Victor Davis Hanson: Why Blue States Aren’t Having Babies

On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc have a fertile discussion on why blue states have a lower birth rate than red states.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. 

SAMI WINC: The last symptom that we want to talk about today, Victor, is fertility. And we know that the university and the rhetoric in the United States is—

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes, and climate too.

WINC:   Yeah, because of climate, we don’t want to have children. 

HANSON: Didn’t [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] say that?

WINC: AOC said that the world was going to end in like 10 years or something.” I don’t know what it was. Who listens to her? 

HANSON: She said she wasn’t going to have kids and have more AOCs, and I thought, “Promises, promises.” [Editor’s Note: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said it is a “legitimate question” to ask if it’s OK to have children due to the climate crisis. She did not rule out having children of her own.]  That’s a problem. I’m not just being in jest. If you look at fertility in the 20 so-called blue states, it is about one point. We average everybody about 1.73. Just in 1999, we were 2.1. I’m talking about people who were born in the United States, the fertility rate. It was about 1.71. But in blue states, it’s about 1.4. And in red states, about 2.1. 

So what’s happening, all you people in Arizona, Florida, Wyoming, Utah, you’re having like two to three kids, and four million people a year are joining you. And you people in blue states, like where I am, we’re having about 1.4 kids and nobody’s coming here. Everybody’s leaving. Our congressional districts, we’re going to surrender unless we cheat like we’re trying to in California. And they’ve stopped Texas from trying to cheat for their conservatives. We’re going to lose all of our congressional districts, and our economies are going to be backward. But we’ve got to keep doing it. We’ve got to keep getting left, left, left, left. Climate, climate, climate. 

So, fertility is a big problem and Europe is worse. It’s not averaging 1.7. It’s averaging about 1.4. In some countries like Italy and Germany, I think it’s almost 1.2. And why is that? I have got to be very careful how I say that, but traditionally, declining fertility is commiserate not just with health. 

Childhood diseases killed most people. If you were in ancient Greece, a woman would have to be pregnant 10 times to deliver four births to have the three births be successful out of the four and to have two children survive puberty. Maybe 20 pregnancies later, but with the industrial revolution, modern sanitation, health care, that’s not true.

But usually it’s the emancipation of women that makes the fertility go down because they want to get in on the good life with men and have a say in things and child rearing for affluent people, men and women, but particularly women, because it puts more of a—I don’t want to use the word burden—but more responsibility to physically have children and to nurse them. It’s a drag, they think. That’s what they’re told in college.

If you went to college and you said, “Hi, I’m Suzy Smith. And I’m from Utah. And I just want to say in this class on American history that I’m here to do my patriotic part. I want to marry one of you guys in class. I want to get my B.A. in American Studies. And I plan on having three to four children and raise them up to be good old red-blooded patriotic Americans and law-abiding. And that’s my goal. And if I can do that, I made a wonderful contribution.”

I’m not mocking that. That is a noble thing to say, and that person will be demonized and told, “Get out of here.” If you said, “Hello, I’m Samantha Joan. You know, I’m just here because of the patriarchy. It’s so oppressive. And after six or seven boyfriends this year, I was so upset at them. They were just losers, and you know that my women’s studies professors have suggested that because Donald Trump is going to try to take abortion away from us, I have to be very careful. And I’m considering transitioning, but I haven’t decided Firyet.” That’s the alternative. It’s kind of like the difference between Karine Jean-Pierre at the podium and Karoline Leavitt, you know what I mean? It’s Miss Sunshine bouncy happy and has already had one baby and probably will have two more. 

WINC: And super smart and right on top of it and responsive to the press. 

HANSON: Yeah. To get serious for change, I mean I’m serious, but I was too mocking. It is the barometer of a healthy society. When Rome had its greatest problems in the first century AD and the third century AD and you look at the Italian birth rate, it really plummeted. And you can see glimpses in the description of women in Plautus and Terence, but especially, as I said, in first century BC and AD literature that there’s not an emphasis on the Italian agrarian model of kids and family and all that anymore. It’s just not, and the same thing happened in Greece. And I think all of us just think, wow. 

My grandmother was one of 11 children. My grandfather was one of three boys, my maternal. My paternal grandfather was one of four boys. I don’t know about my paternal grandmother, because she died before I was born, but I think she had four sisters. 

My parents had three of us. One child was lost, my sister, at an early age. And then my aunt and that family had two. Then my other family, my parents had my mom who had four deliveries, three survived to adulthood. And then her sister had two and her other sister was crippled and couldn’t have children. So that’s the story. Each generation gets smaller children. And then we say, “Well, we’re going to have immigration. That’ll keep up for two.” It would be energizing if it was, as I said, diverse and legal and integrated and assimilated and skilled. 

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