I’d say holiday columns – Christmas, Thanksgiving, Victoria Day – are among the hardest to write. So, as NR’s in-house demography bore, I wish I’d thought of this Mother’s Day angle. Margret Kopala on the decline of motherhood:

Hiking along the northern reaches of British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast last week, my sister and I passed by the home of a woman recently taken by cancer. As dignified deaths go, it was exemplary. Predeceased by her husband, her care was assumed in turns by her four grown children. She died peacefully, surrounded by them and her beloved ocean views.
For the generation that’s brought Canada’s fertility rate to below replacement levels, such idylls can only become increasingly rare. With 1.5 children per couple, our best hope is a quiet death in a clean facility where the immigrant workers speak our language. And that’s only the human face of demographic decline. The economic face is hardly more appealing: unfilled labour markets, reduced GDP and no tax revenues to pay for health care — to name a few.

Aside from the Steynian stuff, Ms Kopala goes on to note the rising rates of infertility in the western world, abetted in part by increasing rates of sexually transmitted disease among the youthful:

So we pump our young with pills, wrap them in condoms and, coming soon, jab them with vaccines hoping to prevent unwanted pregnancies, STDs and, now, cervical cancer.

One in six couples in the United Kingdom is infertile. The P D James Children Of Men scenario, in which the human race (at least among the G7) is unable to conceive, may not be so far away.