Wake up Britain. Your country is being invaded.

That's the warning given by Ruth Dudley Edwards in her Daily Mail article Will Britain one day be Muslim? While this is not the first time I've seen prognostication of this sort (in fact, she mentioned Steyn's work), it is the first by an English (and Irish) woman. Mrs. Edwards argues that Britain's low birth rate (and all of Europe's for that matter) will be the end of them. The most interesting thing about this argument to me, considering my atheistic leanings, is her correlation of the increase of secularism and the decrease of the national birth rate.

The big question this poses is: why are we not reproducing? There are many reasons, but probably the most important are the decline of religion and the liberation of women.

In Ireland, when the Roman Catholic Church effectively ran society, sex was for procreation, contraceptives were banned, the normal size for a family was around five or six children, but 12 or 13 were not uncommon.

As the country embraced secularism in the 1980s, birth rates plummeted, exacerbated by the new-found confidence of women that made them choose careers rather than domesticity.

While correlation is most definitely not causation, other than the faster pace of today's Western lifestyle (we've time for nothing anymore), I can think of only one other factor that could have caused such a decline. While Edwards does include women's liberation in her article, this doesn't explain why when men and women do decide to have children, they are only having one to two.

Something that I think many are failing to recognize could explain it all -- the extreme narcissism of the typical westerner. We're too wrapped up in ourselves to be bothered with children. When we do choose to reproduce, in order to limit the impact on our own vain lifestyles, we only have one or two children. Something to ponder for later.

Hmmmm... I wonder what the numbers look like for the U.S. with regards to birth rates among Americans (American born white, black, asian, and hispanic) and the massive Mexican/South American illegal alien population? I suspect the illegals are producing quite a few more rugrats than we are.