The “replacement rate” for a society is about 2.1—if the average family has that many kids, the nation will replenish itself. The United States hasn’t been above that rate since the 1970s, and is currently on 1.93. It isn’t as bad as the situation in Western Europe, and the immigrants from the south have at least delayed the day of reckoning for the U.S., but this is also a problem not going away anytime soon.

Jonathan Last, writing in The Wall Street Journal, correctly notes that every problem Washington currently debates—from the budget, to tax policy—is essentially irrelevant in the face of a societal decline like this. The gradual disappearance of the population was going to roll on regardless of who won the election and regardless of who controls Congress.

As it turns out, contrary to population control ideology, there aren't enough new children born in America today.

Mr. Last goes on to identify several causes and solutions, not all of which I agree with. Liberal feminists will likely get angry at the suggestion that women going to college and being in the workforce is a key cause of the problem, and this would be a place where I can’t say I’d blame them for being ticked off. I’m going to guess most of us can think offhand and identify working women in families with a number of kids above the replenishment rate. From a policy standpoint, it’s not that Mr. Last’s ideas aren’t good—I’m all for continually altering the tax code to favor larger families—but those who believe in limited government should also understand the limits of government.

There are two key points in the article where Last hits it on the head. When it comes to the cause of the problem, I think most readers here at Catholic Vote probably already quickly indentified the big one, and it’s the fact that the links between sex, marriage and childbearing has been broken. And when it comes to solution, Last acknowledges that no one should be forced to have children they don’t want, but we can start encouraging people to go ahead and have the kids they do want.

I’m inclined to return to a point I alluded to at the top and it’s to re-examine why exactly why we listen to the advice of those who pass themselves off as “science” today.  They delivered a firm analysis that our population was going to explode, and the exact opposite has happened.  True science is based on examination of fact, rather than surrender to ideology. And an examination of science’s track record that’s done…well, scientifically…tells us they’ve been way off the mark. To continue to listen to them would be akin to a sports fan listening to me tell them who’s going to win the Super Bowl today after my repeated errors along the way.

I don’t have kids myself, so I’m certainly not going to be the one to tell other people they have to have more to save civilization. Nor should anyone else. I won’t be the one to sit in judgment of those who, in the past, may have broken the sex/birth control/childbearing triangle. This isn’t about deciding who is perfect and who isn’t. We’re all broken to some degree, and society is an amalgamation of our collective brokenness.

What I am saying is that the Catholic Church and its definition of morality and its approach to science have been proven correct, and that of the left-wing  “science” industry has been proven wrong. No one who wants to follow the Church today and have a large family should have guilt shoved down their throat, and they deserve societal support.

Dan Flaherty is the author of Fulcrum, an Irish Catholic novel set in postwar Boston with a traditional Democratic mayoral campaign at its heart, and he is the editor-in-chief of TheSportsNotebook.com

Rule of thumb: When you're to the left of Cardinal Mahony, you're too far to the left.

A question without an answer is that question, “how much government intervention in caring for the less-fortunate is the right amount?” Catholic social teaching gives us a framework by which to evaluate whether the government is doing too much or not enough to help those in need, but the Catholic Church does not—cannot—set precise policy prescriptions for the “correct” rates of taxation, forms of welfare, rules governing eligibility, etc. Those considerations reside in the prudential judgment of the body politic. In the U.S., that means you and me as voters selecting representatives, and it means those whom we elect to pass and enforce those laws they deem good and necessary.

There can be no disagreement, mind you, about whether or not the people as a whole have a responsibility toward one another and the environment. But on a whole host of issues good Catholics can disagree about the precise involvement (if any) a given level of government has in the concerns of the needy.

But there certainly can come a time when those who, in general, think the government ought to do more rather than less get bit by that government We have come to that time, and those socio-politically liberal Catholics don’t like having been bit.

In a Wall Street Journal column today William McGurn looks at the reactions of some Catholics who supported Barack Obama in one way or another to the HHS contraceptive mandate.

U.S. Senator Robert Casey, Jr., of Pennsylvania, Cardinal Roger Mahony, Notre Dame President Father Tom Jenkins, Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, and others, have expressed their dismay at this ruling—even after so many in the Church championed the passage of Obamacare as a justified and necessary measure in providing health care for all.

Ensuring that all have access to needed health care (among many other expected luxuries our modern society surrounds us with) certainly is in the realm of what Catholic social teaching compels us to consider.

But access to health care does not legitimize massive government control and coerced violation of one’s conscience and religious beliefs. Charity is not charity if it is coerced, and it certainly is not charity if it violates moral norms in itself or requires another to violate his conscience (even if poorly formed).

With regard to the topic at hand, a more market-based system (including but not limited to greater portability of health insurance coverage, the ability for companies to sell plans across state lines, and—especially—disconnecting health insurance from employment) would have entirely precluded the possibility of the government ordering Catholics to violate their consciences or get out of the business of caring for those in need. A more circumspect approach that may have included an actual reading and analysis of the entire bill before passage would likely have prevented this.

But too many people, including too many prominent Catholics, were too eager to let Obama, Pelosi, and others who desire pervasive centralized control to write the thing and pass it.

Subsidiarity became a punch line, when it was mentioned.

Truly a tragedy that it had to come to this. But perhaps at least now all good people who value freedom of conscience, religious liberty, and/or the great services provided over the centuries by the various organizations of the Catholic Church (hospitals, schools, orphanages, soup kitchens, thrift shops, shelters, hospices, job training and placement services, crisis pregnancy clinics, maternity homes, adoption services, counseling services, etc.) will come together to help push back this illegitimate power grab.

If it is not pushed back, this country has fundamentally changed from one that values and defends religious liberty and personal freedom to one that requires compliance with the diktats of the central planners, pure and simple.

Even if you think contraception is a legitimate form of health care you ought to be able to encompass the problem with this regulatory mandate. If not, you are a fan of central planning, and you have lost the right to complain when (not if) the central planners require you to violate your own conscience under penalty of massive fines.