Let’s start with a very simple truism: You can’t have prosperity without people.

Human beings are the most valuable resource, because it is human ingenuity that creates, captures and cultivates all other resources. We as human beings are the custodians and protectors of the planet, not the destroyers of the planet (as the radical environmentalists would have you believe). The richer and more technologically advanced we become, the more likely we are to avert a catastrophic event like a giant meteor crashing into the planet and destroying all life.

Which brings us to a potentially ruinous trend: Many countries are literally running out of people.

In Europe, births have fallen below deaths — which is a terrifying glimpse into the future of a new dark age of the Western world.

Unless birth rates start rising — and quickly — Europeans are becoming extinct.

Negative population growth is a sure killer of prosperity — and human flourishing. It’s also contrary to Christianity and most other religions, which instruct us to “be fruitful and multiply.”

It’s not just Europe. Japan and Korea will cut their populations in half over the next 80 years if they don’t start moving away from one-child-per-couple rates of propagating.

Why are rich countries depopulating the planet?

For 60 years, people like Paul Ehrlich (“The Population Bomb”) and governments around the world — including our own — warned that we all had a moral obligation to save the planet by having fewer babies. There were periods of forced abortions, forced sterilizations, forced birth control and, in advanced nations like the U.S., a cultural sneering at families with four or more kids.

That mendacious propaganda campaign worked all too well — and look what it has wrought.

There are other explanations. As we have gotten richer — and especially as women’s earnings have risen — the “cost” of having a child in terms of lost income has risen. I’m NOT suggesting that women should be paid less!

People are marrying both at lower rates and later in life, so the median year for a woman to have a child keeps rising — leaving fewer fertility years left for multiple children.

Religiosity has declined somewhat in our more secular me-first society. That’s sad because childless couples tend to be less happy. And why have kids if you don’t believe there is a divine reason we were put on this planet?

The solutions to this problem aren’t obvious. Pronatalist government policies — like paying people to have kids and offering free child care — have had spotty levels of success.

The U.S. has delayed the crisis happening in Europe and much of Asia through immigration of young workers. Not only do immigrants increase the population, but they tend to have more kids than native-born Americans.

But even with immigration, we in America have an obvious aging problem.

Let’s start with one simple step: celebrating as a society the virtues and self-sacrifice of motherhood. Our schools and our teachers and our clergy and our political leaders need to keep pushing the message that the greatest contribution men and women can give to saving our species is to have more kids — as soon as possible.

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