No kids please, we're selfish

Childless at 48, I'm now old enough for the question of motherhood to have become merely philosophical. Still, I've had all the time in the world to have babies. I am married. I've been in perfect reproductive health. I could have afforded children, financially. I just didn't want them. They are untidy; they would have messed up my flat. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

From the Guardian on September 17 via American Renaissance.

This essay, surprisingly frank and self-aware, lays it all on the table, covering falling European birth rates and what it means for sustained European culture. The author continues:

Yet maybe the multiculturalism debate is sufficiently matured for us to concede that white folk are people, too. We encourage minorities of every stripe to be proud of their heritage - Jamaicans, Muslims, Jews - as well they should be. We don't assume that if an immigrant from China cherishes his roots and still makes a mean moo shoo pork he is therefore bigoted toward every other ethnicity on the planet. So can Italians not champion Italianness? Or the British their Yorkshire pudding? Indeed, the tacit consensus - that every minority from Australian aboriginals to Romany should be treasuring, preserving and promulgating their culture, while white Europeans should not - is producing a virulent, sometimes poisonous rightwing backlash across the continent, and a gathering opposition to the immigration that Europe sorely needs if it is to maintain itself economically. In the interest of civil, rational thinking on this matter, we should at least allow ourselves to talk about it. The long-dominant populations in most of Europe are contracting, and maybe by the time they're minorities in their own countries they will have rights, too - among them at least the right to feel a little sad.

We are living in the eye of a great big storm, one that will only fully be appreciated by our children as they try to write the history of their nation. The paradigm has irrevocably shifted, and even baby-boomers who have never before questioned any of their petty assumptions and motivations can smell the rain a'comin'.