Historians agree that declining population was a major cause of Rome's fall. When I did brief research regarding the cause of the declining population, two mainline sources blamed it on plagues (see this post, third paragraph) and don't mention contraception and abortion, even though those practices were prevalent.
Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity makes a clear record. A few passages:
In addition to infanticide, fertility was greatly reduced in the Greco-Roman world by the very frequent recourse to abortion. The literature details an amazingly large number of abortion techniques--the more effective of which were exceedingly dangerous. . . .
A primary cause of low fertility in the Greco-Roman world was a male culture that held marriage in low esteem. . . .
[A]lthough plagues played a substantial role in the decline of the Roman population, of far greater importance was the low fertility rate of the free population in the Greco-Roman world . . . and the extremely low fertility of the large slave population. . . .
I appreciate Stark's starkness, but I wonder: why do mainstream historical sources fail to mention the contraceptive culture that was Rome's decline? One of the sources I consulted is a lecture by The Teaching Company that I bought a few months ago. I typically find TTC a reliable source (once in awhile, you get an ideologue who claims things like, "The U.S. intentionally poisoned Native Americans with small pox," but that's unusual). Yet the lecture about the decline of the Roman Empire didn't even mention contraception and abortion.
This is especially startling since historians are constantly trying to show the general population why history is relevant. They love drawing parallels to modern situations, using Santayana's saying that 'those who don't know history are doomed to repeat history.' But they have a glaring parallel between the United States' and Europe's (Rome's) declining birth rates and a corresponding risk from Muslim (Germanic barbarian) aggression and rising birth rates, and they fail to mention it.
What's going on? Given the relevance of the parallel, I have a hard time believing it's just an innocent omission. I suspect the lecturer and writer, and/or their publishers, didn't want such things mentioned, if not explicitly, at least implicitly: "This is mainstream. Don't say anything that could inflame political or religious sensibilities."
Thing is, if the truths about the dangers of declining populations don't hit the mainstream (folks out there still don't know about it; they're stuck in Malthusian thinking), the biggest danger to the West will continue to grow.
