From rampant inflation to campus riots to yet another trial for Donald Trump, there’s no lack of news headlines these days. While the 24/7 news cycle captures just about everything happening in major cities and small towns alike, some of the biggest stories are ignored.

One of these stories is the declining birth rate in the West.

It’s as though an asteroid were moving toward Earth but isn’t expected to hit for another 50 or 100 years. If it doesn’t affect people in the here and now, it’s just not our concern, right?

But this one threatens the very existence of our civilization. Some even call it a public health emergency.

“The really extraordinary thing about the field of public health isn’t the epidemics they fixate on,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh writes. “It’s the ones they ignore. In particular, there is one ongoing public health crisis that these experts really don’t want to talk about — even though, if it continues for much longer, it will quite literally bring about the end of humanity.”

Birth rates are not something we regularly think about. In fact, public schools teach that there are too many people in the world. And when we look around, society seems to be thriving. But we’re closer to the brink than we might realize. Walsh adds, “Right now, Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, Greece, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Qatar, the UAE, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, the UK, Germany, and the United States — and many others — have birth rates that are well below replacement level.”

It seems to be a cycle throughout world history. As societies become more prosperous and creature comforts more accessible, people are more interested in having fun than passing on the gift of life to the next generation. Consequently, millions of young couples today have decided against starting a family, while others abort babies who might get in the way of their backpacking trip across Europe or who are otherwise just too expensive or inconvenient.

Some progressives like to pretend they’re mothers and fathers, though. Those who have pets call themselves cat dads or dog moms. And while raising a pet is a fine endeavor, it’s nothing like the hard work and incredible joy that having real children brings — not to mention many other benefits.

And like everything else these days, having kids is now being politicized. As part of its anti-family, anti-child agenda, the Left wants you to think the desire to have children is — wait for it! — racist.

In response to the recent Natal Conference held in Texas, Gaby Del Valle of Politico sounded the alarm with an article titled, “The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.”

“The mission is to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change,” Del Valle writes. “This conference suggests there’s a simple way around the problem of majority rule: breeding a new majority — one that looks and sounds just like them.”

In other words, if you’re conservative and want to have kids, your real agenda is to create a supermajority in the future. Welcome to identity politics. These are some of the same people who’ve been bragging about non-whites becoming a minority in just a few years.

We know journalism has hit a new low when an article that seems like an Onion piece is published on a so-called mainstream news website.

As Peter Heck writes: “It’s tough to avoid commenting every day on just how terrible the media in this country has become. Obviously, over the course of the last week, we’ve all seen in real time what so many of our ‘institutions of higher learning’ have become — woke cesspools of shallow thinking and morally stunted, impassioned activism. So maybe it comes as no surprise what those fool factories are producing from their journalism departments.”

There is no lack of readers interested in these articles. For decades, we’ve inculcated our young people with the idea that for reasons ranging from the environment to warfare to famine, we need to end the human threat to the planet. There’s even a movement dedicated to voluntary human extinction.

In 2022, an ABC News/Ipsos poll revealed that nearly a quarter of young Americans are reconsidering having children because they fear it could increase the impact of climate change. Meanwhile, Third World countries are populating at a fast clip, and many of their people are pouring into developed countries — like ours. Some of them may not know the luxury of running water, but they know that having children is the only way to grow a civilization. The problem is that their kids may see the end of this one.

Perhaps it’s too late to stave off the fall of the West, but we can and should keep working to change our culture to one that values life, teaches our young people the joys and necessities of family life in a thriving society, and ends this nonsensical notion that having kids is a right-wing attempt to take over the world.