Europe has simply given up

 Here is a chart by Eurostat showing European nations' birth rates by decade beginning at 1960 and by year 2012-2014. See a trend there? And do you see that Turkey is the only nation to show a steady, upward trend? 

Demographer s agree that a birth rate of 2.1 live births per woman is what it takes to maintain a level population level. When the rate falls below 1.8 it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse and below 1.5 it approaches near-impossibility. That's why rates that low are often called a "demographic death spiral."

And that is one reason why I have for many years advocated America's disentanglement from the military part of the NATO alliance. As I have said before, if NATO’s countries will not have enough children to preserve protect themselves, why should American women have children to protect them?

The chart:

Spain's government is so alarmed that it has literally set up an official office to address the problem and,

... has tasked demographic expert Edelmira Barreira with sorting out the problem. The move comes after the country reported a higher number of deaths than births for the first time in 2015.

Spanish women between 18-49 reportedly had an average of 1.3 children in 2015 - below the European Union’s (EU) figure of 1.58. Spain’s birthrate has fallen by 18 percent since 2008, according to figures from Eurostat.

And between 1977 and 2015, the number of childless couples tripled from 1.5 to 4.4 million... .

As a demographer, though, Senora Barreira cannot be optimistic since once a society's rate drops to 1.3, more than a marginal increase over the long term is almost impossible. And besides, Spanish couples "blamed long working hours and late nights for the decrease" - whatever that really means.

Long ago Europe's countries decided to build a welfare state instead of bear children. But as the birth rate correspondingly fell, who would provide the labor and wealth to pay for Europe's very generous retirement payouts and nationalized health care? They answered that question, too, but did not foresee or did not care the long-term outlook: "The Mohammed Retirement Plan Will Kill Europe."

Once again, European values are in conflict with European survival.

The European values that require Europe to commit suicide are about ideology, not language, culture or nationhood. But the incoming migrants don’t share that ideology. They have their own Islamic values.

Why should 23-year-old Mohammed work for four decades so that Hans or Fritz across the way can retire at 61 and lie on a beach in Mallorca? The idea that Mohammed would ever want to do such a thing out of love for Europe was a silly fantasy that European governments fed their worried citizens.

Then there is this informative little chart: "Muslims have an average 3 children per family (or woman? The data does not clarify this). Not hard to calculate how large the population will explode into within the next three decades."

This is one reason Europe's future decades will be decidedly non-European in ways that we recognize Europe now.

Update, March 1: The trend is also worldwide:

Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and will overtake Christianity as the most popular before the end of this century, according to an analysis of religious surveys published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

With 1.6 billion, Muslims made up 23 percent of the world’s population, according to a 2010 Pew estimate. That figure was still some way short of the 2.2 billion Christians which comprised 31 percent of the population.

However, by 2050 there could be near parity between the numbers of adherents of the two religions for the first time in history. The reasons for this rapid growth are thought to be the greater number of children Muslims have compared to other religious groups and the comparatively young age of Muslims.