July 12, 2021

By Bill Berkowitz

In 2019, in central Verona, Italy, under the banner “The Wind of Change: Europe and the Global Pro-Family Movement,” the 13th World Congress of Families (WCF) took place. The event is a now annual conference of ultra-conservative activists and their growing coterie of political allies. The aim of these annual gatherings is to promote what is called “the natural family.” 

Although the WCF originated within the Christian Right, according to reporting by investigative journalist Claire Provost at the website of The Face, “the jet-setting religious and political elite -- – including priests, bishops, government ministers, ambassadors, and aristocrats like Prince Louis Alphonse of Bourbon, duke of Anjou, who is also a great-grandson of General Franco – discuss how to spread ​‘traditional values’ and resist or roll back demands for reproductive and sexual rights.”

To conferees, same-sex parents, single mothers, women who end unwanted pregnancies, and the unthinkable: teens who have sex, are the enemy of the “natural” family. And, at the heart of these gatherings is concern over a construct called “Demographic Winter.”  

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the WCF “was formed in 1997 in a meeting in Russia between American academic and Reagan appointee to the National Commission on Children, Allan Carlson, and the Russian intellectuals Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov.”

In a 2015 report, the Human Rights Campaign called the WCF “one of the most influential American organizations involved in the export of hate.” 

The fear of European population decline — something called “birth dearth,” used to evoke the horrors of nuclear winter, also known as “demographic winter.” That construct has been used as a catchphrase for turning the discussion [about declining birth rates and rising population age in the West] into a major culture war battle. For many on the Right, framing it as “Demographic Winter” heightens fear while describing a future of economic catastrophes, the decline of Western Civilization, and the destruction of the “natural” family.

Demographic winter is the ultimate culture war battle for the Christian right, rooted, the right claims, in the rise of feminism, legalized abortion, the acceptance of homosexuality, illegal immigration, comprehensive sex education in schools, and the growth of minority populations. All of this is supposedly the result of a multi-decade campaign by liberals to undermine “natural law” and the “natural” family.

In 2002, Pat Buchanan wrote a book titled Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil our Country and Civilization; the Family Research Council, a leading Washington, D.C.-based right wing lobbying group held a conference called “The Roots of Demographic Winter and the Global Economic Crisis.”

Six years later, the Family First Foundation produced the film, Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family, an apocalypse-tinged plea for more white Western babies. Its sequel, Demographic Bomb, traced the history of “the plan” to depopulate the world, with a dose of conspiracy theory thrown in. While racism was a barely hidden subtext in most of the rhetoric, fear of declining populations allowed American proponents of the so-called natural family to forge alliances with European conservatives.

In a 2008 Nation article titled “Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies,” author Kathryn Joyce wrote: As Rick Stout and Barry McLerran, producers of Demographic Winter, argue, “Only if the political incorrectness of talking about the natural family within policy circles is overcome will solutions begin to be found. These solutions will necessarily result in policy changes, changes that will support and promote the natural, intact family.” 

In my 2010 article titled “Right-Wing Uses Declining Birthrate to Stoke Fear,” Devin Burghart, of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, an organization that has long tracked and exposed right-wing movements told me that, demographic winter was still a relatively new way of describing “the old alarmist ‘birth dearth’ concept -- the idea that we're facing declining birthrates which is supposed to portend all sorts of cataclysmic events.”

“One particular strand of dearthers,” Burghart said, was being “led by folks like Pat Buchanan, [who] focus particularly on the supposed danger of declining birthrates among white people in the United States and Europe, which they argue is leading us toward the impending demise of Western Civilization. The concept melds nativism and Islamophobia together with the Christian Right's infatuation with procreation and heterosexuality.”

With so conservative movement still stirring up many culture war battles in the U.S., (Critical Race Theory, cultural Marxism, voter suppression, anti-Transgender, anti-abortion), and so many players involved, (the Republican Party, Religious Right, QAnon, armed militias, neo-Nazis) it may be difficult to still take one of the right’s venerable targets – “Demographic Winter” – seriously. Nevertheless, one can trace the fear white conservatives have of being overrun by people of color as a generator of many of the battles being fought today.

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