Massacre of the Comments

Abortion promoter Ann Furedi was writing in the Guardian yesterday on how 200,00 abortions a year (compared with around 693,000 live births) are really quite a Good Thing. There were some interesting comments - 50-odd, so Laban chipped in with his four penn'orth.

This morning there was only one comment - mine - and now even that has gone. Hardly any on the whole site now. Comment is Free seems to have turned into Comment-Free. Even Herod only deleted the first-born.

When I was writing my post on abortion, sex-education and demographic change I'd forgotten a conversation I'd had a couple of weeks back with a Catholic educator and committted Labour Party man, who was still active in education in a large Northern city. A decent sort. Two things he told me that stuck - one being that the area where he'd been a head for umpteen years was bedevilled by white flight - parents applying to out-of-area schools, the other being the increasing pressure from Muslim parents for single-sex secondary education.

I can completely understand that - they look at the native girls and think - "I don't want my daughter growing up like that".

Just so would a Victorian father have felt, could he have seen the future. Victorian secondary schools were nearly all single-sex. In those cities where the old buildings survive, you may still see schools with entrances marked 'Girls' and 'Boys'.

The 2006 ONS Birth stats (pdf) are the latest available series - and more than ever they show the demographic transformation of our great cities. Children born to foreign-born mothers make up 22% of babies born in England and Wales (Table 9.2) but it's the city figures which are telling.

Newcastle 23%
Blackburn 27%
Manchester 38%
Sheffield 21%
Bradford 32%
Leiester 41%
Nottingham 24%
Northampton 25%
Birmingham 36%
Coventry 29%
Luton 48%
Cambridge 41%
Peterborough 30%
Watford 36%
Inner London 59%
Outer London 48%
Milton Keynes 30%
Reading 36%
Slough 53%
Oxford 42%

Table 9.5 gives us total fertility rates by country of birth of mother. While they differ somewhat from Richard Berthoud's 2001 calcs, which were I believe based on ethnicity rather than country of birth, the pattern is clear.

United Kingdom 1.6
India 2.3
Pakistan 4.7
Bangladesh 3.9
East Africa 1.6
Rest of Africa 2.0
Other New Commonwealth 2.2
Rest of World 1.8



I think, given these stats, that

a) demographic change is likely to bring about a lowering of the abortion rate, just as it's already seen a raising of the birth rate. I expect to see the number of abortions start to fall in the next few years, as the number of young people from non-aborting cultures rises, and the number from aborting cultures falls. Truly the sexual revolution contains the aborted seeds of its own destruction.

b) this lowering of the abortion rate will doubtless be hailed as a triumph by Ann Furedi and the rest of the sex-ed/abortion industry.

c) but it'll be a very short-lived triumph. In our major cities the pressure for single-sex secondary schools will become irresistible as more and more voters call for them. Those single-sex schools will NOT have a Furedi-style sex-ed policy - the policy is far more likely to be a Victorian-style - 'don't even talk about it, let alone do it' policy - especially in girls schools. Of course single-sex schools and Victorian sex ed worked pretty well for the natives once - before they learned better.