[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG2IZEzUmA0]

While not the best piece of cinematic art out there (review coming super soon), it’s got truth, science and a compelling message on its side. We need more people and investors willing to put this message out there, and directors/ producers like Rick Stout and Barry McLerran to do it.

Once people realize it’s not that healthy or safe, it deconstructs relationships and marriages and potentially ends pregnancies, they throw one last argument in the mix: overpopulation. Throw this on your crumbling polemical pyre, folks: threatening overpopulation is a myth. While there has been exponential population growth, especially in the last century, it is not having the disastrous effect as was predicted by chicken little butterfly specialist (yes, really) Paul Erlich in the 70′s. Mind you, none of his hyperbolic and sensationalist predictions of “The Population Bomb” have come true.

I know that people feel really strongly about this, and are really attached to the idea of overpopulation. This is fueled by heart-wrenching pictures of emaciated children in parts of the world where civil wars and genocidal dictators have taken away their access to food–not the sheer numbers of the population. For those whom this video ticks off or perhaps surprises you, I would encourage you to not only check out the Population Research Institute, but to see the documentary Demographic Winter (review forthcoming).

After you do that, you can check additional secular pieces in well known publications to confirm the crisis of rapidly declining fertility rates.

Have you read John Senior?

A friend not too long ago recommended his book, “The Restoration of Christian Culture,” and told me a little about his life and times at Kansas University. Really, a heroic life. 

The precursor to the recommended book was a much more somber “The Death of Christian Culture.” Both books were actually a series of lectures given, and later published. Anyway, I ordered them both, and am reading Death right now. It’s intellectually satisfying, poetically written and frighteningly prophetic. I’ve been told the second one is much better. Since this one is brilliant, I can’t wait to read the next.

A little sample relevant to our themes of natural family planning, love, life and children:

It is no accident that decadence leads to the hatred of children…

Conversely, he affirms:

This is the economy of the private enterprise of love: it generates. Love is fecund. Love is not only a means to an end, like a road, but is a kind of propulsion. It is like walking up an escalator, or swimming with the current–to beget children, to love children, to encourage their growth, to ease their sufferings, and to suffer oneself with them, even to our death.

He’s elucidating the relationship between the decline of Christian culture and the denigration of children, using the case of a mother who was acquitted of murdering her week old child because she was special needs and did not want her. Yet the courtroom erupted in cheers when the verdict was announced.

He goes on to debunk Thomas Malthus, the disproved 19th century economist who predicted that England’s population would outrun its food sources by 1850. (How are we doing, England?)

 As I’ve said elsewhere, children are not the problem; they are the answer. People are not walking carbon footprints, but potential solutions to contemporary problems. 

Every time a child is born, not just a mouth to feed is born, but hands and brains. [ A quote in Senior's book from Josue de Castro, a founder and director of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, and one of the five or six world-renowned men in the field of human population problems.]

This is a surprisingly quasi-balanced article

She talks about how larger families don’t seem to be inherently immoral as Porritt suggest, but states, “If large families are the stuff of spectacle, it is partly because they have become rarer.”

I really like that Zernike delves into this topic with a sympathetic ear and a balanced pen, but the question she doesn’t ask–or at least doesn’t publish–in depth is why large families are rarer. Sure, she mentions the dawn of contraception and its widespread use, but she doesn’t get to the burning question at hand: why do large families forgo contraception, and what are the results, and the differences between them and the “average” family? A great follow up to this article would be a piece on the contra-contraception movement, which is made up of a diversity of advocates, large families and small.

Zernike does go the extra mile to show that these families are regular, intelligent people, and I like that.  She also shows their sense of humor in the face of intrusive and rude comments about their family size, relaying any number of sassy replies.

Among her interviewees is Leslie Fields, author of “The Case for Kids,” whose brave and forthright testimony in Christianity Today drew all sorts of angry letters. (Thank you Lambeth ’30 for planting those seeds.) Fields rightly notes that you can’t even enter into debate with people who are that angry and irrational (as we found out from the childfree comment-and-crucify session we had last year and the year before).

Some of my favorite quotes:
“How can you afford so many? ‘Lifestyles are expensive, not kids.’ ”

“‘Children are a kind of wealth,’ Mrs. Curtis said. ‘Just not the kind of wealth our society tends to focus on.’”

Eberstadt journalistically gelds the ridiculous glee of Humanae Vitae critics. Frankly, she packs a politically incorrect punch as well, so gird your loins. Her brief opening ends with a restrained,

“ He that sittethin the heavens shall laugh,” the Psalmist promises, specifically in a passage about enjoying vindication over one’s adversaries. If that is so, then the racket on this fortiethanniversary must be prodigious. Four decades later, not only have the document’s signature predictions been ratified in empirical force, but they have been ratified as few predictions ever are: in ways its authors could not possibly have foreseen, including by information that did not exist when the document was written, by scholars and others with no interest whatever in its teaching, and indeed even inadvertently, and in more ways than one, by many proud public adversaries of the Church.
Forty years later, there are more than enough ironies, both secular and religious, to make one swear there’s a humorist in heaven. “

In her six part article (homage to Pope Paul the Sixth?), she breaks it down. All the natural law aside (and that’s like saying to house builder, “The foundation aside…”), she focuses on section 17, which warned that if contraception became widely accepted, four things would result: “…a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.” Hmm…some of those things–four fourths to be exact–sound familiar.

Sociologists, demographers, anthropologists, economists, and other academics in the fields related to or working withsocial science have darkly vindicated Pope Paul VI and his predictions. And not so fast! Before you accuse the scientists of some sort of Catholic Conspiracy of concocting data, the irony is that most of these scientists (though truth be told, not all) are not Catholic, and in some cases, could care less about HMC (Holy Mother Church) and the teachings of the LJC (Lord Jesus Christ). A well-known sociologist says,

“The leading scholars who have tackled these topics are not Christians, and most of them are not political or social conservatives. They are, rather, honest social scientists willing to follow the data wherever it may lead.”

The list of researchers affirming the statistical data pointing to lowering of morality and the breakup of the family (and resulting societal challenges and ills) includes Nobel Prize winning George Akerlof, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Judith Wallerstein, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Sara McLanahan, Gary Sandefur, David Blankenhorn, James Q. Wilson, Linda Waite, Maggie Gallagher, Kay Hymowitz, Elizabeth Marquardt, W. Bradford Wilcox, Charles Murray, Francis Fukuyama, and more… The sexual revolution has not paid off, and they know it.

Further,

“Consider the work of maverick sociobiologist Lionel Tiger. Hardly a cat’s-paw of the pope—he describes religion as “a toxic issue”—Tiger has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of the sexual revolution to today’s unique problems. The Decline of Males, his 1999 book, was particularly controversial among feminists for its argument that female contraceptives had altered the balance between the sexes in disturbing new ways (especially by taking from men any say in whether they could have children).

Equally eyebrow-raising is his linking of contraception to the breakdown of families, female impoverishment, trouble in the relationship between the sexes, and single motherhood. Tiger has further argued—as Humanae Vitae did not explicitly, though other works of Catholic theology have—for a causal link between contraception and abortion, stating outright that ‘with effective contraception controlled by women, there are still more abortions than ever. . . . Contraception causes abortion.’”

Grrr…He is Tiger, hear him research! For more on Tiger’s research listen for free online to Janet Smith’s Contraception: Why Notor order a free copy of the CD. All I can say to his work is Reowww (vicious feline meow-roar)! Check it out.

This entry is getting long, and I realize I’m quote-poaching and just re-presenting Eberstadt’swork. I have to close with one of my favorite topics: feminism. I consider myself a feminist, though not your mother or grandmother’s feminist–a kinder, complimentarity minded, more authentic feminist. I looked under Wikipedia (wince, I know) for “feminist,” and I couldn’t even find my type of feminist. And there were a lot of them listed. I digress…of all people to witness to the cultural discontent of the sexual revolution, the most ironic testimonies come from…the feminists, many of them advocates of contraceptives and the mid-late 20th century sexual revolution. Here’s reflection on what Eberstadt aptly calls the Pill’s bastard child–ubiquitous pornography,

“‘The onslaught of porn,’ one social observer wrote, ‘is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy.’’ Further, ‘sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, super size portions, and obesity. . . . If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.’ And perhaps most shocking of all, this—which with just a little tweaking could easily have appeared in Humanae Vitae itself: ‘The power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time.’”

WHAT? Where did she find that quote? Somebody’s old-fashioned Grandma or a riled-up Ann Coulter? I doubt it. And No. It’s Naomi Wolf, third-wave feminist and promiscuous sex advocate, apparently, and unwitting witness to the failure of contraception to make women happier and society better. Pornography has never been more rampant, and there are more and more studies to indicate the damage this is doing not only to marriages, but to men’s brains and ability to function normally, let alone optimally. Just ask Dr. Phil Mango, who specializes in this type of research and work.

After all is said and done, the Church is a sign of contradiction. The Lord was, and His followers will continue to be. If his followers are not a sign of contradiction, one has to wonder who they are actually following. There is always mercy and healing for those who stray (we all do), but we must be accountable to the Truth and following the teachings of Humanae Vitae, no matter what the challenge, the difficulty. Remember the words of Gamaliel in Acts, “If this plan or undertaking [in our time, the contraceptive mentality] is of men, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them!” However, also remember that however impressive the statistics, glorifying the reviews, or redeeming the reports of the sociological vindication of HumanaeVitae, many will still reject the truth of the message, and the Sender of the message. While we can give thanks for writers like Eberstadt, sociologists and economists like Akerlof, we should not put all of our hope in men (for you lingual-inclusive feminists, that’s men, as in humankind), but in God.

UPDATE: Dig Paul VI and truth? Sign the Layperson’s pledge of assent.

UPDATE: Humanae Vitae on WordPress.

UPDATE for HV lovers: Feel free to comment back to a jaded jingoist who is so anti-Catholic that he’s probably an embittered ex-Catholic.