I’ve just returned from my sons’ sports day. It was hot, there wasn’t much shade, and he didn’t win. Good job it’s all about the taking part.
I took refuge in the biscuit tent and there I met a mum a few years older than me which would have put her at around 50. She held in her arms the bonniest baby I have seen for a long time. In fact, I haven’t seen many babies for a while, what with them all being aborted.
“I want to keep her in the shade,” the mum said. “Would you hold her for me while I go and watch my son race?” I didn’t need to be asked twice. I happily grabbed little baby Maria and sat her on my knee, me with my seven biscuits and her with her slobbery one. I told her all about how when I hurdled for Hertfordshire I fell over at the final hurdle. She laughed. I couldn’t be angry with her for finding it funny, she was just too lovely.
Baby Maria might not have lived had she not been the product of the fruitful love of a Catholic couple open to life (and with seven children already). Mum fell unexpectedly pregnant after an eight-year gap and Baby Maria has Down’s syndrome. She was passed from me to a sixth former, and then on to a few of the lower school boys, all taking it in turns to keep her out of the sun.
The young men in this all-boys’ school began awkwardly at first, holding her like a rugby ball, before finding their feet and settling into it – any teenage swagger they might have had was instantly forgotten as she wrapped her chubby little arms around their neck and nuzzled her head against theirs. It was lovely to see.
I wondered how many young men growing up today have much experience of the rough and tumble of large family life, of changing dirty nappies, of practising patience, turn-taking, sensitivity, sacrifice, of nurturing the skills necessary to care for others. Not many it seems.
Pregnant women and babies should not be a rare sight, but they are becoming such.
In her recent interview on Triggernometry, Alex Kaschuta explained that only three per cent of the world’s population are living in countries where the fertility rate is not declining. This is not something that we are necessarily aware of as we go about our daily lives, but we will start to become more aware of an increasingly elderly population as the pyramid reverses and Sadiq Khan implements Zimmer Frame lanes across London.
Women in the UK, themselves from small families, are choosing to put off motherhood until later in life. An inconveniently-timed pregnancy is terminated in favour of a better-timed one which may never come.
The global population collapse is no apocalyptic fantasy, it’s happening now.
What did we expect would be the result of the contraceptive pill and widespread access to abortion? As Alice von Hildebrand says, “A society, like ours, which has opted for death, has sealed its own demise”.
It is predicted that we are watching the last of the South Koreans march into their graves as abysmal birthrates there have fallen below one child per couple. This pattern is to be found across the West where we are fed a starter of overpopulation and climate catastrophe, a main course of self-worship and harm reduction, a cheese course of artificial intelligence and a dessert of contraception and abortion – all washed down with the perfect pairing of euthanasia. It’s a grizzly sommelier at work.
Meanwhile our so-called Conservative government has implemented policies that financially disincentivise the formation of families (ignoring the cost of doing so) whilst catastrophising the putative cost of using plastic straws, which we’re all going to need when we are a nation of old folk on liquified food.
It’s grim. It really is. I know it’s summer and the roses are blooming beautiful, and no one wants to hear about the thorns. So, let’s focus instead on a future in bloom, because much as I love dear Alice von H our demise does not have to be sealed, just yet.
In deeply religious Georgia, the only country to have moved from below replacement rate to above, parents are incentivised to have a large family by the promise of a baptismal ceremony for their fourth child conducted by the patriarch himself. I’m not sure the promise of having a fourth child baptised by Justin Welby would have any more pull than a complimentary Frappuccino from Starbucks, so what can largely secular UK do to affect the same change?
One crucial step is to normalise large families. “What you hear in whispers, proclaim from the housetops” Mt 10:27. Get these mothers and fathers into schools to shout about it. If you have a large family, contact your local secondary school and ask whether you might visit during RSHE and talk about your vocation as mother and wife, husband and father. If you dare, let the teenagers hold your baby. Don’t let the first baby they ever hold be their own at 38 years old. You can be sure they will have engineers, CEOs, doctors and lawyers coming to encourage them into such professions, why not throw parenting into the mix?
If it really is all about equality, diversity and inclusion – then let that include parents of large families; mothers who did not abort their baby for having Down’s syndrome or because they were the product of rape, couples who married at 25 and are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, dads who have made sacrifices to support their wives and children, women who paradoxically find themselves through making a sincere gift of themselves as mothers. Many kids in school won’t hear these messages unless we bear witness to them.
You might wonder who would buy it in this day and age, just as there were those who wondered the same about Jesus’ difficult message: turn the other cheek, lay down your life, love your enemy, pray for those who persecute you, be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect. It turns out there were a lot of takers.
We need to counter the rhetoric coming from those like Hulda Hjartardottir, head of the Prenatal Diagnosis Unit at Landspitali University Hospital, who tells mothers: “This is your life. You have the right to choose how your life will look like. We don’t look at abortion as a murder. We look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication … preventing suffering for the child and for the family. And I think that is more right than seeing it as a murder – that’s so black and white. Life isn’t black and white. Life is grey.”
We need to show our young people that while living can often be grey, life itself is black and white.
It’s the difference between baby Maria existing or not existing. Son Heung-min existing or not existing. Let them hold the baby and see how black and white it really is. Parents of the world unite and shake the hibernating hearts from their slumber.
(CNS photo/Tony Gentile, Reuters)
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.