With the exception of Israel, not a single Western country currently has an above-replacement-level fertility rate. American births have been in steady decline since 2008, and hopes of a coronavirus-induced resurgence of births have turned out to be misplaced. Wilfred Reilly comments:

As I noted in a recent article, . . . many members of Gen-Z seem to reject conventional dating and romance totally. Today, only 30 percent of senior high-school students have ever had sex even once, and only 21 percent are currently involved in a “sexually active” love relationship. About 20 percent identify as gay or otherwise “queer.” There are several possible reasons for the objectively rather-astonishing rise of childless celibacy as a trend among America’s young. Religiosity, which brought with it endless “moral” rules but also the formal duty to “be fruitful and multiply,” is on the wane—the fastest-growing religious identity in the United States if not the world is “none.”

But one additional and very obvious factor has received far too little attention in most past analyses of this topic. Almost certainly, one reason that many Americans—perhaps particularly urban liberal white women—are not having children is that they have been told throughout their entire lives that it is immoral or evil to do so. The extent to which this is the case almost cannot be overstated.

A recent large-[sample-size] survey found that fear of such variables as “climate change” influenced the child-bearing decisions of 53 percent of respondents. . . . [O]ne strongly suspects the people occupying Western civilization will figure out a solution to a problem like “higher sea levels”—rather than simply staring dully at the rising waters until we all drown. However, we may not as easily survive the downstream effects of our current fear of the rising waters.

Can the United States continue to lead the world? Sure. . . . But, to keep growing our population and retain our economic pole position while we do so, we will have to try something that we have not tried for decades—convincing our own citizens that having families is good. Suggestions on how to do that are welcome!

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.