The Update Desk: Babies, We Need More Babies!

A year or so ago, I did a post on what many people, yours truly included, thought were out-in-right-field comments by Rep. Steve King, the Iowa Republican who's not known for his calm, centrist rhetoric.

Babies, We Need More Babies! brought us King's comments on the importance of having good old American babies. As in,

You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else's babies. You've got to keep your birth rate up and that you need to teach your children your values and in doing so, then you can grow your population and you can strengthen your culture, you can strengthen your way of life. 

Our way of life and our culture, to King, are not very inclusive, although he takes pains not to come right out and say white babies are better than other babies. He doesn't have to come right out and say it - it's as plain as the nose on his face.

This whole white people business, though, does get a little tired. I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?

Ah, he's a delight, King is. There are more examples of his thinking in the original post. But what brings me to the Update Desk and Rep. King today are the shocking statistics on the birthrate here in America. 

The birthrate fell for nearly every group of women of reproductive age in the US in 2017, reflecting a sharp drop that saw the fewest newborns since 1987... The general fertility rank sank to a record low of 60.2 births per 1000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 - a 3% drop from 2016...

There's a number in the the figures that will scare the blue cheeses out of many people, including Rep. King, I'm sure: there were only 244,760 more white births than all other demographics combined.

• All races and origins: 3,853,472
• White: 1,991,348
• Hispanic: 897,518
• Black: 560,560
• Asian: 249,214
• American Indian or Alaska Native: 28,878
• Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: 9,418

I've found no comment on Rep. King's social media feeds - perhaps he's still in shock.