even in those cases only because the state legislature raised the minimum marriage age from 14 in 2005 with the FLDS in mind. So based on two cases where where it looks like the law was broken, the state seized 468 FLDS children, including babies, toddlers, boys, and prepubescent girls as well as the teenaged girls who allegedly were at risk.

The egregiously erroneous information provided by CPS reinforces the wisdom of the Texas courts in concluding that the wholesale removal of these children was unwarranted. It also should encourage greater skepticism about self-serving claims by bureaucrats seeking to justify their actions, even— perhaps especially—when the targets of those actions are far outside the mainstream. When this story first broke back in April, how many people thought it was the weird, creepy polygamists who were basically telling the truth and the government-appointed child rescuers who were wildly misleading the public?

How Can You Have Your Pudding If You Don't Drink Your Wine?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:14:00 EDT

Writing in Time, John Cloud notes that "the U.S. seems to be in the midst of one of its periodic alcohol panics, this one focused on adolescents," even though drinking by teenagers has been declining since the early 1990s. "The data indicate there are fewer young drinkers," Cloud writes, "but a greater proportion of them are hard-core drinkers." He blames "the all-or-nothing approach to alcohol" that prevails in the United States and makes the case for "the Southern European model of moderate, supervised drinking within families":

The way to produce fewer problem drinkers is to create more drinkers overall—that is, to begin to create a culture in which alcohol is not an alluring risk but part of quotidian family life....There's evidence that drinking with your kids—not buying them alcohol for a party but actually drinking with them at home—is a good way to teach responsible drinking behavior.

In one study, for example, teenagers who drank with their parents (as opposed to getting alcohol from their parents for unsupervised parties) "were about half as likely to say they had drunk alcohol in the past month and about one-third as likely to say they had had five or more drinks in a row in the previous two weeks." The researchers concluded that "drinking with parents appears to have a protective effect on general drinking trends."

But Cloud notes that "social host laws," which hold adults criminally responsible for underage drinking on their property, discourage the modeling of temperate drinking. He laments that "we are encouraging kids to leave their homes (presumably by car) and drink in parks or abandoned warehouses or anywhere else they think they won't get caught and their parents won't get arrested."

The article, which quotes addiction psychologist and reason contributor Stanton Peele (who pointed it out to me), is worth reading in full, not least for the calm, measured tone we have not come to expect from newsweeklies on subjects like this.

I discussed zero tolerance and the "underage drinking epidemic" in a 2002 column.

No Child Left Behind

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Creators Syndicate

Two weeks before the Texas Supreme Court unanimously rejected the wholesale removal of children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, a spokesman for the state’s Child Protective Services (CPS) insisted the case “is not about religion.” If you believe that, you may also believe that a community of hundreds is a single household, or that a 27-year-old is younger than 18, to cite just a couple of the whoppers CPS has told about the largest child custody case in U.S. history.

To justify seizing 468 children from the ranch, which is owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), CPS argued that the church’s teachings are inherently abusive. CPS did not bother to present evidence that particular children were in immediate physical danger, as required by state law, because it thought membership in the polygamous sect was enough to make parents unfit. The state asserted that a “pervasive belief system” at the ranch, which it raided on April 3 in response to what seems to have been a fictitious abuse report, encouraged underage marriage. “They’re living under an umbrella of belief that having children at a young age is a blessing,” the lead investigator testified. “Therefore any child in that environment would not be safe.”

But as the appeals court ruling upheld by the Texas Supreme Court noted, “The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the [state’s] witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger. It is the imposition of certain alleged tenets of that system on specific individuals that may put them in physical danger.”

CPS claimed 31 underage girls at the ranch were pregnant or mothers. It later conceded that at least 15 of them were in fact adults while a 14-year-old on the list was not pregnant and had no children. The Associated Press reported that “more mothers listed as underage are likely to be reclassified as adults.”

In any case, as the appeals court noted, “teenage pregnancy, by itself, is not a reason to remove children from their home and parents.” In Texas the minimum age for marriage with parental consent is 16—raised from 14 in 2005 with the FLDS in mind—and “there was no evidence regarding the marital status of these girls when they became pregnant or the circumstances under which they became pregnant.”

By the state’s count as of late May, underage mothers represented no more than 3 percent of the children it seized. Even if the other girls who had reached puberty were likely to be married off soon (a matter of dispute), there was no evidence that the boys or the prepubescent girls were in danger of abuse. Half the children forcibly separated from their parents were 5 or younger.

CPS glossed over the lack of evidence by treating the entire 1,700-acre ranch as a single household. If there had been even one instance of abuse in the community, it argued, no child should be left there. This assumption of collective guilt was not only contrary to law; it was contradicted by the state’s own witnesses, who conceded that FLDS members, only some of whom practice polygamy, disagree about the appropriate age for marriage.

The first parents to be reunited with their children after the appeals court’s ruling were Joseph and Lori Jessop, both EMTs in their 20s. The monogamous couple’s children—two boys and a girl, ages 1, 2, and 4—became ill during their state-imposed separation and had to be hospitalized.

When the kids were released from the hospital, caseworkers literally pulled the two older children from their mother. Until a judge intervened, CPS threatened to take the youngest child as well, saying nursing babies older than 12 months were not allowed to remain with their mothers.

Not surprisingly, the Jessops’ older children were anxious in the days after they were returned to their parents, waking up repeatedly during the night and displaying regressive behavior. There was never any evidence that their parents abused them, but there’s plenty that the state did.

Senior Editor Jacob Sullum writes a weekly syndicated column.

What's in the Teen Pregnancy Pact's Fine Print?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

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Baby Bust!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Dr. Love is struggling. Oh, the business side of things is going well. There’s the couples cruise, the magazine, the singles nights, the self-authored sex ideology he calls “bio-communication.” And the international media still can’t get enough of him: A few years back, seemingly every wire service in the world had a story on the young gynecologist’s forthcoming “super baby making show,” which would pit 10 couples against one another to see who could conceive first in a public assault on Singapore’s shockingly low fertility rate. As a government-backed baby booster for the island city-state, Wei Siang Yu just wants couples to work less and fornicate more. But try as he might, the good doctor can’t seem to coax Singapore’s child-free twentysomethings into bed.

Ask young women about Dr. Love, and you’ll get derisive giggles. Ask for his allegedly widely available pro-sex DVD at the local entertainment megastore, and the seller won’t have a clue. Ask one of the assistants at his home office whether young lovers actually rent out his bally-hooed procreation pad, which is dominated by a complicated looking “sex swing” and other accoutrements of venturesome lovemaking, and he’ll change the subject.

Dr. Love’s allies in the war on childlessness have fared no better. The Singaporean government’s official matchmaking agency, the SDU—the initials stand for Social Development Unit, but it’s known to snarky islanders as “Single, Desperate, and Ugly”—is situated just off the city-state’s main shopping thoroughfare, and it doesn’t seem nearly as popular as the nearby Emporio Armani.

These days the official slogan of Singapore’s baby-making campaign is “Three or More.” But Singaporeans of childbearing age grew up listening to an altogether different appeal: “Stop at Two.” As in much of East Asia, the tiny island’s population exploded after World War II—by more than 90 percent between 1957 and 1970 alone. In the Age of Aquarius, billboards and posters warned young couples “the more you have, the less they get” and “girl or boy, two is enough.” Parents who agreed to be sterilized after having two children got priority placement for their kids in elementary school.

Since then, demographic conditions have changed radically, but the state has maintained its intense interest in procreation. Singapore’s “total fertility rate,” a crude prediction of how many children a woman will bear in her lifetime if current patterns persist, is among the lowest in the world at 1.07, but the baby bust is not a future the island faces alone. From Hong Kong (0.98) to Italy (1.29) to Russia (1.39) to Canada (1.61), most of the world’s population will soon live in nations where the fertility rate is below the “replacement” level of 2.1. Governments far less authoritarian than Singapore’s are intruding into childbearing choices. After 200 years of exponential population growth, and just four decades after overpopulation doomsaying began filling the bestseller lists, the First World is suddenly gripped with underpopulation hysteria.

And everyone has an explanation for it.

“Europe is facing a demographic disaster,” said quondam Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in his February concession speech. “That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality.”

The late Pope John Paul II agreed with America’s most famous Mormon, speaking of a “crisis of births.” On the liberal side you can find demographic thinkers such as Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, and the Australian demographer Peter McDonald, who argue that we’re headed for a dark future unless governments begin bestowing mothers with some serious baby shower gifts.

Books like P.D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men (made into a bleak film in 2007) join Mark Steyn’s America Alone in depicting a harsh and violent babyless landscape. Even in the United States, where population growth remains uniquely irrepressible among wealthy nations, ideologically driven concerns about demography have crept into the national conversation. They appear in the 2004 science fiction comedy Idiocracy, in which intelligent women and men, by failing to produce children, have doomed the world to collective mental incapacity by the 26th century (when the U.S. president is a porn star and the most popular TV show is Ow! My Balls!). They appear in the hysterical 2008 documentary Demographic Winter, in which we can watch a lone, naked boy shivering in an empty warehouse.

The developed world is experiencing a wave of pro-natalist sentiment that threatens to bully the childless, tax the single, and reorient states toward the production rather than the protection of citizens. In most developed nations with below-replacement fertility, governments are attempting to align incentives so that women will use their bodies for the purpose of childbirth. In the U.S., right-wing religious groups are calling for a rollback of contraceptive freedom and a return to patriarchal arrangements, all in the name of something called “demographic balance.”

It may sound like a movement of sorts, but it is far from cohesive. Although pro-natalists share an obsession with procreation, they are driven to this anxiety by a host of different fears. As a group, they worry that their countries are admitting too many immigrants, and too few; that we have liberated women too much, and not enough; that welfare states are too strong, and too weak. Pick any divisive social issue—a lack of religiosity, say, or an excess of the same—and you can find someone to draw the connection to demographic decline.

Modern fertility panic stems from a desire to reshape polyglot cultures, to regain control over women’s reproductive choices, and to locate a single, easy-to-understand culprit for disparate social problems. As they have for hundreds of years, societies are projecting their deepest anxieties onto empty wombs.

Bye-Bye Baby
If you’re a woman of childbearing age in a developed country, there’s a good chance your government will pay you to reproduce at the currently desirable rate. Russian women who opt for a second child receive a lump sum of 250,000 rubles ($9,200)—not bad compared to Poland’s going rate of a measly 1,000 zloty ($460) per kid. France and Sweden combine pro-natalist incentives with more traditional social welfare schemes. Fecund couples in Sweden, for instance, receive a combined 13 months of parental leave, 11 of which can be taken by one parent, and during which the government provides 80 percent of a parent’s former income. Parents collect 900 euros ($1,410) per year; bosses then must allow their employees to work part time for prorated pay once they become parents.

In May 2004 the Australian government tried to boost its birthrate of 1.76 by announcing that the parents of children born after July 1, 2004, would receive 3,000 Aussie dollars ($2,800). As Australian economists later noticed, pregnant women due in June did not leave it up to nature whether the maternal stipend would come to them; more babies were born on July 1, 2004, than on any day in the previous 30 years.

Singapore’s SDU offers a free government dating adviser who interviews young singles about themselves and their ideal partners. The adviser chooses a match, and the eligible bachelors watch videos of one another before agreeing to the date. Before the big night, both are offered makeovers, and the SDU gives free lectures on personal grooming. “Personal hygiene doesn’t end with a shower and clean clothes,” reads a helpful dating guide. “For close encounters between the sexes, oral hygiene cannot be ignored.…Extreme halitosis may require medical attention.” The largesse extends well past date night. First and second children bring in baby bonuses of 3,000 Singapore dollars ($2,200) each, while third and fourth children garner 6,000 Singapore dollars ($4,400) each. The government also matches parental investment in special children’s savings accounts, which can be used for day care or other child-related expenses, dollar for dollar.

In Singapore and elsewhere, the shift from baby boom to baby bust effected a remarkable role reversal among those obsessed with procreation. Pro-family conservatives went from reliably urging calm in the face of books like William Paddock’s Famine 1975!, which proposed a system of triage for dealing with inevitable mass starvation; to fanning the flames of birth-rate fear. Allan Carlson, the head of the World Congress of Families and long one of the most virulent opponents of United Nations population control policies, began telling audiences that “the demographic problem facing the twenty-first century is depopulation, not overpopulation.”

Of all the possible American narratives to explain fertility decline, none seems to hold more power than a story of leftist values leading inexorably to extinction. In March the Illinois-based Family First Foundation released a documentary called Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family. As a variety of experts explain our descent into extinction, the producers lay out their hypotheses in bullet points: Divorce, Working Women, Prosperity, The Sexual Revolution, and what’s termed “Ideologies.” Frolicking children fade and disappear into nothingness—a rapture of sorts visited upon us repeatedly throughout the film. Cohabitation, feminism, and pop culture do not fare particularly well. Our economies will fall apart—“Who will man the factories?” asks a tag line, a thought that should keep you up at night only if you suspect producers will die off while consumers live on. The Fall of Rome is invoked, the rise of “the East” mentioned more than once. Kay Hymowitz, a conservative social critic, describes the advent of the “man-child,” more interested in Maxim than procreation, as the film cuts to a man playing his Wii intently, his presumably childless wife looking on gloomily from the side.

Across the Atlantic, the British press is full of self-loathing op-ed pieces about a people too self-absorbed to reproduce. Representative articles include a Sunday Times article headlined “Sorry, baby, but our lifestyles come first” and a Daily Mail piece more directly entitled “Why ARE We Too Selfish to Have Children?”

Are lad mags and the Nintendo corporation responsible for a global decline in birthrates? Broadly, nations that are more developed (and therefore more likely to produce video games and men’s magazines) produce fewer children than less developed nations. But while Demographic Winter uses Europe as the ultimate cautionary tale, Europe’s current demographics largely contradict the idea that more socially conservative societies tend to produce more children.

Religion? It is the most religious European countries, such as Italy, that have the continent’s lowest fertility rates; secular Norway is just under replacement level. Working women? European countries with the highest work force participation rates, such as Sweden and Norway, tend to have higher fertility than those with a comparatively small percentage of women working, such as Greece.

Cohabitation? France, where shacking up is a social norm, has a higher fertility rate than any of its immediate neighbors. Family instability? In a forthcoming book, Demographic Challenges for the 21st Century, the demographer Tomas Sobotka argues that divorce rates in Europe might be positively correlated with birthrates. “Many countries which have advanced furthest in the decline of traditional family and the spread of less conventional and less stable living arrangements,” he writes, “record relatively high fertility when judged by contemporary European standards.” Low levels of economic development coupled with social conservatism may well produce high fertility levels; but in modern Europe, it seems that the combination of a modern economy and social conservatism may produce some of the lowest fertility levels on Earth.

In the first half of the 20th century, demographers generally held that urbanization, industrialization, and education were the chief determinants of fertility decline. Later, neoclassical economists hypothesized that the rate of decline would correlate with the rates of increase in the opportunity cost of women staying out of the work force and in the relative cost of raising children.

The latter theory is useful “as a way to structure thinking,” according to the American Enterprise Institute demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, but, as with nearly every theory of fertility, there is much that it fails to explain. The relative cost of having children is indeed very high in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States, but these countries have markedly different birth rates. Nor does it explain why the birthrate is lower north of the Canadian border than south of it.

Strangest of all, total fertility rates are dropping most rapidly in predominantly rural countries with low female literacy rates and few work force opportunities. Dramatic drops in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, absent much economic development, have come as a surprise to economists and demographers alike. In 1970, according to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, Bangladesh’s total fertility rate was 6.4. In 2006 it was 2.9. Zimbabwe’s rate dropped from 7.4 to 3.3 during the same period.

The theory that economic development leads to fertility decline breaks down at the very first demographic data point on record. The first country to enter a sustained fertility decline was not England, the cradle of the industrial revolution. “It was France!” exclaims Eberstadt. “France was rural and poor and was very largely illiterate and, not to put to fine a point on it, it was Catholic. That kind of confutes a lot of things we think are supposed to connect between modernization and fertility change.”

The Baby-Welfare State
The conservative narrative of fertility decline is part of the right’s culture war weaponry, engineered to find praise in the pages of Human Events and criticism in the pages of The Nation. But it’s more nostalgia than political program, a generalized condemnation of progress rather than a plan for the future. After a screening of Demographic Winter at the Heritage Foundation, a socially conservative D.C. think tank, a panel of enthusiastic commentators was asked how to achieve the massive cultural rollback required to stop collective extinction. Judging by the film’s logic, this would involve reversing the sexual revolution, bringing women back into the home, curtailing an ethic of individualism, and ending the welfare state. Most of the panelists had little to say. One piped in with “virtues education.”

Practically speaking, on the policy level, demographic panic is only useful for one purpose: the promotion of social welfare programs many social conservatives would oppose. From France to Poland to Singapore, governments are responding to low fertility with policies social democrats have always favored. Almost any aspect of the welfare state can be construed as encouraging procreation; more to the point, low fertility can be blamed on the lack of any particular social welfare program. A dearth of pregnancies is evidence that protections for workers are too few, social welfare allowances too small, public school days too short, mandated maternity leave too limited. Women want to fulfill their natural roles as mothers, goes the assumption, but dog-eat-dog capitalism stands in the way.

“Evidence reveals that, in most countries, most young people aspire to an enduring intimate relationship and to having children,” wrote Peter McDonald in an influential 2005 paper on fertility policy. “However, faced with the realities of the new social and economic world, many do not achieve these aspirations.” McDonald blames deregulation and “neoliberalism” for an environment hostile to procreation. “States,” he concludes tidily, “must be principal players in restoring the social balance.”

The contention that women aren’t having as many children as they’d like to is rooted in “desired fertility,” or the number of children women say they want as they enter their childbearing years. In Europe, as women increasingly choose to go childless, they continue to tell surveyors that they want two children. That disparity is sometimes deemed “unmet demand”; governments, goes the theory, must assist women in the quest to produce the children they say they want.

When the concept is framed this way, most of us have “unmet demand” for any number of goods—flat-screen televisions, yachts, MacBooks—that taxpayers fail to help us acquire. No one doubts that it is possible to structure incentives such that more women will use their bodies in the way politicians prefer, which is why many liberal arguments for pro-fertility policies are suspiciously self-affirming. Offered millions of dollars per birth, women would indeed go into labor more often. Pregnant women can then be cast as responding rationally to incentives or as “achieving their aspirations” to become a mother. The more relevant question, and the one rarely broached, is whether women who choose not to have children should be forced to subsidize those who do.

There is an alternative explanation for the behavior of young women who declare a desire for two children yet go on to have one or none: Women may be telling pollsters what they think the pollsters want to hear, or simply reciting lines memorized from cultural scripts. “The answers may reflect mere stereotypes,” wrote the demographers Gustavo De Santis and Massimo Livi Bacci in a 2001 study, “and not constitute any reliable guide of people’s true preferences or intentions for the future.” The two-child norm, they add, “generally prevails in our times.” Men and women may continue to idealize the nuclear family—one boy, one girl—well beyond its heyday.

At the moment, small cash handouts do not appear to be doing much to increase birthrates across Europe and Asia. More-sophisticated attempts to reduce the burdens of working mothers, such as subsidized day care or regulations regarding the status of part-time workers, may raise birthrates very slightly, but there is no consensus on whether they are effective. Birthrates rise and fall, and it’s difficult to establish causality even when fertility rates shoot up after a policy goes into effect.

Michael Teitelbaum, a historian of demography, says he knows of only two places where pro-natalist policies have achieved real long-term results. One was communist East Germany, where wages were kept so low that the government could afford to pay baby bonuses that amounted to one-third of what a woman would have made working that year. The other was communist Romania, where dictator Nicolae Ceausescu outlawed contraception and abortion in October 1966 without warning. The resulting spike in birth rates was the largest in recorded history. That worked for about a decade, says Teitelbaum, “until people reconstructed their illegal ways of controlling their fertility.”

Birthrate Pangs
Depopulation panic isn’t new. It’s merely making a comeback after a long, anomalous period of overpopulation panic. Waves of birthrate anxiety swept through France at the beginning of the 19th century and the United States between the world wars. Today’s developed-world worries are in one sense very understandable: No one alive today can remember a time when the global population was not on the rise. Growth has become the norm, and that norm may change in the foreseeable future. “When [growth] goes negative even a tiny amount,” says Teitelbaum, “some people immediately say, well, this is a quantum, dramatic shift in what it means to be a human society.”

Quantum or otherwise, a demographic shift does require adjustment, notably of pension programs that are built on faulty assumptions of endless expansion. Fertility declines alter the basic age structure of a society, much as the baby boom did a half-century ago. Neither gradual declines nor gradual increases in population need be destructive, but the former will require concrete changes in redistribution schemes and a reshuffling of resources.

For those who, with good reason, worry about the solvency of transfer programs in an age of population decline, replacement immigration looks like a partial solution, and therefore xenophobia is part of the problem. But for many if not most of the people preoccupied by fertility rates, immigration is no solution at all. The question isn’t about whether the United States, Singapore, or France will be without people in 2100; it’s about what kind of people will populate those countries: what they will look like, what they will teach in their schools, what God they will bow before. Mark Steyn’s America Alone warns that within a few generations Europe will be a Muslim continent. When Pat Buchanan discusses depopulation in The Death of the West, he does not proceed to suggest we replace children of European descent with Mexican laborers. Pro-natalist policies in Quebec, Singapore, and until recently Israel implicitly target a preferred ethnic group, attempting to fill the future with the demographics desired by the current political class.

Michael Teitelbaum and Jay Winter have another explanation for the current fertility panic. “Such worries seem to crop up at predictable moments,” they wrote in a response to Phillip Longman in the September 2004 Foreign Affairs, arguing that “when a dominant political or economic power begins to feel unsure of its mastery and uncertain about the future, many thinkers turn to demography for an explanation of its plight.”

In times of collective insecurity, empty wombs are cast as either a cause or a symptom of a state supposedly in decline. In their 1985 book The Fear of Population Decline, Teitelbaum and Winter say pro-natalism became a French obsession after Germany invaded France in the late 19th century. Emile Zola’s 1899 novel Fecondite is a 19th-century version of Demographic Winter, no less subtle in its message or gentle in its warning. Zola tells the story of a factory worker named Mathieu Froment and his wife, Marianne, who reproduce at a rate that alarms their individualistic, selfish, and more prosperous neighbors. A bourgeois accountant at the factory equates fertility with poverty. Naturally, his wife dies during a botched abortion. Mathieu’s employer mocks the highly fertile, avoids reproduction, and espouses neo-Malthusianism; his single son becomes a murderer and his wife goes mad and dies. The Angelins, a pair of individualists, decide to put off parenthood; Mme. Angelin dies childless, penniless, and thoroughly disgraced. Through it all, the noble Froments continue to multiply. “At one point,” Teitelbaum and Winter note, “Marianne delivers at the rate of one child every two pages.”

Fear of invasion is a theme running straight through the historical narrative of fertility alarmism. It’s no coincidence that the first great wave of American immigration coincided with a period of heightened maternalist rhetoric. President Theodore Roosevelt was particularly concerned about the “race suicide” of white Protestants. “The severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility,” he said in 1910, shortly after his second term had ended. “The first essential in any civilization is that the man and woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease.”

Periods of anxiety over “race suicide” are rarely good times for women. Protestants who were worried about the rising tide of foreign Catholics passed anti-abortion laws in the 1880s that endured until 1973, when Roe v. Wade limited their scope. Embracing historical continuity with the nativists who came before him, Mark Steyn takes time in America Alone to blame women for aborting the generation that might have stood between us and the coming Islamification of the West. It’s not surprising at all that the single greatest social anxiety of our time has been reduced to crude demographic projections that pin the blame on empty wombs.

Slippery Science
In 1960 Princeton demographers sought to buttress current population theory in one of the most ambitious demographic projects ever. The European Fertility Project, led by Ansley Coale, collected massive amounts of data from city registers and church basements and mapped fertility rates in 600 European provinces.

The problem: No extant theory would hold the disparate results together. “They ran into a lot of brick walls,” says Eberstadt. “This pattern of diffusion of fertility decline didn’t make a lot of sense to labor force specialists or to industrialization specialists. Then some specialist said, ‘Oh! I see what you have there; you have a map of the language families of modern Europe.’” People who spoke the same language, the researchers found, tended to enter fertility decline at around the same time. Women were having fewer children because their friends were having fewer children. It’s a completely fascinating and utterly question-begging conclusion. What domino sets off the cascade of childlessness?

“The problem,” the historian Charles Tilly writes in the introduction to Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, “is that we have too many explanations which are individually plausible in general terms, which contradict each other to some degree, and which fail to fit some significant part of the facts.”

The result is a plethora of explanatory narratives, some with more predictive power than others but none totally satisfying. What’s more, the “ideal fertility rate” itself is a matter of ideological preference. “It’s not obvious to me what the ‘right’ level for birthrates is for any country,” says Eberstadt. “It is obvious to me what the right direction for mortality is. The right direction is down. But fertility is a much more complicated story.” There isn’t even a consensus about the relationship between population growth and economic growth. Theoretically, individual incomes can continue to rise as the population falls.

The answer is likely to be a complex combination of theories we already have—sociological, anthropological, and economic. In the midst of so many plausible causes, it’s tempting to search for a narrative that conforms to previously held convictions or confirms long-held anxieties. The search for a valueless science of demography continues to be conducted in vain, and the very language we use to discuss falling birthrates is loaded with unscientific judgment. Nations are not just depopulating; they are “dying,” “decaying,” even “autogenocidal.” Fertility rates don’t just decline; they “collapse.” Our future is “barren,” a “demographic winter” marked by “sterility” and “senescence.”

Bogus fears about fertility decline don’t preclude justified ones, and current rates of fertility pose real, though not obviously catastrophic, challenges. In a shrinking society that refuses to welcome more immigrants or reform population-dependent social programs, something will have to give. Cash handouts for kids are a far cry from the more coercive pro-natalist policies of Ceausescu and Mussolini, and pro-fertility policies will cease to provoke charges of totalitarianism when they are wrapped into larger social welfare policies. Many changes sold as supportive of working women, such as extending the public school day to conform with work hours, are often defended on their own merits as well.

But as pro-baby policies are inevitably sold as pro-mother, and by extension pro-woman, it’s worth recalling the sentiment behind the Australian birth premiums and Singaporean matchmaking schemes. At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings. “To know what demography is, we need to know what a population is,” the French social scientist Herve Le Bras wrote in The Invention of Populations. “That is where the trouble begins.”

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.

But I Don't Even Speak Armenian!

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:04:00 EDT

The Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Office is sending Arthur Mkoyan—who graduates soon from high school at the top of his class—and his family back to Armenia, even though neither he nor his younger brother speak Armenian:

"I haven't been in Armenia since I was 2, so I don't really know anything about the place," said Arthur Mkoyan, 17. "All I've seen is just videos my mom has watched on the Internet."
[T]he academic skills he has displayed in Fresno may not easily translate to college in Armenia. Arthur said he understands only a few words of Armenian.

Mkoyan's family fled Armenia after his family's house was set on fire as an act of political retribution. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided that that wasn't a good enough reason to keep the family in the U.S.

They arrived in the United States in 1995 on six-month tourist visas, according to Virginia Kice, a public information officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The family settled in Fresno, where [father Ruben] Mkoian [who spells his name differently than his son] worked as a truck driver and his wife worked in a jewelry store. They set about living their lives, which soon included a younger brother for Arthur.
But after the visas expired, the family's application to remain in the United States was denied. In 2002, an immigration judge ruled that they had no legal basis to remain in the country, Kice said.
After their application to the Board of Immigration Appeals was rejected, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year denied their petition for a hearing.
The court was unpersuaded by the father's assertion that he might still be subject to reprisal if he were to return.

For more reason on this phenomenon, click here, especially if you're capable of sniffing out the irony of deporting a 4.0 student with no criminal record while sparing a convicted felon.

What's the Matter With France?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:44:00 EDT

A.P. reports that French politicians across the political spectrum are outraged by a judge's decision (noted this morning by Katherine Mangu-Ward) to grant a recently married Muslim couple an annulment because the bride misrepresented herself as a virgin. "The ruling ending the Muslim couple's union," A.P. says, "has stunned France and raised concerns that the country's much-cherished secular values are losing ground to cultural traditions from its fast-growing immigrant communities." I don't get it, just as I did not understand why so many Frenchmen thought it was imperative to ban headscarves from schools. This case seems like a straightforward application of a contract, albeit one constrained by laws regulating marriage:

In its ruling, the court concluded the woman had misrepresented herself as a virgin and that, in this particular marriage, virginity was a prerequisite.
But in treating the case as a breach of contract, the ruling was decried by critics who said it undermined decades of progress in women's rights. Marriage, they said, was reduced to the status of a commercial transaction in which women could be discarded by husbands claiming to have discovered hidden defects in them.

The court decision "is a real fatwa against the emancipation and liberty of women. We are returning to the past," said Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara, the daughter of immigrants from Muslim North Africa.

Notably, the wife, presumably suffering from false consciousness, joined the husband in seeking the annulment and has no desire to challenge the outcome or to publicize the case:

The hitch is that both the young woman and the man at the center of the drama are opposed to an appeal, according to their lawyers. The names of the woman, a student in her 20s, and the man, an engineer in his 30s, have not been disclosed.

The young woman's lawyer, Charles-Edouard Mauger, said she was distraught by the dragging out of the humiliating case. In an interview on Europe 1 radio, he quoted her as saying: "I don't know who's trying to think in my place. I didn't ask for anything....I wasn't the one who asked for the media attention, for people to talk about it, and for this to last so long."

Yet critics of the ruling, including the justice minister and the prime minister, insist it must be challenged because it represents a defeat for feminism and secularism. Evidently women's freedom must be restricted to protect their freedom: They cannot be allowed to enter into whatever contracts they choose or make their own legal decisions because they might misuse those rights. Just to be clear, that is the feminist position. As for the secularist imperative, which in France is strong enough to override the free exercise of religion, I do not understand how it can co-exist with legal principles that empower aggrieved religious groups to punish people for speech that offends them. How can the same country that fears Muslims are taking over when they insist on wearing headscarves or marrying virgins prosecute a novelist for contempt of Islam?

[Thanks to Mark Tarnowski for the tip.]

Soundbite: Pop Christianity

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:05:00 EDT

In 2005 Daniel Radosh visited his wife’s family in Wichita, Kansas, and tagged along to a Christian rock festival. It was a bizarre experience for a journalist who thought he knew every cranny of pop culture: He was surrounded by fans screaming for bands he’d never heard of. “The key moment for me,” Radosh remembers, “was when one of my sister-in-law’s friends ran back after a set and said ‘That was awesome! They prayed like three times in a 20-minute set!’ I had to know what it meant to judge a band by how hard it prayed rather than how hard it rocked.”

Three years later Radosh has produced Rapture Ready! (Scribner), a humorous travelogue-cum-study of this “alternate universe.” He doesn’t attend a single church service. He goes instead to the Christian professional wrestling rings, stadium-sized passion plays, and rollicking rock festivals that make up the $7 billion Christian pop culture industry.

Q: Since the 2004 election we’ve seen umpteen books about evangelical Christians and their political influence, most of them written to spook secular Americans. What do you learn from exploring this culture that you don’t learn from exploring religious politics?

A: If somebody memorized the Constitution and watched C-SPAN every night and knew all the voting records of every senator but had never heard of Elvis Presley or Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Seinfeld, I think you could make a case that that person didn’t know much about America. We hear about evangelicalism as a religious movement, as a political movement; if you don’t know who [evangelical superhero] Bibleman is, or who [thriller writer] Frank Peretti is, or if you’ve never heard Christian comedy, you really don’t understand what’s going on in these peoples’ lives.

Q: You visited the oldest remnants of Christian pop culture, like the Great Passion Play in Arkansas, and it seems like the newer culture is leaving behind a much more conservative, much less tolerant way of life. What parts of that are being ditched in the new Christian pop culture?

A: It’s not a function of new and old as much as corporate vs. non-corporate. Companies like Thomas Nelson or Zonderman are wary about treading on many political or theological toes. The more independent voices within Christian culture, whether it’s something that existed before mass-market entertainment like the Great Passion Play, or whether it’s the Christian indie rock scene which does not get played on radio—they tend to be much more a reflection of people’s honest personal beliefs and honest spiritual beliefs. You’ll hear Christian rock bands that are militantly anti-abortion or militantly pacifist.

Click above to watch Daniel Radosh discuss his new book on Christian pop culture, Rapture Ready. Go to reason.tv for more information and to include this video on your website.

Q: What is more racially segregated, mainstream culture or Christian culture?

A: Definitely Christian pop culture. There’s no question about it. Mainstream pop culture isn’t any glorious field of interracial harmony, but the industry is dominated by hip hop and R&B and has been for 15 years now. The Christian music scene, which in almost every way is reflective of the mainstream music scene, has almost no hip hop acts to actually chart.

Q: Is the debate over whether or not you can commercialize Christianity pretty much settled?

A: It’s settled, but that was to be expected if you look at the history of American evangelicalism. When radio was invented there was a segment of the Christian population that said because the Bible says Satan is the prince of the air, and because radio uses airwaves, it must be a tool of Satan. But evangelicalism is by definition engaging in culture. Radio became American culture. There was just no way that Christians were going to turn their backs on that.

The broader debate is settled, but there’s a new debate bubbling up from younger Christians, saying, you know, we need to be more thoughtful about culture. We can’t just adapt every cultural form, take a rock song and change “my baby” to “my Savior.” The way that one honors God is by being authentically creative.

FLDS Parents Get Their Kids Back; Church 'Clarifies' Its Marriage Policy

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:34:00 EDT

Yesterday the state of Texas began to allow members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) to recover the children who were illegally seized from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado on April 3. CNN reports that all 468 of the children will be returned except for a 16-year-old girl who, according to her attorney, was an "identified victim of sexual abuse." Speaking of which, yesterday the FLDS Church issued a statement in which it promised to abide by state laws that set a minimum age for marriage:

    * The church's policies regarding marriage have been widely misrepresented and misunderstood. Indeed, much of the misinformation circulating on this subject seems designed intentionally to fuel the flames of prejudice against the church.
    * The church's practices in this regard continue a long tradition of marriage in this country that would have been found to have been unremarkable in 19th century America. In the FLDS church all marriages are consensual. The church insists on appropriate consent, including that of the woman and the man in all circumstances.
    * Nevertheless the church is clarifying its policy toward marriage. Therefore, in the future, the church commits that it will not preside over the marriage of any woman under the age of legal consent in the jurisdiction in which the marriage takes place. The church will counsel families that they neither request nor consent to underage marriages. This policy will apply church-wide.
    * The church believes in purity, cleanliness, and innocence. Our children and families are the cornerstones of our lives and our religion. We hope that this modest clarification in policy will alleviate recent concerns and allow the church and its families to reside in peace among our neighbors.

That sounds like an implicit acknowledgement that FLDS members have not always obeyed state law in this area. When the church says "all marriages are consensual," it does not necessarily mean that the state, which has decreed that girls below a certain age are incapable of giving proper consent, would recognize them as such. At the same time, the church is probably right that its early marriage practices "would have been found to have been unremarkable in 19th century America." In fact, until just a few years ago the minimum age for marriage with parental consent in Texas was 14; the state legislature raised it to 16 in response to concerns about the FLDS presence in Texas.

I don't mean to imply that there should be no minimum or that the state should not enforce it. But it's important to recognize there is a degree of arbitrariness in drawing these lines, especially when animus against a particular religious group seems to be part of the motivation. Lord knows I don't want my 15-year-old daughter to get married, and it's hard for me to sympathize with a father who does. But arranging a match between a girl of that age and a guy in his late teens or early 20s is different from marrying a 13-year-old to a middle-aged man, and both of those are different from "pedophilia," which is how some of the church's harsher critics have described its customs.

The order returning the FLDS children, issued by the same judge who (according to the Texas Supreme Court) erroneously approved their removal, requires their parents to permit unannounced visits by state caseworkers, which "could entail medical, psychological and psychiatric examinations"; to remain in Texas and notify the states of any trips more than 100 miles from home at least 48 hours ahead of time; and to complete "parenting classes." Since the state still has not presented any specific evidence of abuse in the vast majority of these cases, these conditions seem unjustified to me, and the last one is especially insulting. Is there any reason to believe FLDS members lack basic parenting skills, or is it just that state officials don't approve of their religious beliefs?

Previous reason coverage of this story (in chronological order) here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Clarification: As a couple of commenters have noted, the real issue here is (or ought to be) the age of consent for sex. That gets conflated with the minimum age for marriage because having sex with your wife does not constitute statutory rape, no matter how much younger she is, as long as she was old enough to marry with parental consent (and in fact had that consent).

[Thanks to Tracy Cooper for the tip.]

Texas Supreme Court Rejects Seizure of FLDS Children

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:17:00 EDT

The Texas Supreme Court has unanimously upheld last week's appeals court ruling rejecting the state's wholesale removal of children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado. "On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted," the justices said, agreeing with the lower court that Child Protective Services could not justify taking custody of more than 450 children by citing their parents' religious beliefs, which the state claimed encouraged underage marriage.

The text of the Texas Supreme Court decision is available here. Here is my first column on the case. Here is this week's follow-up column about the appeals court ruling.

Addendum: Although the justices agreed that taking all the children was not justified, three said the state would have been justified in removing just the girls who had reached puberty and who might therefore be in danger of sexual abuse. These girls were a small minority of the 468 children seized by the state, many of whom were boys and half of whom were 5 or younger.

[Thanks to Derek Levisay for the tip.]

No Child Left Behind

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The week before a state appeals court condemned the wholesale removal of children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, a spokesman for Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) insisted the case "is not about religion." If you believe that, you may also believe that a community of hundreds is a single household, or that a 27-year-old is younger than 18, to cite just a couple of the whoppers CPS has told in the last two months.

To justify seizing more than 450 children from the ranch, which is owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), CPS argued that the church's teachings are inherently abusive. CPS did not bother to present evidence that particular children were in immediate physical danger, as required by state law, because it thought membership in the polygamous sect was enough to make parents unfit.

CPS asserted that a "pervasive belief system" at the ranch, which it raided on April 3 in response to what seems to have been a fictitious abuse report, encouraged underage marriage. "They're living under an umbrella of belief that having children at a young age is a blessing," the lead investigator testified. "Therefore any child in that environment would not be safe."

But as the appeals court noted, "The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the [state's] witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger. It is the imposition of certain alleged tenets of that system on specific individuals that may put them in physical danger."

CPS claimed 31 underage girls at the ranch were pregnant or mothers. It recently conceded that at least 15 of them are in fact adults, ranging in age from 18 to 27, while a 14-year-old on the list is not pregnant and has no children. A.P. reports "more mothers listed as underage are likely to be reclassified as adults."

In any case, as the appeals court noted, "teenage pregnancy, by itself, is not a reason to remove children from their home and parents." In Texas the minimum age for marriage with parental consent is 16 (raised from 14 in 2005 with the FLDS in mind), and "there was no evidence regarding the marital status of these girls when they became pregnant or the circumstances under which they became pregnant."

By the state's current count, underage mothers represent no more than 3 percent of the children it seized. Even if the other girls who had reached puberty were likely to be married off soon (a matter of dispute), there was no evidence that the boys or the prepubescent girls were in danger of abuse.

CPS glossed over the lack of evidence by treating the entire 1,700-acre ranch as a single household. If there had been even one instance of abuse in the community, it argued, no child should be left there. This assumption of collective guilt was not only contrary to law; it was contradicted by the state's own witnesses, who conceded that FLDS members, only some of whom practice polygamy, disagree about the appropriate age for marriage.

The first parents to be reunited with their children after the appeals court's ruling, which CPS has asked the Texas Supreme Court to reverse, were Joseph and Lori Jessop, both EMTs in their 20s. The monogamous couple's children—two boys and a girl, ages 1, 2, and 4—became ill during their state-imposed separation and had to be hospitalized.

When they were released, CPS caseworkers forcibly pulled the two older children from their mother. Until a judge intervened, CPS threatened to take the youngest child as well, saying nursing babies older than 12 months were not allowed to remain with their mothers.

Not surprisingly, the Jessops' older children are anxious these days, waking up repeatedly during the night and displaying regressive behavior. There was never any evidence that their parents abused them, but there's plenty that the state did.

But Your Honor, I Swear I Thought She Was 15!

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:36:00 EDT

I came across this tidbit while reading about today's appeals court ruling condemning the wholesale seizure of children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch. Or perhaps I should say "children" (emphasis added):

At least half the mothers taken from a polygamist sect's ranch and put in child foster care have now been declared adults, significantly chipping at agency statistics that seemed to demonstrate the widespread sexual abuse of underage girls.
Attorneys for the state's Child Protective Services agency have been conceding, one by one, that many of the mothers authorities cited as evidence that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints committed widespread sexual abuse of girls are actually adults.
They had admitted by midday Thursday that 15 of the 31 mothers listed as underage are adults; one is actually 27. A few are as young as 18, but many are at least 20.
Another girl listed as an underage mother is 14, but her attorney said in court she is not pregnant and does not have a child.

Then, too, as the appeals court noted, "teenage pregnancy, by itself, is not a reason to remove children from their home and parents." Teenagers in Texas can marry at 16 with parental consent, and "there was no evidence regarding the marital status of these girls when they became pregnant or the circumstances under which they became pregnant."

It's also important to keep in mind that the 16 (or fewer) underage mothers represent a small percentage of the children seized by the state, who included infants and toddlers as well as boys of various ages. As the court found, there was no evidence whatsoever to indicate these kids—at least 97 percent of those seized—were being abused or in imminent danger.

Texas Appeals Court Says Removal of FLDS Children Was Unjustified

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:24:00 EDT

A Texas appeals court has ruled that the state acted improperly in removing more than 450 minors from the FLDS Church's Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado and placing them in foster care. An attorney for the children's mothers told the Desert News:

CPS was not justified in removing these children. They did not provide any evidence that the children were in danger, and they acted hastily in removing the children.

The story does not include details of the decision, and the paper says "it is unclear if the children will be returned immediately to the ranch or what impact this will have on ongoing status hearings."

Here is my column arguing that the state overreached and a followup post on its attempts to retroactively justify seizing the children.

Update: CNN has more:

"The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the department's witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger," the three-judge panel said.
The state's Department of Family and Protective Services "did not present any evidence of danger to the physical health or safety of any male children or any female children who had not reached puberty," the judges ruled.
According to the ruling, the mothers said the state should have proved that the children's health or safety was in danger; that there was "an urgent need for protection" that required immediately separating the children from their parents; and that the state made "reasonable efforts" to avoid removing the children.
Because no such proof was presented, the mothers argued, the District Court -- which backed the department's seizure of the children -- "was required to return the children to their parents and abused its discretion by failing to do so."
"The legislature has required that there be evidence to support a finding that there is a danger to the physical health or safety of the children in question and that the need for protection is urgent and warrants immediate removal," the ruling said.
It concluded, "Evidence that children raised in this particular environment may some day have their physical health and safety threatened is not evidence that the danger is imminent enough to warrant invoking the extreme measure of immediate removal prior to full litigation of the issue."

The full opinion is here.

Supremely Convenient

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In a recent speech to the National Rifle Association, John McCain presented himself as an advocate of judicial restraint. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee decried "activist judges" who override the will of the people as expressed by their legislative representatives, in the process "shrugging off generations of legal wisdom and precedent."

Yet that is exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court will be doing if, as the Arizona senator urges, it overturns the District of Columbia's gun ban. Evidently some kinds of judicial activism are better than others. Perhaps activism vs. restraint is not the best measure of what makes a good judge.

The most recent Supreme Court decision addressing the Second Amendment is ambiguous but has often been read as an endorsement of the view that "the right to keep and bear arms" pertains only to state militia service. That is the position taken by most federal appeals courts, and until relatively recently it was the conventional wisdom among legal scholars.

McCain nevertheless is right that the Supreme Court should reject that view—not because doing so epitomizes judicial restraint but because a thorough examination of the Constitution and its historical context shows that view is wrong. It is wrong no matter how many legislators, academics, and judges have endorsed it, no matter how long it was widely accepted.

What about the California Supreme Court's conclusion, announced the day before McCain's speech, that the state constitution requires official recognition of same-sex marriages? McCain criticized the ruling for overriding the people's will, reflected in a 2000 ballot initiative that reaffirmed the traditional definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Although the four judges in the majority acknowledged their decision was inconsistent with the way marriage had always been understood under state law, they argued that long acceptance does not make a policy constitutional.

To buttress that point, they cited the 1948 decision in which the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on interracial marriage that had been in place since 1872. But that decision was based on the 14thAmendment, which was passed after the Civil War with the aim of guaranteeing the residents of every state, regardless of race, the "privileges or immunities of citizens," "due process of law," and "equal protection of the laws."

It was not much of a stretch to conclude that the 14thAmendment, which the U.S. Supreme Court had said protected "the right of the individual...to marry," barred anti-miscegenation laws. By contrast, the California Supreme Court now is redefining that right to mean something it never has meant, treating two people of the same sex, as opposed to a man and a woman of different races, as "similarly situated" and therefore entitled to identical treatment in the name of equal protection.

As a matter of policy, I favor an arrangement similar to the one mandated by the court, in which the government treats couples equally without regard to sexual orientation. The California legislature already has done that in almost every respect, extending to gay "domestic partners" all the rights and responsibilities that apply to heterosexual couples under state law while withholding the "marriage" label.

So why does it matter if a court pushes the state a bit further in this direction, requiring equal nomenclature as well as equal treatment? Because the state constitution leaves that decision to the legislative process, and a constitution that can be ignored to reach good results also can be ignored to reach bad results.

As McCain noted in his NRA speech, many gun control advocates claim the Second Amendment is "archaic," no longer relevant in modern America. Advocates of campaign finance regulation, including McCain himself, argue that the contemporary threat of big money in politics requires revising the First Amendment's command that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." For courts confronted by laws based on such constitutional revisionism, judicial restraint is no virtue.

No Reason to Rush

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In the old story, a preacher gives an inspiring sermon, which he concludes by asking his congregants to stand up if they want to go to heaven. Everyone rises except one nervous-looking fellow. "Brother," asks the incredulous pastor, "don't you want to ascend to paradise when you die?" Says the holdout: "When I die? Sure! I thought you were getting up a group to go right now."

That's pretty much how I feel about the California Supreme Court's decision granting the right of same-sex couples to marry. The destination is a good one. I just wish the court weren't in such a hurry to get there.

In recent years, the country has been moving at a steady pace to affirm a once-unthinkable concept—namely that as a matter of both individual rights and social good, gays should be free to make the same commitments as heterosexuals. According to a 2007 CBS News/New York Times poll, 60 percent of Americans now support allowing same-sex couples to enter into civil unions or marriage.

Radical changes don't happen overnight. But the speed of this one has been impressive. It's been only 22 years since the U.S. Supreme Court said states may criminalize homosexual conduct. It's been only 15 years since the Supreme Court of Hawaii shocked the country by ruling that gays might have a constitutional right to marry.

It's been only eight years since Vermont became the first state to admit same-sex couples to the rights and responsibilities of matrimony through civil unions. It's been only three years since California followed suit by letting gays enter into domestic partnerships.

But all of a sudden, the justices have discovered that their state constitution not only allows but requires that marriage include homosexual couples—even though in 2000, 61 percent of the state's voters rejected that option.

The majority is not always right, and in that instance, I thought the majority was wrong. But democracy doesn't say the people will always be right. It merely says they have the right to decide most matters of public policy. Here, by contrast, the California Supreme Court says the citizenry has no right to define marriage the way it has been defined by custom and law for eons.

At stake was not whether gay couples may acquire the rights and duties of marriage in a state-sanctioned framework. As the court acknowledged, they can already do so under the domestic partnership law. But it's not enough for them to get the substance of marriage. The court said they must also get the same terminology.

It reached this conclusion through a lot of philosophizing about "the right of same-sex couples to have their official family relationship accorded the same dignity, respect and stature as that accorded to other officially recognized family relationships." But the state constitution (like the federal one) does not traffic in mushy terms like "dignity" and "stature." When a court puts such heavy reliance on amorphous concepts, it telegraphs that it will not be tied down by the actual words of the state charter.

For further proof, consider that while the California constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of "sex, race, creed, color, or national or ethnic origin," it does not forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The justices somehow found something in the document that the authors thought they omitted.

Prudence and caution, which are virtues in the executive and the legislative branch, are no sin in the judiciary, either. What those attributes dictated here is that the court give civil unions a fair interval to show their merits or flaws in practice, rather than rushing in to pronounce them inadequate.

The justices would have been wise to mark time while the people of California continued on their path toward full equality for gays. Instead, the court has practically exhorted them to stop the journey. Opponents of gay rights have mounted a drive to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November, which stands a good chance of passing.

The exercise may end up not only overturning the Supreme Court's presumptuous decree but hardening public attitudes against the whole idea for years to come. In time, Californians would probably be inclined to embrace gay marriage. But if you insist they go there today, don't be surprised if they refuse.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Libertarians for Gay Marriage—Including Bob Barr!

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:43:00 EDT

From the chair of California's Libertarian Party:

People who truly cherish freedom see today's Supreme Court decision as a victory for liberty and common sense. There's no reason why consenting adults should not be allowed to marry so long as their arrangement doesn't interfere with any other individual's ability to live their life in any way they want to.

Many supporters see the decision as a repudiation of bigotry and narrow-mindedness. But Libertarians also see it as a step towards a revision of the larger public policy issue surrounding marriage. Californians should start asking their elected officials why government is involved in granting marriage licenses at all.

And here's Libertarian presidential hopeful Bob Barr (via Marc Ambinder):

Regardless of whether one supports or opposes same sex marriage, the decision to recognize such unions or not ought to be a power each state exercises on its own, rather than imposition of a one-size-fits-all mandate by the federal government (as would be required by a Federal Marriage Amendment which has been previously proposed and considered by the Congress). The decision today by the Supreme Court of California properly reflects this fundamental principle of federalism on which our nation was founded.

Missing Pedophiles

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In March, London’s Daily Mail reported that a British elementary school had obscured the heads of children in group photographs on the school’s website with oval smiley faces, “apparently to protect them from paedophiles.” The widespread anxieties underlying that bizarre incident are almost entirely off the mark, according to a recent review of the evidence concerning Internet-related sex crimes.

Writing in the February-March American Psychologist, Janis Wolak and three colleagues at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center conclude that “the stereotype of the Internet child molester who uses trickery and violence to assault children is largely inaccurate.” In their survey of more than 2,500 law enforcement agencies, “99 percent of victims of Internet-initiated sex crimes…were 13 to 17 years old, and none were younger than 12.” The cases typically involved teenagers who knew they were talking to adults online, agreed to meet them specifically for sex, and were not forced or threatened with violence.

In short, Internet-related sex crimes are overwhelmingly cases of statutory rape rather than child molestation.

Based on telephone surveys of 10-to-17-year-old Internet users, Wolak et al. also question commonly held beliefs about what kinds of online behavior expose teenagers to the risk of such encounters. Neither posting personal information nor participating in social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace was by itself associated with victimization. Instead the researchers found that “youths who interacted online with unknown people and also engaged in a high number of different risky online behaviors” (such as “having unknown people on a buddy list, talking online to unknown people about sex, seeking pornography online, [and] being rude or nasty online”) were “much more likely to receive aggressive sexual solicitations than were youths who interacted online with unknown people but restrained their risky behaviors.”

The idea that the Internet has fostered a “shocking increase in the sexual exploitation of children,” as Newsweek put it in 2001, also appears to be unfounded. Wolak and her colleagues estimate that Internet-related sex crimes account for something like 7 percent of all statutory rapes. They note that “several sex crime and abuse indicators have shown marked declines during the same period that Internet use has been expanding.”

The Investigation Continues, but Here Are a Few Reckless Allegations

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:18:00 EDT

Yesterday, attempting to retroactively justify the wholesale removal of children from the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch, Carey Cockerell, commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, insinuated that children at the ranch, which is owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), had been beaten severely enough to break their bones. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Cockerell told a state legislative committee "at least 41 children from the polygamous YFZ Ranch have had broken bones," which he said was "cause for concern." Yet USA Today reports that the medical textbook Fractures in Children "cites data that suggest 42% of boys and 27% of girls suffer at least one fracture before age 16." According to the latest official count, the state of Texas has taken custody of 464 minors who lived at YFZ, ranging in age from less than 1 to 17. If 41 of them have had broken bones, that's less than 10 percent over all, which, pace Cockerell, does not seem to be "cause for concern."

FLDS attorney Rod Parker notes that some of the children at YFZ suffer from brittle bone disease:

That makes some of the children more susceptible to broken bones. The mothers told CPS about that when they were taken in. They've known all along that the reason they might see higher incidence of broken bones was due to this condition. They have no evidence to support the implication it is due to child abuse.

Lloyd Barlow, a physician who lives at YFZ, said he'd seen no signs of abuse:

"Probably over 90 percent of the injuries are forearm fractures from ground-level or low level falls," Barlow told The Associated Press from his office at the Eldorado ranch. "I can also tell you that we don't live in a community where there is a pattern of abuse."
Barlow said he is an FLDS member but also a licensed physician in Texas and Utah and is required by law to report suspected abuse.
"What they are saying is that in the history of the lives of 400 some-odd children, there have been injuries. They are not saying they have 41 [current] fractures," he said.

Cockerell's department later backed away from his insinuation that the fractures were evidence of beatings:

Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Child Protective Services division, said the state was still investigating and Cockerell's comments were not meant to be an allegation of abuse.
"This is pretty early in this investigation, particularly given the number of children we've been interviewing," he said. "We are just looking into it."

This is pretty sleazy: There seem to be a lot of broken bones (though not any more than you'd expect in a random sample of American kids), and we're concerned about that, but we're not saying the kids were abused. We're just strongly implying it.

Cockerell also said "interviews with children and journals found at the ranch" have led investigators to believe some of the boys may have been sexually abused. Anyone who is familar with episodes like the trumped-up McMartin Preschool prosecutions understands how easy it is for social workers, through leading questions and repeated allegations, to elicit testimony from little kids that supports their preconceptions. As for the journals, since Cockerell says only that abuse may have occurred, I assume the written evidence is ambiguous as well.

Although it may turn out that some of the children at YFZ were abused physically and/or sexually, I don't trust Cockerell's investigators to find the truth, because I don't think they see that as their mission. Instead they are intent on showing, in the face of widespread criticism, that the state was right to separate all the children from their parents, even though there was no evidence of abuse in the vast majority of cases. The thing is, they will never be able to show the state was right, no matter what they find. At the time they forcibly removed these children, state officials conceded they had no reason to believe anyone was being beaten or that sexual abuse extended beyond the underage marriage of teenaged girls (the extent of which is disputed by FLDS members). As I noted in my column yesterday, in more than nine out of 10 cases their argument for separation hinged on the idea that bringing children up according to FLDS teachings was inherently abusive. If they subsequently find evidence of physical or sexual abuse, that does not make their rationale for removal any more legitimate.

Latter-Day Taint

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

I'm not quite as old-fashioned as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), which hews to the early-marriage customs of the 19th century and the polygamous practices of biblical times. But I'm old-fashioned enough to believe the government needs a good reason to pull a crying, clinging child away from her mother and hand her over to the care of strangers.

The possibility that the child might marry an older man 10 or 12 or 14 years from now does not cut it. Citing that long-term, speculative danger to justify the certain, immediate damage it has done by forcibly separating hundreds of children from their parents, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has violated its duty to take such extreme measures only when there's no other way to prevent imminent harm.

The department took custody of 463 minors who were living at the FLDS church's Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch in Eldorado after an April 3 raid that was based on an abuse report police believe was a hoax. On Monday state officials said the children, who are now living in group homes or shelters, include 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17, of whom 31 are pregnant or have children.

I don't know whether to believe that. Texas officials have proven unreliable even on such basic questions as the justification for the raid, which was a report of physical abuse from a 16-year-old YFZ resident who apparently does not exist, and the number of children seized, a figure that was revised yet again this week. Just a few days ago, the number of underage mothers was said to be 20.

It's not clear how the government determined the ages of these girls. It says many who claimed to be adults were in fact minors, while FLDS members say many of the girls the state describes as minors are in fact adults.

Furthermore, the age of consent for sex in Texas is 17, while the minimum age for marriage, with parental approval, is 16 (raised in 2005 from 14 with the FLDS in mind). Hence a pregnant 16- or 17-year-old is not necessarily evidence that any laws have been broken.

Even by the government's account, 463 children were forcibly removed from their homes because 7 percent of them may have been victims of sexual abuse. Although there's no evidence that boys or prepubescent girls were abused at YFZ, the minors in state custody include 213 boys and about 130 children under the age of 5.

What is the state's rationale for taking girls who were not pregnant or mothers along with those who were, for taking boys along with girls, and for taking infants, toddlers, and preschoolers along with teenagers? In an affidavit, it asserts "a pervasive pattern and practice of indoctrinating and grooming minor female children to accept spiritual marriages to adult male members of the YFZ Ranch resulting in them being abused." As for the boys, "after they become adults, [they] are spiritually married to minor female children and engage in sexual relationships with them resulting in them becoming sexually [sic] perpetrators."

In short, the whole FLDS culture is sick and corrupt, so anyone raised in that environment is ipso facto a victim of abuse. This theory of collective guilt, which was accepted by Judge Barbara Walther after a chaotic and cursory mass hearing on April 17, is the antithesis of the individualized risk assessment that is supposed to justify taking a child from his parents.

Some YFZ residents say they do not approve of marriage before the legal age of consent, while others say they do not practice polygamy at all. Yet all were tarred with the same broad brush, based on a principle that church attorney Rod Parker aptly summed up this way: "If you're a member of this religious group, then you're not allowed to have children."

First They Came for the Toddlers...

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:25:00 EDT

The FLDS raid in Texas looks more ludicrous every day. Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Scott Henson takes aim at Judge Barbara Walther:

Excuse me, Judge? You issued a sweeping, house-to-house search warrant based on a highly questionable anonymous call that turned out to be phony. You refused to allow individual hearings for children, grouping them together like cattle. You accepted the testimony of an expert on "cults" who only learned about FLDS from media accounts, rather than an academic who'd studied them professionally for 18 years.

You've ruled the existence of five girls between 16 and 19 who were pregnant or had children was evidence of systematic abuse, even though in Texas 16-year-olds can marry with parental consent. You've ruled young toddlers are in "immediate" danger because of their parents' beliefs or what might happen 15 years from now, not because anyone abuses them.

From the evidence presented publicly, I do not believe that the children have been sexually abused or physically harmed. Allegations of forcible rape turned out to be bogus, and only five girls 16 to 19 years old were found pregnant or with children -- probably about the same ratio you'd find if you rounded up all the kids in my neighborhood....

In Eldorado, no one alleges YFZ parents are themselves abusing children. Instead the allegation (in court, at least) is that they're teaching their kids that a woman's highest calling is giving birth and raising children and that it's acceptable to get married at an early age. Even if it were true, and the allegation was disputed, can this really be enough to seize children from their homes?

Hanson has been covering the case heavily on his excellent blog. Also invaluable: The Polygamy Files, a blog by Brooke Adams of The Salt Lake Tribune, who has been on the fundamentalist Mormon beat for years. One piece of good news: Judge Walther has reversed her decision to separate FLDS mothers from children less than 12 months old.

And yes, it may turn out that there was some genuine sexual abuse in that community. If so, it should be punished. But even then, the approach the government has taken would be deeply harmful overkill, for reasons expressed pithily by Les Jones:

Imagine that some parents in a school district were accused of child abuse. Now imagine that the authorities took every child from the elementary, junior high, and high school away from their parents and put them in foster care. That's a rough analogy of what's happening in Texas.

The difference, I guess, is that the FLDS parents belong to a "cult." And once you've applied that label, it's just a quick step to assuming they do everything en masse.

Big Love and Big Government

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:46:00 EDT

Lots of people in the comments have asked for a thread on the Texas polygamy case.

Here you are.

I haven't had the time to thoroughly read up on the case, so I don't yet have an opinion of the propriety of the police action. If Scott Henson's take is correct, I guess my opinion would be that given what we now know, the tactics seem excessive, the justification for the raid iffy at best, and the cult in question is unquestionably icky.

Ickiness alone isn't illegal, of course. And if Texas law says parents can marry their 15-year-old daughters off to 60-year-old men, perhaps we should talk about the wisdom of that law, not arrest the people who still manage to stay within it, repugnant as they may be.

I have seen other reports in which police do claim to have found evidence of girls on the compound being pregnant while as young as 13. So I guess we'll have to wait and see how it all shakes out.

In the meantime, here's something to mull over: Should we allow parents to give consent for a child under 18 to marry, or to have sexual relations? If 18 is that state's age of consent, I think I'd be inclined to argue that we shouldn't.

But it's an interesting question.

As Goes Bangor, So Goes Maine

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:21:00 EDT

Last week Maine became the fourth state, along with Arkansas, Louisiana, and California, to prohibit smoking in vehicles carrying minors. Its law, which covers all passengers under 16 and allows primary enforcement (meaning that a driver can be pulled over just for violating the smoking ban), is the strictest so far. The Arkansas and Louisiana bans apply only to little children. California's covers anyone below 18, but a smoker can be cited only if he's first pulled over for some other reason. The main backer of Bangor's car smoking ban, after which the state law is modeled, says next year he will push Maine legislators to raise the cutoff age to 18 and increase the penalty, now a $50 fine. Police can't know the age of people in a car until they pull it over, of course, so the law could provide a handy excuse for hassling young adults who smoke, especially if its coverage is extended to 16- and 17-year-olds. Don't like the looks of that long-haired 20-year-old with a NORML bumper sticker? If he's smoking in the presence of someone who might be a teenager, you've got all the justification you need for a traffic stop.

My previous comments on car smoking bans (and my reasons for thinking they are not justified by the need to prevent child abuse) can be found here, here, and here, among other places.

Toddlers Are Not Not Allowed to Marry

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:34:00 EDT

An extraneous not in a 2007 law briefly allowed children of any age to marry in Arkansas, as long as they had parental permission. The botched passage read:

In order for a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is not pregnant to obtain a marriage license, the person must provide the county clerk with evidence of parental consent to the marriage.

In a special session last week, the state legislature re-established the old minimum ages for marriage with parental permission: 16 for girls and 17 for boys. Evidently legislators abandoned the attempt to carve out an exception for girls younger than 16 who are pregnant, perhaps fearing that the mysterious marriage not would slip back in.

Here's a rundown of legal marriage ages in various states. Until a couple years ago, when lawmakers established a minimum marriage age of 15, Kansas was among the loosest, allowing girls as young as 12 to marry with parental permission. Neighboring Nebraska had a minimum age of 17, the sort of discrepancy that can cause tabloid headlines.

This Would Have Made Those Shitty Sgt. Rock Comics a Lot More Interesting...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:10:00 EDT

...and it would have rendered moot the drama behind the pop ballad "Billy Don't Be a Hero." But the times they are a-changin':

In a historic but little-noticed change in policy, the Army is allowing scores of husband-and-wife soldiers to live and sleep together in the war zone - a move aimed at preserving marriages, boosting morale and perhaps bolstering re-enlistment rates at a time when the military is struggling to fill its ranks five years into the fighting.
"It makes a lot of things easier," said Frazier, 33, a helicopter maintenance supervisor in the 3rd Infantry Division. "It really adds a lot of stress, being separated. Now you can sit face-to-face and try to work out things and comfort each other."
Long-standing Army rules barred soldiers of the opposite sex from sharing sleeping quarters in war zones. Even married troops lived only in all-male or all-female quarters and had no private living space.
But in May 2006, Army commanders in Iraq, with little fanfare, decided that it is in the military's interest to promote wedded bliss. In other words: What God has joined together, let no manual put asunder.
"It's better for the soldiers, which means overall it's better for the Army," said Command Sgt. Maj. Mark Thornton of the 3rd Infantry.

More here.

Why are People Having Fewer Kids?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

The "demographic winter" is coming. So warns a new documentary of the same name. What is the demographic winter? The phrase, according to the film's promotional materials, "denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates, also referred to as the 'birth dearth,' and what that portends." The first half of Demographic Winter was previewed at the conservative Heritage Foundation a couple of weeks ago. According the film, the demographic winter augurs little good, e.g., economic collapse and social deterioration. If current trends continue world population should begin a steep decline sometime around the middle of the 21st century. Why?

Because total fertility rates (TFRs) are plummeting around the world. Population stability is achieved when each woman bears an average of 2.1 kids over the course of her lifetime—one for her, one for her male partner, and a little overage to make up to childhood deaths. Today, there are sixty countries in which TFRs are below 2.1. For example, the European Union's TFR is 1.5 and no EU member state has a TFR at replacement or above. Even high population developing countries have seen steep declines in fertility. Since 1970, China's TFR fell from 5.8 to 1.6; India's from 5.8 to 2.9; Indonesia from 5.6 to 2.4; Japan's from 2.0 to 1.3; Mexico's from 6.8 to 2.4; Brazil's from 5.4 to 2.3; and South Africa's from 5.9 to 2.7. The U.S. TFR dropped from 2.55 in 1970 to around 2.1 today, largely because of the influx of higher fertility immigrants. However, the fertility of second generation Americans drops to the level of longer established Americans.

I doubt that the "demographic winter" portends economic collapse or social deterioration, but let us set that aside for this column, and instead ask why people are choosing to have fewer children? After all, voluntary childlessness seems to violate the Darwinian premise that our genes dispose us, like all other creatures, to try to reproduce.

However, demographic data are undercutting the notion that there is some kind of sociobiological nurturing imperative, economist and demographer Nicholas Eberstadt noted during the question period following the documentary. As evidence, he pointed to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where 30 percent of women are childless and that Hong Kong's TFR has been below 1 birth per woman for at least a decade.

Demographic Winter asserts that "every aspect of modernity works against family life and in favor of singleness and small families or voluntary childlessness." And surely they are right. Modern societies offer people many other satisfactions and choices outside of the family. In particular women find that their time becomes more highly valued in occupations outside the home. There are no iron laws of demography, but one that comes pretty close is that the more educated women are, the fewer children they tend to have. Eberstadt also noted the best predictor of fertility levels is the desired family size as reported by women. And finally, the most profound event of the 20th century may have been the sexual revolution's drive toward gender equality, enabled by modern contraception. Unlike other creatures, people can have the fun of sex without the side effect of parenthood.

So, modernity essentially transforms children from capital goods that produce family income into consumption items to be enjoyed for their own sakes, more akin to sculptures, paintings, or theatre. But that's just the problem—according to happiness researchers, people don't really enjoy rearing children.

"Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact," reports Harvard psychologist and happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert. In addition, the more children a person has the less happy they are. According to Gilbert, researchers have found that people derive more satisfaction from eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television than taking care of their kids. "Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework," asserts Gilbert in his bestselling, Stumbling on Happiness (2006).

Of course, that's not what most parents say when asked. For instance, in a 2007 Pew Research Center survey people insisted that their relationships with their little darlings are of the greatest importance to their personal happiness and fulfillment. However, the same survey also found "by a margin of nearly three-to-one, Americans say that the main purpose of marriage is the 'mutual happiness and fulfillment' of adults rather than the 'bearing and raising of children.'"

Gilbert suggests that people claim their kids are their chief source of happiness largely because it's what they are expected to say. In addition, Gilbert observes that the more people pay for an item, the more highly they tend to value it and children are expensive, even if you don't throw in piano lessons, soccer camps, orthodonture, and college tuitions. Gilbert further notes that the more children people have, the less happy they tend to be. Since that is the case, it is not surprising that people are choosing to have fewer children. And if people with fewer children are happier, then people with no children must be happiest, right? Not exactly, but the data do suggest that voluntarily childless women and men are not less happy than parents. And they sure do have more money to squander as they try to pursue what happiness they can and strive to somehow fill up their allegedly empty lives.

Disclosure: My wife and I try not to flaunt our voluntarily childless lifestyle too much.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.