“Where are the children of the native population of this country?”
News article filed by Margaret Webb
The papers have been recently full of politicians’ statement and reports talking about the damage done to this country by the uncontrolled influx of immigrants over the last ten years sponsored by the Labour government’s policies. Some might consider it ironic that while the British National Party has endured years of vile insults for making precisely the same points – that mass immigration was putting intolerable strain on social services, affordable housing, schools, the NHS, and on the patience and toleration of Britons – now that the government’s own researchers are saying it, no one bats an eye. Still, one mustn’t hold a grudge. At least they’re finally saying it.
There has been some satisfaction upon hearing government officials admit at last, years too late, that their population increase estimates had been too low and need “major revision.” Some satisfaction, but not a great deal considering the cost of the mistake. We are told that 240,000 more people are expected to come to Britain this year than will leave and that Britain’s population will rise to 71 million within the next quarter of a century. Yesterday’s papers held even more gruesome estimates of 81 million inhabitants of this sceptered isle by 2050.
It is anyone’s guess what the state of the country’s social system will be by then. If as many people continue pouring into this country as do now at the current rate, it is hard to imagine that Britain will bear any resemblance in fifty years to the nation Churchill knew and that our fathers so hard fought for. Despite this, the chorus continues from all the major parties that immigration into Britain is essential to the economy, to maintain the workforce and the future of our State-controlled pensions and benefits in old age. In short, we are told we British who have given up having children, need not only nice young healthy workers to maintain our lifestyles (and tax base) for the moment, but we will need the children those workers will have in order to keep the whole thing rolling into the next five decades.
This assertion is dismally supported by the statistical trends, known for some time to demographers, and outlined in terrifying detail by the Canadian columnist Mark Steyn in his book America Alone. They show that the birth rate in Britain, like that of the rest of secularised and (temporarily) materially affluent Europe, is dropping while the population ages.
Let us compare the numbers of some of the most popular places of immigrants to Britain, with those of the population of Britain as a whole. The US Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, tells us that the median age of people in Afghanistan is 17.6 years and the birth rate is 46.21 births/1,000 people. The median age of Syrians is 21.1 years with 27.19 births/1,000 people. In Pakistan, the median age is 20.9 years with 27.52 births/1,000 people.
The white, that is, native British population makes up about 92% of our 60 million people. This breaks down roughly into “racial” groups as follows: English 83.6%, Scottish 8.6%, Welsh 4.9%, Northern Irish 2.9% black (presumably this means African or Jamaican) 2%, Indian 1.8%, Pakistani 1.3%, and “mixed” 1.2%.
In the UK, the median age for both men and women is 39.6 years. For just women, it’s 40.7 years, getting, in other words, towards the end of the child-bearing years. The birth rate is just 10.67 births/1,000 people. The total fertility rate of Britain is 1.66 children born per woman. The minimum rate necessary to maintain a steady population, that is, to fail to grow, is 2.1 children per woman.
Permanent change
This week, the Office for National Statistics told us that the drop in the birth rate is slowing slightly, but this is due to the influx of immigrants. While there is some evidence of more births among “people born in Britain”, the favoured government euphemism for white native Britons, whatever increase there has been is driven by the birth rate among immigrants. The ONS further tells us that British people are aging and that by 2008 there will be more pensioners in this country than children.
Sir Andrew Green of immigration watchdog MigrationWatch said, “These figures are hugely important. They imply that the nature of British society will irrevocably and permanently be changed for our children and grandchildren.”
“These changes are taking place,” he said, “without the public having a voice.”
And the birth rate will not only continue to drop, but will start falling faster and faster as more women top the child bearing years. Right now, the median age of British women is past the age at which women easily conceive children. When the majority of a population’s females are past their fertile years, the rate of acceleration towards the bottom of the fertility slope gets faster and faster.
The native British population is at the edge of the demographic precipice right now – from which it is all but impossible to return – and is not slowing down.
Cheery, yes?
Let us turn our attention now to another hot media topic, one, oddly enough, that is almost never treated in the press as in any way related to our demographic problems: abortion.
Abortion has been in the news this week because a Commons committee, in light of its upcoming 40th anniversary, is discussing whether the 1967 Abortion Act needs to be re-examined. They are discussing whether recent medical findings about the unborn child’s ability to survive outside the womb and feel pain at earlier ages warrants changing the gestational age limit for legal abortion. There are proposals to have it lowered from 24 weeks to 20, or 16; raised to the US and Canadian situation where there is no age limit and abortions can be carried out up to five minutes before natural birth; or left unchanged.
Meanwhile, in typical Labour Party fashion, the government has announced it has no intention of changing the gestational age limit, no matter what the findings of its own committee.
Pro-life advocates, however, have pointed out that all this amounts to so much argument over celestial pin-head tap dance routines. They say, simply, that abortion cannot remain legal because it is wrong to kill innocent children, an argument that is ignored and ridiculed with terrifying regularity.
Too many abortions
But even some who are generally supportive of what is called “a woman’s right to choose” are starting to say that things are a little out of hand. Several of today’s newspapers carries a forthright statement from Lord Steele, whose private members’ bill became the 1967 Abortion Act and who tells us forthrightly that there are simply too many abortions in Britain. Too many women, he said, are using abortion as a form of long-term contraception, which is not what his bill was intended to do.
Others are complaining that with the prevalence of ultra sound scans, children with minor genetic problems like the easily correctable club foot, or cleft palate, are being killed under the clause in the Act that allows abortion for “serious” handicaps. And fewer children with Downs syndrome are allowed to survive to birth every year. This, they say, is a renewed form of eugenics, the quest for creating a superior human race.
The abortion rate in the UK is increasing, as it has done every year since the Act was passed. If it was indeed intended that legal abortion was to be used only in those rare cases where the mother would die, or the child had no chance of survival either up to or after birth, then its purpose has been utterly subverted. Every year since abortion has been legal the records have shown that the vast majority have been for what are sometimes called “social” reasons. That is, for personal preference not to become a parent or out of financial fears; the children, in other words, have been perfectly healthy, as have the mothers.
Since the Act’s passage, it is estimated that over six million British children, to put it as politely as possible, have not been born. The annual numbers have increased to almost 200,000 a year. A staggering one in five British pregnancies now ends in abortion.
Had they been allowed to live, about half the children aborted would now be old enough to have children of their own, so the demographic disaster is not due only to the missing six million children, but also to the hypothetical many millions more who would have been conceived had their parents not been killed before birth.
Abortion in Britain, as it is everywhere, is more prevalent in the upper echelons of society. In general, the better education a woman has, the more likely she is to abort her children. This means that we have been killing off the most promising generation, those who would have been expected to follow their parents’ footsteps and enter university.
With all of the above in mind, the question raised by the statistics mentioned above, ‘Where are the children of the native population of this country?’ is suddenly answered.