If more Spanish and Italian pubescent girls make pacts to get pregnant in imitation of the girls of Gloucester, Massachusetts, would that be a good thing or a bad thing? There was a time when “girls in trouble” were not allowed to get abortions and would instead give up their babies to church-run orphanages. If merely replacing the population with younger generations were the principal problem, the solution conceived of by seventeen teenaged girls in Gloucester would appear to be just what the doctor ordered.
For girls and young women, peer pressure and fashion are utterly important. The birth rate for any nation correlates to the BATNA for a woman’s pregnancy. When there is a high level of status for a woman who becomes a mother as opposed to a woman who does not become a mother, women will gravitate toward childbearing. When there is a high level of status for a professional woman who “has it all” as opposed to a woman who is sneered at for being “barefoot and pregnant”, it is a no-brainer that the birth rate will plummet. Fashion, fashion, fashion. If a woman is more celebrated when she is barefoot and pregnant than when she gets an abortion, it affects the birth rate.
Conventional wisdom from both the Left and the Right castigates the Gloucester Girls, by the Right for not getting married first and by the Left for not killing the fetuses. But if such a trend of pregnancy were to become fashionable in Europe, would this necessarily be an improvement over the status quo? Can the western world dare celebrate the Gloucester Girls as heroines given the sour legacy of Lebensborn? Nazi eugenicists promoted pregnancies among unwed teenaged mothers as a means of promoting a “master race”. The emotional trauma for the actual children of that program was horrific.
If increasing the birth rate of a nation were the only problem, that could be solved very easily. Yet, the social problems leading to the plummeting birth rate go much further. Does accommodating the needs of unwed mothers lead to a celebration of unmarried motherhood? Is a nation of bastards what a society wants? I think the reason why the birth rate is so low in Europe is because every other alternative is considered to be worse.
