Introduction

Back in the late 1960s in the United States, pro-abortion groups promised us  that the rewards would be great if we legalized abortion. A group called  NARAL promised us that “Legal abortion will decrease the number of unwanted  children, child abuse cases, and possibly subsequent delinquency, drug  addiction, and a host of social ills believed to be associated with  neglectful parenthood.”1  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
This is how the Devil works: He promises us everything, then betrays us. No  wonder he is called “a liar and the father of lies.”
A few prophetic people, like Father Paul Marx, the founder of Human Life  International, realized that the pro-abortionists were lying. But even  Father Marx could not have seen just how bad things would really get after  abortion was legalized;

*Several abortionists in the United States specialize in killing unborn  babies right up until the moment of birth with a hideous procedure called  dilation and extraction, or `partial-birth abortion.’ The abortionist  delivers the baby feet first, all but the head. Then he uses a special tool  to break a hole in the baby’s head and sucks the brains out. Most of these  babies and their mothers are perfectly healthy, and almost all of the babies  would be perfectly normal if they traveled just three more inches down the  birth canal.

*Many doctors say that, since abortion is legal right up till the moment of  birth, that it should be legal after birth as well. If a mother changes her  mind and does not want to have the baby after it is born, these doctors let  the child starve to death, or kill it outright. They call this  “fourth-trimester abortion” or “a second chance at choice.” More than a  dozen abortionists have been charged with killing newborn babies. We suspect  that thousands each year are simply left to die.

*Hundreds of women have died of so-called “safe and legal” abortion in the  United States. Most of these deaths were avoidable, since the worst doctors  in the profession seem to become abortionists because they cannot get work  anywhere else in the medical field. In one case, abortionist Alicia Hanna  Ruiz killed a mother of four, then tried to stuff her dead body in the trunk  of her car right in front of two of her children. In another case, abortionist David Benjamin punctured the uterus of a mother of four and then  just walked away, allowing her to bleed to death. Both abortionists were  convicted of murder.

*More than four out of five abortions in the United States are performed on  single women. Abortion has become a fast and easy “eraser of mistakes” for  women who have sex before marriage. But they are often victims, as well as  their unborn babies, because their boyfriends now expect them to abort if  they get pregnant, and get violent with them if they do not. At Human Life  International, we have documented more than fifty cases of boyfriends  murdering their girlfriends because they would not get abortions. And, since  the pregnancy of the girlfriend is usually not reported when newspapers  write about these crimes, we can estimate that at least one hundred  boyfriends kill their pregnant girlfriends each year because they would not  get abortions. In one particularly horrible case, a boyfriend lured his  15-year-old pregnant girlfriend into a forest, killed her by jamming a  branch down her throat so hard it tore her tongue out, and then crushed her  skull with a 15-kilogram rock.

*Abortion has destroyed millions of marriages and engagements in the United  States. I have seen husbands standing around outside abortion clinics with  sad looks on their faces. When I ask them why they do not do anything to  protect their own child, they just shrug and say “What can I do? Abortion is  a woman’s right and I can’t interfere.” Studies have shown that a great  majority of marriages and pre-marital friendships break up within two months  after an abortion.

*And, of course, the psychological impact on women is huge. It has to be  when one commits such a profoundly unnatural act. Any priest can tell you  about women confessing their abortions from 10, 20, 30, even fifty years  previously. Their dead children will just not let them rest. My mother  Pamela died in July 1991. On the last day of her life, she confessed to my  wife Kathy that she had had an abortion forty years earlier, in 1951. She  felt compelled to tell someone about this event after all those years.
Significantly, she never told my brother or I that she had aborted our older  brother or sister.

We are all pro-life here. We are aware of the terrible effects abortion has  on the family, on the fathers, on other children, and most of all on  aborting women themselves.

But we often lose sight of the wider effects of abortion, of contraception  and sterilization, and of the Culture of Death itself. This “anti-life  mentality” does not only affect individuals and families; it has terrible  effects on ethnic groups, on nations, and even on entire continents.
What I am here to talk to you about today is about the more sweeping,  large-scale impacts of abortion.

The Demographic Fruits.
Introduction. The most profound impacts of the Culture of Death indirectly  affect everyone on earth. But almost nobody thinks about demographics, or  the characteristics of a nation’s population, because these effects take  place so slowly.
The direct cause of abortion is the separation of sex from procreation.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Europe, which has been in the grip of  the anti-life mentality since World War I.
There are many demographic impacts caused by the Culture of Death in general  and by abortion and contraception in particular. In Europe, these effects
are:
* a declining population
* decreasing support ratios
* collapse of the family
* the influx of Islam
* declining economic power

Plunging Populations
Demographers use a very important term called the total fertility rate  (TFR), which is the average number of babies each woman has during her  lifetime. In order for a developed nation to replace its population, its TFR  must be about 2.2.

Not one of Europe’s 39 countries is currently replacing its population.
Sixteen of the lowest twenty TFRs in the world belong to European nations,  and the highest European TFR is Albania’s 2.03, still well below  replacement. Europe’s average TFR is now 1.35, which means that Europe’s  population is about to plunge.

There are currently eighteen countries in the world whose population is  actually declining. Fifteen of these are in Europe. In fact, Europe is the  only continent whose total population is now declining. Historically, this  has only happened during famine, epidemic or war. This is the first time in  the history of the world that an entire continent’s population is declining  due to people simply not having any more babies, for no more pressing reason  than they do not want them any more.

The only European country with laws that fully protect preborn children or  allow for only a “life of the mother” exception is tiny Malta, home to just  1/20 of one percent of Europe’s population. Even Ireland’s strong  traditional protection of preborn children is eroding rapidly, with ten  thousand Irish women and girls travelling legally into England for abortions  every year.

Support Ratios
The nations of Europe are already feeling the profound demographic effects  of their longtime anti-life policies. These include rapidly dropping support  ratios.

The support ratio is the number of working people (aged 20-64) supporting  each retiree (assumed to be 65 years old and older). In the year 2000, the  European support ratio was 4.1. In other words, slightly more than four  workers were supporting each retiree. This ratio will shrink to about 1.7 by  the year 2050, collapsing national social security systems and retirement  plans and leading to a huge push for cost-cutting in the health care area.
This will obviously also lead to a sustained push for euthanasia. We have  already seen this in the Netherlands, the first nation to legalize  euthanasia. Keep in mind that the Netherlands is one of the youngest nations  in Europe.

Collapsing Families
In Europe, the Culture of Death has successfully undermined its two great
enemies: Faith and family. There has been a huge increase in the number of  divorces (from 125,000 in 1960 to about 750,000 in 2001); births to unwed  mothers (4.5 percent of all births in 1960 to about 25 percent in 2001);  unemployment (from five million in 1977 to more than 15 million in 2001);  and a huge increase in abortions, from about 250,000 in 1960 to more than a  million annually today among the EC12 countries alone.2  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
Europe and Islam
The United Nations estimates that there will be an influx of about 50  million Muslims by the year 2025, mainly from North Africa. Because they are  generally a very religious people, Muslims tend to integrate poorly with  secular European society, a situation causing great tension and conflict  that will only worsen in the future.3  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html

Muslims, who are generally very pro-life, know that they can conquer the  world, if not with the sword, then with patience and with their children. As  Atifa Dawat, an Iranian delegate to the July 1985 conference entitled “Forum  85,” in Nairobi, Kenya, stated, “The more children we have, the better. When  there are enough Muslims in the world, then we will have world victory.”4  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html

If `Christians’ continue to selfishly abort their children while Muslims  continue to have large families, then Islam truly deserves its “world  victory.”
In Germany, rioting has broken out in response to the incoming flood of  foreign workers (gastarbeitern, or “guest workers”) who are needed in order  to make up for the fifteen million Germans who have been aborted over the  past thirty years. As expected, the world media has painted this as a  “right-wing backlash,” with a “small minority of Nazis” causing nationwide  disruption. Common sense reveals the truth: Germany is caught in an  impossible situation. It must become an ethnic melting-pot with great speed  in order to survive, and almost all Germans, regardless of age, resent the  influx of foreigners, which has caused their taxes to more than double since  1980.

European countries that have been victims of permissive abortion for even  longer periods than the United States are feeling ethnic impacts right now.
In Paris, the largest city in the nation known as the “eldest daughter of  the Church,” there are now more mosques than there are Catholic churches!
As The Wall Street Journal observes:

Fewer Europeans are practicing Catholics than ever and the  size of nominally Christian families in Europe has been shrinking for  decades. By contrast, many Muslim immigrants are enthusiastic practitioners  of their faith and often have more children than the European average. The  Muslim population in Europe has doubled in the last decade, according to  United Nations estimates. There are now more Muslims in Italy than Jews or  Protestants. The first mosque in Rome opened in 1995 and perhaps 100 have  opened on the Italian peninsula since 1989. Islam is now the number two  religion in France; Muslims edged out Protestants several years ago. There  may be as many as five million practicing French Muslims today, a number  roughly equivalent to the number of practicing French Catholics …5  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html

This state of affairs is a direct result of falling Europe birthrates; the  last year “native” Europeans replaced themselves was 1973, and since then,  there has been a shortfall of tens of millions of births required to replace  the population.6  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html

Until now, massive immigration has made up for the shortage of babies. But now the  population of Europe, despite this immigration, is declining for the first  time since the Black Death of 1347-1351.

Loss of Economic Power
According to the United Nations definition, there are 39 nations in Europe  with a population of greater than 100,000 in the year 2000. The UN has  projected the average age of the people in each nation of the world by 2050.
By 2050, fifteen of the twenty oldest nations on earth will be European.
Thirty-four of the oldest fifty will be European. By 2050, Europe will be by  far the oldest nation on earth. This table shows the average age of people  by continent in 2050:
Europe………… 52.3 years
Latin America….. 46.6 years
North America….. 45.1 years
Asia …………. 45.1 years
Oceania ………. 44.7 years
Africa ……….. 30.7 years
—————————-
World ………… 42.5 years

Twelve European nations — including Ukraine — will have an average age of  more than 50 years. The youngest nation in Europe will be Albania, with an  average age of 42 years. By comparison, the average age of Nigerians will be  20 in 2050. Liberians will enjoy an average age of 23, and Somalians will  average 22 years of age.

In Ukraine, 40 percent of the people will be aged 60 and over, and only 14  percent will be children under 15, compared with 27 percent children and 10  percent over 60 in Nigeria.

The United Nations has also predicted that 43 nations will actually decline  in population by 2050. Two-thirds of these (29) are European nations.

Europe is currently losing about a million people a year, and this trend is  accelerating fast. If we use the historically more accurate low variant, the  United Nations predicts that the European population will collapse from its  current 725 million to 565 million by the year 2050 — a loss of 22 percent.
And this accounts for massive immigration from the South.

The fact that the European population is both aging and getting smaller does  not bode well for European economic power in the future. We all know that  the future belongs to the young; and this does not just refer to our  children, it refers to entire nations and continents as well.

As we have already said, by the year 2050 the European population will be  rapidly shrinking. It will be about 565 million. By comparison, the  population of the United States will be about 355 million. In 2050, the  average European will be 52 years old. The average American will only be 45.
With its vast storehouses of technology and natural resources, the United  States will be much better positioned to lead the world economy than the  European Union. But here is another strange demographic effect: By 2050,  more Americans will speak Spanish than English, because English-speaking  Americans are dying out and Hispanics are having large families!
But where will the real power be in half a century? Probably not in North  America or in Europe.

In Africa!
This continent has already begun to exploit vast natural resources that may  dwarf the combined assets of both the European Union and the United States.
And Africa will have the people to capitalize on its natural wealth. By  2050, the population of Africa will have nearly doubled to 1.515 billion.
And the average age of Africans will be only 31, fourteen years younger than  any other continent.

If African nations can overcome AIDS and official corruption, there will be  no stopping Africa from dominating the world’s economy and moral values for  decades to come. In the United States, we already see this effect with the  large numbers of African priests coming to our parishes. Father Boniface  Osuji from Nigeria once told me that African priests see the United States  as mission territory, since so few people go to church there.
Trying to Stop the Dying Process

At least a dozen European countries have recognized the danger posed by  plunging birthrates, and have tried to reverse the process, but with little  success. History shows us that once the people of a nation are conditioned  to believe they should live for themselves and that children are a burden,  it is virtually impossible to persuade them otherwise.

As one example, European population alarmists have been exaggerating the  high cost of raising children for decades in their campaign to get people to  have smaller children. When the terrible demographic effects of too few  babies become obvious, the governments try to reverse the thinking of the  people, but with little effect. The people remember only that babies are  messy, noisy and expensive.
This is why the La France a besoin des enfants! [France needs babies!]  campaign failed.7  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html

And this is why, when the German State of Brandenburg offered to pay its citizens US  $650 to have a child, there was not even the slightest change in the birth  rate. People were insulted that the government had told them for years that  raising a child cost more than $300,000, then turned around and offered them  just $650 to have babies. No wonder Wolfgang Jahmer, director of a social  welfare program in Schwerin, Germany, said that “We have some fears that the  tree of life may be falling.”8  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
Germany’s culture is extremely top-heavy with elderly people, and visiting  American pro-lifers have noted the common sight of dogs being dressed up in  expensive clothes and even being wheeled about in baby carriages!9  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html

The only answer to this situation is for pro-life activists to convert the hearts and  minds of the people one by one. This will take as long to do as the  population controllers took to destroy the European’s love of children. We  are talking about a process that will take at least a generation. The  conversion of hearts is our greatest mission. If the current generation  refuses to have children, and if nothing changes their minds, then we must  evangelize their children.

Conclusion
Now that I have thoroughly depressed you, I do not want anyone here to go  out and commit suicide. There are too few Europeans as it is.
So now I will give you the good news. The future belongs to the people who  have babies. Nations — and now even entire continents — are dying. Ethnic  groups are simply disappearing. But we see signs of hope everywhere in the  world today:

* Since the current Pope took office in 1978, there has been a
64 percent increase in the number of seminarians worldwide. And groups like  Human Life International and Priests for Life are doing their best to reach  these young men with pro-life materials and instruction.

* In the United States, pro-abortion families are dying out  because they average only about one child. Pro-life families are flourishing  because they average between three and four children each. Public opinion  polls show that Americans are becoming more pro-life by about one percent  per year. Within the next ten years, you are going to see huge changes in  our pro-abortion law, which is one of the worst in the world. We are  beginning to destroy pro-abortionism at its roots in the United States, and  we think the same will begin to happen in Europe soon. The evil weed of  anti-life thinking cannot be killed from the top down; it will die from the  roots up. How can the Culture of Death win? It contains the seeds of its own  sterile destruction.

* Even in nations that have had abortion for almost a century,  the people are recognizing the terrible effects and are rising up against  it. In Russia, the young pro-life movement is making strong advances, giving  the people a message they have never heard before. And in South Africa, the  nation with the world’s worst abortion law, pro-lifers are defying the  repressive regime and are speaking out in greater and greater numbers.

* Finally, and most importantly, we were made to fight — to  fight for Faith, for life, for family, for country — to fight for the  values that dignify humanity, that care for the least and most helpless  among us, that lead to true liberty and freedom. There can be no higher  calling. We should be sincerely grateful to God for this matchless  opportunity to serve Him! Our Lord told us to “Go forth and make disciples  of all nations” [Matthew 28:19], and there is no better way to achieve this  than by saving lives and souls in the pro-life movement. And our reward will  be great, but only if we fight on until the end: “… and you will be hated  by all nations for My Name’s sake. And then many will fall away, and betray  one another, and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and  lead many astray. And because wickedness is multiplied, most men’s love will  grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved” [Matthew 24:9-13].

We have to fight with all our might, but do not worry too much if you lose  and lose again. Nothing tempers a soul like the pro-life movement, where we  are taught to endure and have faith. If ever you get discouraged, just  remember the words of 1 Corinthians 15:58: “Therefore, my beloved brethren,  be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing  that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

Endnotes
1 National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), “A Speaker’s and Debater’s  Notebook,” 1974, page 11.   http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
2 Eurostat. A Social Portrait of Europe. Luxembourg: Eurostat, 1991. The
EC12 countries are Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Greece, Ireland,  Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom.
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
3 R. Clarke. “Population Imbalances: The Consequences.” Forum [Council of  Europe], 1986, pages 5 to 7.   http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
4 Janie Hampton. “Women at United Nations Conference Stage Heated Fight Over  Abortion.” The Oregonian, July 21, 1985.   http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
5 Wall Street Journal editorial, September 25, 2000. See also “News Notes.”
The Wanderer, October 5, 2000, page 3.   http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
6 Calculations and extrapolations based on figures from the Institut  National d’Etudes Demographique (INED). “Short Fall in Births Europe.”
Population, July/September 1983. http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
7 French national ad campaign. Daniela Deane. “Birth Rates Down Across  Europe.” USA Today, October 15, 1997.   http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
8 Stephen Kinzer, New York Times News Service. “German State Pays Bounty for  Babies.” The Oregonian, November 25, 1994, page A13. http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html
9 The author personally observed this phenomenon as early as 1986 during one  of his visits to Europe.  http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/clo/clo_02bitterfruitsabor.html