Is the Culture of Death Committing Suicide?

The West is committing demographic suicide, aborting children with Down Syndrome and other "abnormalities". They have fallen far below the 2.33 children needed per woman for replacement.

From Crisis

By Joseph Pearce

"The future belongs to those who show up," goes the saying, and Europe is not on track to be there.

If you give the devil enough rope, he’ll hang himself. This is true, but it’s not the whole truth. The problem is that he’ll hang you first. The devil hangs his own disciples, which is tragic enough, but he also hangs the innocent. These timeless cautionary thoughts should be kept in mind as we survey the way that the culture of death in the decadent West is collapsing in its own hedonistic too-muchness. 

Let’s take the example of Iceland as a microcosmic representative of what is happening in many of the larger countries of Europe. Like most countries in the collapsing, decadent Europe, Icelanders are following the Nazis through the practice of eugenics to exterminate the “unfit.” In particular, Iceland boasts of its “final solution” to the problem of children with Down syndrome in the program of systematically exterminating them. About 85 percent of expectant mothers undergo prenatal testing, and close to 100 percent of them choose to kill their child if he or she is diagnosed with Down syndrome. Only two children with Down syndrome are born in Iceland each year. 

What are we to make of a culture in which almost every mother chooses to kill her own baby if the child in the womb is disabled? Is such a culture more “unfit” to survive than its own children which it devours? The latter question is being answered before our very eyes as we witness Iceland’s culture of death committing suicide.

Until fairly recently, unlike in most of Europe, the birthrate in Iceland was at replacement levels. In recent years, however, as Icelanders have embraced Western decadence, the birthrate has plummeted to 1.56 children per woman of childbearing age. As Iceland’s own population has lost the will to live, or to bring new life into the world, the shortfall is being met by the arrival of immigrants in such numbers that Icelanders will be an ethnic minority in their own country within three or four decades. 

The root of the problem, in political and economic terms, is Iceland’s abandonment of its national sovereignty in 1994, when it chose to be absorbed into the burgeoning and obese European Union. Having accepted its status as a relatively impotent subject of the EU, it has left itself at the mercy of the evil empire’s rapacious imperial directives. Ironically and pathetically, Iceland was not even afforded full membership in the EU in return for its subjection but was allowed to join the powerless European Economic Area on the fringes of the empire’s expansionism. It surrendered its national freedom without even being allowed the dignity of joining the Empire. It had become a mere dominion.

Lacking the moral or political will to disobey their adopted masters, the people of Iceland have sat idly by as Iceland has accepted wave upon wave of immigrants. Having chosen to become a colony, Iceland is now being colonized to such an extent that its indigenous people are destined to become an ethnic minority.

As stated earlier, Iceland is not an isolated example, an idiosyncratic anomaly, but a microcosmic representative of what is happening throughout the decadent West in general and the European Union in particular. All nations that have adopted the culture of death are on the same suicidal path. 

Returning to the cult of infanticide and the extermination of the unfit, Iceland might be the worst in its wholesale embrace of the “final solution” of abortion, but things aren’t much better elsewhere. In Europe as a whole, 92 percent of mothers choose to “terminate” their child with Down syndrome, while in the United Kingdom the figure is 90 percent. Things are marginally better in the United States, where more than two-thirds of women choose to give their child death instead of life, though some studies indicate that as many as 90 percent of American women make this dark choice.

In France, a pro-life video was banned by the government because it shows children and adults with Down syndrome speaking cheerfully of the happy lives they’re living. The sight of smiling children was deemed offensive because it might “disturb the conscience” of those who choose to exterminate their own child with Down syndrome. Again, what are we to make of a culture in which the government encourages women to kill their own “unfit” children but won’t allow anything to “disturb their consciences”?

What we should make of such a culture is that it is itself unfit to survive. The culture of death has chosen to take the devil’s bargain and will face the inevitable consequences of such a choice. The devil’s disciples, having succumbed to the temptation to destroy their own children, have succumbed to the temptation to destroy themselves.
Isn’t this all a little depressing?

Not in the least. It simply shows that the culture of life does not need to destroy the culture of death because the latter is in the process of destroying itself. By comparison, those who follow Christ simply need to do what He commands. We need to be fruitful and multiply. We need to love the Lord our God. We need to love our neighbors. And yes, we need to love our enemies too. 

We need to pray for those who have embraced the death-culture. We need to witness to the goodness, truth, and beauty of Christ’s Presence in the midst of the darkness. And we need to follow the Great Commission, the great commandment of Christ: to go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.