SAY THE AWKWARD PART:

[W]hat keeps civilization going is not just extraordinary heroism but the kind of courageous action that we more often call fortitude: faithfulness in the daily duty of civic, family, and religious life. I think we can still identify plenty of heroic actions of the sort I fantasized about in America today. What we increasingly lack is this longsuffering consistency in building and maintaining society. During World War I, one Edwardian Karen demanded in the street to know why G.K. Chesterton was not out "defending civilization." "Madam," he replied, "I am civilization."

What we lack are the people being civilization.

In 2012 (blessed, peaceful, irenic 2012!) Charles Murray identified the growing vast cleavages in American life in his book Coming Apart. There, he identified what was separating the rich from the poor in terms of civic life, work, religion, and, most importantly, marriage. American adults who were not in the upper socio-economic quintiles were not marrying, were having fewer children, and, when they did, were having them outside of marriage.

When I reviewed his book at the time, I wrote that despite chapter subtitles such as "It's Worse Than It Looks!" he was probably too optimistic about many of the trends. The behavior at the bottom was spreading through the middle classes in 2012. Things have only become worse.

Demographers Lyman Stone and Bradford Wilcox write in a recent Newsweek article titled "Empty Cradles Mean a Bleaker Future" that the story we have not been hearing over at least the last twelve years is that American birthrates have fallen through the floor. Despite many decades of American fertility exceptionalism in which American women averaged around 2.1 children in their childbearing years--the rate necessary to replace a population--the drops seen around the time of the Great Recession of 2008 have continued. This year, Mr. Stone and Dr. Wilcox forecast, American fertility rates will fall below 1.7, putting us in the company of China and the other European and Asian countries that have been aging and, some of them, shrinking.

Why aren't there more children? Mr. Stone and Dr. Wilcox observe that there are certainly worries in times of economic and health uncertainty; the drop that happened in 2008 was swift, and the drop in pregnancies this year has been noticeable, too. But the drop in fertility after 2008 continued through economic recovery into the time just before we locked everything down. Women are actually reporting on surveys a desire to have more children than such surveys revealed in the recent past. But it is now likely the case that one out of four women born in the 1990s will end her childbearing years without having any children.

The main driver for that is the drop in marriage. Marital birth rates have remained steady, if not stellar. But women also worry about the enormous time demands and difficulties involved in raising children. These two are not unconnected: Being a mother is very hard, even with a husband as an active and present father. While some women will go ahead and have a child without a husband or even a man in sight, the takers for this situation are not surprisingly fewer and fewer. The difficulties are exponentially multiplied in such situations and the results are, as decades of social science research show, much worse for children--especially boys. 

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