An excerpt from George Weigel:
Whatever else might be said about these developments, that Europe should find itself, at this particular moment in its history, embroiled in a sharp-edged conflict over the legal imposition of political correctness must strike even the friendliest observer as a bizarre distraction from the most dramatic fact about the continent in the early 21st century: Europe is committing demographic suicide, and has been doing so for some time.
In the late 20th century, some environmental extremists confidently predicted that, as the world ran out of various things—gold, zinc, tin, mercury, petroleum, copper, lead, natural gas, and so forth—humanity would be crushed beneath rampant “overpopulation.” At the beginning of the 21st century, the world is still chock-full of natural resources. Europe, however, is running out of the most crucial resource—people.
The overall picture is sobering enough. Not a single EU member has a replacement-level fertility rate, i.e., the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population. Moreover, eleven EU countries—including Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and all three Baltic states—display “negative natural increase” (i.e., more annual deaths than births), a clear step down into a demographic death-spiral.
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