It’s not just that European nations aren’t having children. They’re increasingly preventing the children they do have from being born.
‘T he lamps are going out all over Europe,” British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey wistfully and presciently remarked shortly before the United Kingdom’s entry into World War I. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Over a century later, the lamps are going out once more. And though there is again a war on the European continent, one whose carnage is not to be neglected, Europe has set an altogether different blood-dimmed tide upon itself that also demands witness. If it is less visible to the world, it is only because the lives affected are in the dark — by being denied the possibility of ever existing.
Europe’s fertility crisis has been ongoing virtually since it was fashionable to worry about the supposed opposite crisis of overpopulation. In 2022, the European Union registered its lowest number of births since 1960, at 3.88 million. That was the first time the figure fell below 4 million. The average number of births per woman was a tick under 1.5 — closer to 1.0 in some nations, but nowhere was it above the level at which a population grows rather than shrinks.
There is a dawning awareness that such low birth rates are a problem: for the perpetuation of economies and the maintenance of social insurance systems, and for the small matter of ensuring that nations, and the human race itself, continue.
It is not exactly a consolation, but is at least a reality with which to reckon, that fertility rates tend naturally to decline in nations that reach the stage of development many in Europe have. It is unsurprising that the continent that sought most aggressively to bring about history’s end is now most aggressively afflicted with this tendency. But Europeans have taken this recognizable pattern to the point of obliviousness, apathy, or even outright antagonism toward the future. Their history (probably) cannot be erased. But they will increasingly lack a posterity to recognize it, much less to ensure further chapters.
Even more disturbing, however, is that many Europeans are actively willing this fate upon themselves. A great number of them are doing so not just through deciding not to have children but by snuffing out the lives of children yet to be born. Last year, France, in another Jacobin turn, enshrined a right to abortion into its constitution. The Nation, that reliable barometer of American Jacobinism, recently highlighted the widespread use of abortion pills in Sweden. They are legally permissible through 22 weeks of pregnancy. “We’re creating miscarriages with medicine,” one Swedish hospital midwife said. Of European Union member states, only Poland and Malta meaningfully limit abortion.
The British Isles, so often in European history aloof from the Continent’s various madnesses, have sadly succumbed to this one. Last month, the U.K. voted to decriminalize abortion at any stage. It is too soon to attribute to this legislation the dire results of preceding legal regimes. But those results are dire nonetheless. Recently released statistics revealed that nearly a third of conceptions in England and Wales ended in abortion in 2022. Recent changes, sadly, seem only a culmination of this pattern, not a deviation from it. Abortion has claimed some 10 million lives since its initial legalization in the U.K. in 1967. Meanwhile, Ireland, so long resistant to English mores, voted to liberalize its abortion laws in a 2018 referendum. Now, one in six unborn lives ends in abortion there.
Between the two pincers of choice and violence, Europe is negating its own future. Our country is not necessarily safe from a similar fate. Though Roe is gone, returning the regulation of abortion to the states, many of the latter have embraced abortion regimes even more radical than what Roe enabled. The slaughter of some 60 million innocents between Roe and Dobbs cannot be erased. And pro-lifers have yet to undo the moral distortion the prior regime of widespread abortion inflicted on the nation. Abortion pills may be more limited in this country than in Sweden (and should be restricted even more), but they now account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions here. In self-destructing, though, Europe is leading the way, as it has before in other baneful ways.
The catastrophe of World War I devastated European combatants for a generation or more. It deprived nations of some of their most promising youths. It forever imprinted itself on those who fought and survived, and even on those who never saw combat. The violence it unleashed changed Europe’s conception of itself and laid the groundwork for further violence and chaos to come. We have yet fully to see the extent of the distortive and corrupting horrors this other form of violence, inflicted not by adults on their peers but by adults on children, will bring forth. Europe’s lamps will truly go out — by the hand of the lamplighters themselves. Mere self-annihilation may prove the least frightening aspect of the darkness that will follow.