Upper Class to Itself: Go Extinct
The Daily Telegraph reports:
Under-age girls who become pregnant are most likely to have an abortion if they live in prosperous areas, figures show.
In some of the wealthiest parts of England four out of five under-age pregnancies end in an abortion, but in poorer areas under-age girls are twice as likely to keep their child.
Experts say it is the aspirations of well-off families that lead to a higher abortion rate, as girls opt not to miss out on their education.
Geoffrey Chaucer responds:
"Hear, comrades, we're of one mind, as each owns;
Let each of us hold up his hand to other
And each of us become the other's brother,
And we three will go slay this traitor Death;
He shall be slain who's stopped so many a breath."
...
"Now, sirs," said he, "if you're so keen, in brief,
To find out Death, turn up this crooked way,
For in that grove I left him, by my faith,
Under a tree, and there he will abide;
Nor for your boasts will he a moment hide.
See you that oak? Right there you shall him find.
God save you, Who redeemed all mankind,
And mend your ways!"- thus said this ancient man.
And every one of these three roisterers ran
Till he came to that tree; and there they found,
Of florins of fine gold, new-minted, round,
Well-nigh eight bushels full, or so they thought.
No longer, then, after this Death they sought...
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5 comments:
Births to underage-mothers (=under 18 I presume) are a minuscule share of total-births.
The dysgenic effect here must be correspondingly minuscule.
The CDC reports that 141,428 babies were born to USA-mothers under-18 in 2008. Total births: 4.248 million.
So, 3.33% of all babies born were born to under-age mothers. (That is higher than I'd expected).
For white non-Hispanic mothers, it was 1.94%. [44,095/2.268-million]
The dysgenic effect here must be correspondingly minuscule.
Hail,
It's certainly a fair point that the effect is, of itself, small.
But it's important to understand that this is part of a general pattern of behavior on the part of the upper class where they value female education and female career advancement over childbearing to a greater degree than the other classes.
Also there’s the issue that there's a certain savagery to the idea that there are really rich neighborhoods in London where 80% of the underage pregnancies end in abortion.
Considering that they could easily afford to care for the children, and considering how easy it would be for the rich parents of the mothers to set up adoptions, I think this shows a rather shocking sort of grim determination behind their materialism and social status mongering.
Of course the biggest issues affecting the IQ of England is all the non-European immigration, and the fact that the least productive of these immigrants and their descendants are getting paid off by the state to have more children.
What I’ll never understand is this: If modern Western countries absolutely must give money to people for being poor, why not just give them a lump sum per year for being poor?
Why give them more money the more children they have?
It’s madness.
But behind this madness, to a significant extent, is the same grimly determined status mongering in the upper classes which leads their underage daughters to abort their pregnancies at such a high rate.
Perhaps the masses of England and other Western countries are so happy with the Welfare State that the elite couldn’t change things even if they tried.
But that equation clearly doesn’t apply to immigration.
When it comes to immigration the impetus is disproportionately coming from the elite, and when it comes to the gentile elements of these elites at least the motive behind this support comes down to materialism (desire for cheaper labor) and status mongering (desire to show they’re so secure on their perch that they aren’t threatened by immigrants, as well as that they have the “politically correct” opinions which are so often used as a marker of social status).
The English elite, like the elite of all too many Western countries, are (in aggregate) putting a higher value on abstractions than on their own existence.
They care more about a diploma than about their own unborn flesh and blood.
They care more about getting a little more of that often fleeting abstraction called money, and that even airier abstraction called social status, than they do about the welfare of their less wealthy relatives.
Ultimately they may even care more about those abstractions than they care about themselves as individuals.
I really think it would to take a major terrorist attack, something massive that hits them on a purely involuntary gut level, to wake them from their dream.
SA, no disagreement from me on your general points about social dynamics. However, if we are going to have abortion, I suppose if a 16-year-old gets pregnant that'd a good case for it.
when it comes to the gentile elements of these elites at least the motive behind this support comes down to materialism (desire for cheaper labor)
Someone made a point the other day that struck meL This is not Dickens' day where masses of cheap labor are needed to be poured into factories or coal-mines or whatever. The economy has changed. Conservative support for immigration in the 1990s and 2000s is probably more about being PC and thus (what they see as) relevant than the labor issue.
There is a positive correlation between a man's wealth and his fertility even in developed countries -- it's just that the threshold where that positive correlation starts is far above the middle class level it was during the 1950's.
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