Remember the cries on the left in the late 1960s and early '70s for zero population growth? (They spawned an awful Star Trek episode and a couple of even worse movies if you need a quick refresher.) Well, it's possible to see it in action these days on both coasts--and in Old Europe. First up, the Connecticut Post writes, "Can New England be saved? Report finds too many negatives":

Are New England's best days behind it? Is it fated to be an old, blue, cold and complacent corner of a red-hot America?

Some indicators suggest so. The six states are barely holding their own in population; Massachusetts is actually slipping. Each year the merger mania of big companies seems to snap up a famed New England corporation — a Hancock, Fleet or Gillette. Only scrappy fights stem closure of the region's principal military bases, an anchor of its long-standing defense economy.

Despite the remarkable surge of biotech research and corporate spinoffs in the Boston region, the overall economic growth rate is anemic.

Check around New England, as we have in hundreds of interviews over the past three years, and you sense little of the dynamism of the American South and West.

The region's congressional strength is dwindling, and it won no favors in Republican-led Washington with its six-state sweep for John Kerry in 2004. Right now, states like Massachusetts and Connecticut look strong in national rankings of education and income, but the trend lines are down as competitors nip at their heels.

But is decline inevitable?

We argue "no."

Well, San Francisco would probably beg to differ, in a trend that James Taranto spotted a few months ago:

"San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city," the Associated Press reports. "Just 14.5 percent of the city's population is 18 and under." The AP dispatch attributes the small number of children to high housing costs and Frisco's high prevalence of nonprocreative sexual orientations. Not mentioned is the Roe effect. The AP also describes how the city is responding:

Determined to change things, Mayor Gavin Newsom has put the kid crisis near the top of his agenda, appointing a 27-member policy council to develop plans for keeping families in the city. . . .

Newsom has expanded health insurance for the poor to cover more people under 25, and created a tax credit for working families. And voters have approved measures to patch up San Francisco's public schools, which have seen enrollment drop from about 62,000 to 59,000 since 2000.

One voter initiative approved up to $60 million annually to restore public school arts, physical education and other extras that state spending no longer covers. Another expanded the city's Children's Fund, guaranteeing about $30 million a year for after-school activities, child care subsidies and other programs.

So the lack of children is a reason to spend more taxpayer money on schools and other programs for kids. If there were more kids, would that be a reason to spend less? The question answers itself, doesn't it? As Ronald Reagan once observed, "No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth."

Nowhere is that more evident than across the Atlantic, where governmental policies have created a Carter-style malaise in which birth rates are down--and unemployment is up, putting the Old into Old Europe.

As Mark Steyn wrote earlier this year:

When I've mentioned the birth dearth on previous occasions, pro-abortion correspondents have insisted it's due to other factors - the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg - or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of 48. How much of Europe's fertility woes derive from abortion is debatable. But what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is framed - as a Blairite issue of personal choice - is itself symptomatic of the broader crisis of the dying West.

Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia's population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria's by 36 per cent, Italy's by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?

Of course, for the left, the ultimate secular utopia was the Soviet Union. How are things working out in its aftermath there in terms of population growth? Not very well on the front-end...

Russians, whose lives are shorter and poorer than they were under communism, have more abortions than births to avoid the costs of raising children, Bloomberg.com reported Tuesday quoting the country’s highest-ranking obstetrician.

About 1.6 million women had an abortion last year, a fifth of them under the age of 18, and about 1.5 million gave birth, said Vladimir Kulakov, vice president of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. “Many more” abortions weren’t reported.

...Or the back-end, either.

Late Update (10/20/05): "Demographic Destiny In One Glossy Photo".