The Institute for Family Studies just released “The Demographic Dead End: Without Action, American Population Will Soon Decline,” the most recent of many studies pointing to the impending cataclysm for Western societies from extended periods of below-replacement fertility rates.  The IFS study is hardly unique: more and more people and institutions are talking about population decline and aging societies.

Despite the handwringing, however, few politicians or other public figures are doing much about it, and their suggested solutions are polarized: the Left mostly proposes importing Third World “replacement” populations, especially to do hard work, while the Right recommends helping the market’s “invisible hand” with pro-natalist government subsidies.

Both sides fail to recognize a basic postulate of Pope St. John Paul II’s thought: Culture is upstream from politics and economics.  We are not going to fix our demographic dearth without first fixing our culture.  And that means grappling hard with the “ethic of choice.”

Liberal Western societies enshrine free “choice” as a basic value.  The United States, in particular, has long espoused laissez-faire choice.

But that embrace of choice was tempered in our societies by other cultural factors.  American society, when it was still shaped by mainline Protestantism (with a Catholic immigrant minority), tempered unfettered choice with moral norms.

Even in Western societies that consciously sought to tear up their religious roots, e.g., France laïque, Christian cultural holdovers kept partially in check the worst impulses of free-ranging choice, not least because of their concrete experience of what happens – e.g., the Reign of Terror – when those checks were ignored.

Those societies are largely gone.  Secularization has dissipated cultural Christianity, even in America to a large degree.  Many Christian denominations have abandoned normative goods: take a look at the fractures, mostly over sex, in the American Protestant Mainline. There are also those in Catholicism who would like to accompany those neo-Protestant Pied Pipers. And contrary to charges that opposing those infidelities is importing “pelvic theology” into a Christianity that has “moved on” to “more serious” matters, pelvic matters are hardly incidental inasmuch as no one would exist without them.

Mainstream Christianity recognized that people had choices. But there are good choices and evil choices, whose value depends not on the intention of the doer but the nature of what is chosen. That was before the dominance of what Joseph Ratzinger called “the dictatorship of relativism,” a phenomenon fostered by modern philosophy’s resistance to recognizing normative good and evil, abetted by a flaccid “Christianity,” concealing its cowardice behind the seemingly virtuous phrase, “Who am I to judge?”

Alongside that relativization of the good came the exaltation of freedom.  Atheistic existentialism, especially post-Sartre and Camus, shifted the very role of freedom.  Free choice, not pre-existing reality, became constitutive of the good.  Rather than making the good (or evil) mine, freedom now made morally amorphous acts “good.” We got “my good” and “your good” but not “the good.” (The previous president of Harvard, fired after disastrous testimony in front of Congress about antisemitism, lamely complained that she hadn’t been able to express “my good.”)

That redefinition of choice has had profound consequences for children.  Instead of being a gift of God received as good, children now became “choices.”  The whole abortion ethic in the United States (and much of the Western world) was grounded in an ethic of “a woman’s choice.” If she chose to continue her baby’s life, that was good, but if she chose to end it, that was good, too.

Pro-life bumper stickers captured a deep truth: “It’s a child, not a choice.” The ontological dignity of every child (the fundamental truth of our being made in the image and likeness of God) and his right to life is neither established nor cancelled by a maternal “choice.”  She may choose to ignore or deny that truth, but the choice changes neither the reality nor the moral question.

Which brings us full circle to the thesis we started with: There are some choices we should (and shouldn’t) make.  There are choices available to our freedom for which, nevertheless, that freedom should not be used.

In saying this, we must be aware that the very formulation “there are choices we should (or shouldn’t) make” is in some ways incomprehensible to modern people.  To those raised on an ethic of choice in which the act of choosing itself is what determines the morality of an act, the idea that a choice can be the subject of a “should” (or, even more so, “should not”) makes no sense.

Such thinking is never invoked outside sexual matters.  Few people would say that because you can choose to lie or steal, that the choice is the end of the moral question.  The prohibition of “should” is a peculiar pelvic exception.

That distorted notion of choice floating through our culture is the ultimate reason why we have a demographic drought. You can try to blame all sorts of “social and economic factors.” They exist, of course. But at bottom, we have lost the commonsense proposition clear to previous generations that “you should have children.” That, at a certain age, most men and women should get married and then should have babies.

Having babies is not just a biological phenomenon, much less a “curse” that medication or technology eliminates.  Having babies is not just a social expectation or gender role.  It is a normal development for the average person by which he grows out of himself towards responsibility for others. That’s what Erik Erikson was getting at in his psychosocial developmental stage of “generativity.”

Restoring our culture means rooting out a false notion of “choice” – especially in the procreative realm – where the inherent dignity of a new life can be cancelled by “choice.” Until our cultural atmosphere is reinfused with solid social assumptions that make us believe having a baby is a normal and natural thing that people ordinarily should do, importing a labor force or enhancing parental payments may give us marginal benefits. But won’t come close to touching the real problem.