Decades ago, Dame Lois Browne-Evans was addressing a public meeting in Devonshire. The government of the day was obsessed with Black girls having babies born out of wedlock — so obsessed that important people were having serious discussions about sterilising women who had more than two children. Dame Lois was incensed. Hard drugs were creeping into the country and nobody in authority was paying attention to this. She told the meeting that young people should come out to political gatherings and learn. And then, as an afterthought, she added that some might get a little bored and wander off into the bushes to fornicate.

The next morning, The Royal Gazette reported that an MP had told young people to go and fornicate in the bushes. The reporter subsequently issued a correction, but the initial damage was done. Dame Lois’s enemies used the sentence to try and end her political career.

As we now know, it did not end her career, far from it. Dame Lois Browne-Evans became one of the most consequential figures in the history of Bermudian politics and law. She outlasted every attempt to reduce her to a punchline.

But history has delivered an irony that her detractors could never have anticipated. The problem was never too many Black Bermudian babies. The problem, urgent, cascading, and now undeniable, is that there are far too few babies, period! Even those who are having children outside wedlock are having fewer.

Because the birthrate cannot recover quickly enough to prevent the dependency ratio from reaching crisis point, immigration is not merely an option, it is a demographic necessity. The question is not whether Bermuda needs more people. It does. The question is who comes, on what terms and with what long-term consequences for the island’s demographic balance.

Bermuda’s population has been estimated to have declined for six consecutive years. Deaths now exceed births. The total fertility rate stands at 1.4 children per woman, against a replacement level of 2.1. The Chamber of Commerce estimates that the real population may now be below 60,000, down from a peak approaching 68,000. It is estimated that today nearly one in four Bermudians is over 65. The old-age dependency ratio is projected to reach 40 seniors for every 100 working-age people. While that rate is considered moderately high, it is expected to increase, putting greater strain on the economy.

The Contributory Pension Fund faces possible depletion by 2049, although the Government has recently taken controversial steps to prevent that from happening. And the measurement system we use to track all of this assumes zero net migration because no reliable migration data exists. We are navigating a crisis with a broken compass.

I raised these concerns publicly at the Facing the Brutal Facts forum held at the Bermuda College in 2015. Many of the trends I identified then have continued uninterrupted. The political response has been, in the main, the expression of concern without the implementation of remedy.

Why are Bermudians not having children?

The standard answer, that they are too expensive, is correct but incomplete. The economist Catherine Pakaluk argues that the deeper truth is this: children are no longer needed. When the Ford Model T arrived, horses did not become more expensive. They simply became unnecessary. The only people who kept horses were those who loved them. Today, Pakaluk argues, children have gone the way of horses.

She identifies three functions children historically performed that have since been displaced. First, labour: children worked the farm and staffed the family business. Agricultural modernisation and professional employment have eliminated that function, and in Bermuda’s specific case, the decline of the Black family-owned business has removed one of the most particular local reasons to have children.

Second, old-age security: children were the primary guarantee against destitution in later life. Pensions and social insurance have substantially replaced them. And thirdly, the inevitable link between intimacy and children: contraception severed that connection with extraordinary effectiveness, making children an opt-in rather than a default outcome.

Demographic researchers also note that rising rates of LGBTQ+ identification, particularly among younger generations, contribute at the margin to aggregate fertility decline, since same-sex relationships do not produce children biologically. This is a documented contributor to the trend, not a moral judgment, and its effect, while real, is smaller in scale than the structural factors above.

Cicely Tyson put the marriage dimension plainly: the only reason to get married, she said, is if you plan to have children. In Bermuda, resident-to-resident marriages fell from 253 in 2012 to 153 in 2019 — a decline of 40 per cent in seven years. The population in the prime marrying age group fell nearly 22 per cent over the same period. Fewer young people, marrying less often, in conditions that make starting a family feel financially impossible: the institutional framework for family formation is contracting on every dimension simultaneously.

None of this is happening in isolation. India, a nation long assumed to be the high-fertility counterweight to the ageing developed world, has now recorded a birthrate of 1.9, below replacement, for the first time in its history. No region of the world is exempt. But Bermuda carries this global crisis with the additional weight of a specific history that makes its version of it sharper, and the conversation required to address it harder.

That conversation is about race. The racial dimension of this article’s immigration argument is not a case against immigration. It is a case for immigration designed with Bermuda’s specific history as a conscious parameter. Without taking into consideration the racial equity component, any other reformation will repeat the pattern that produced the present demographic imbalance, which needs to be addressed.

The demographic consequences of that policy are written into the official record. The 2016 Census of Population and Housing, when dissected by race, Bermudian status and nativity, shows that of the 7,121 people granted Bermudian status who were born overseas, 3,859 (54 per cent) were White, despite Whites representing only 31 per cent of the total population. Only 2,113 (30 per cent) were Black, despite Blacks representing more than 52 per cent of the total population. White recipients of status received it at nearly twice their population share. Black recipients received it at barely half theirs. That contrast does not arise by accident.

When Joan Lestor MP raised the matter in the House of Commons in June 1967, she reported that of 706 Bermuda status grants, 700 had gone to White recipients and six to Black recipients, and two of them were members of the ruling United Bermuda Party (HC Deb, June 19, 1967, Vol 748, col 1051). Those figures begged the question: Who is status for?

Sixty years on, the pattern has moderated but not reversed. It is the measurable residue of deliberate policy. A policy where immigration is used as a demographic weapon; a policy of votes given to expatriates specifically to dilute the Black electorate; a policy of the House of Assembly that, in 1935, formally proposed the compulsory sterilisation of Black women who had more than two children “born out of wedlock”, citing American and German sterilisation law as models.

It is a policy that allowed Margaret Sanger to come to Bermuda in 1937 to establish birth-control clinics when the island discovered, in the words of the press at the time, a huge increase in the Negro population. It is a policy of Black women being sterilised against their will, whose relatives have recounted what was done to them at public forums across the decades. That is not a demographic accident. That is policy. Remember “Pathways to Status” in 2016? The protests that followed, and the 24-12 election result that came after, are the clearest possible evidence of how deeply Black Bermudians feel about their demographic birthright.

This history is why, when business voices call for liberalised immigration, or politicians call for an easier route to status, the Black Bermudian community does not hear a neutral, economic argument. They hear a familiar tune, one that has been played before, with consequences their parents and grandparents experienced directly. That is not paranoia. It is rational historical memory. Any population strategy that ignores this will fail to command the democratic and moral legitimacy it needs to be implemented.

The solution exists. It requires courage.

Housing reform is the most important single intervention available. I said so in 2011, when interviewed for the documentary Poverty in Paradise: The Price We Pay, that if it were in my power, I would house the people. Housing costs consume up to 50 per cent or more of many household budgets in Bermuda. You cannot build a family in a home that you cannot afford. With housing costs out of the picture, or greatly reduced, the pressures of living in Bermuda are greatly reduced. Couples no longer financially strangled by housing costs can then begin to consider the family that they could not previously afford. Minister Zane DeSilva’s commitment to more than 200 affordable homes as phase one of a ten-year strategy is welcome and overdue. The test is whether it survives the electoral cycles ahead.

A points-based pathway to Bermudian status, applying solely to permanent status, not to work permits, which would remain unchanged for employers, should be calibrated to maintain the present demographic balance. Bermuda’s constitution already permits remedial measures that address past racial injustices. The legal framework exists. What has been missing is political will.

Bermuda’s pursuit of full Caricom membership and the recently enforced English-language requirement for overseas workers together point, whether by design or fortunate alignment, towards the English-speaking Caribbean as the natural source of future residents: people who share our language, our history of colonialism and emancipation, and who are, in large proportion, Black — to speak the quiet part out loud. That alignment could be made explicit government policy, not left as a coincidence nobody names. In fact, it is a solution in the waiting.

The pension reform, senior care infrastructure and the demographic data systems that would allow us to measure this crisis accurately, rather than guess, are not only necessary, they are long overdue. And none of them will matter if we do not first have the honesty to name what we are dealing with.

Dame Lois did not say what she was accused of saying. But the people who weaponised that accusation were expressing a view about whose reproduction mattered and whose did not. That question has not been resolved in the decades since. It has merely changed its form.

The Biblical reference in the title invokes a stern remedy for wayward historical injustices. What is needed now are the right conditions, just as is required for conception. And we are running out of time to create them.

• Cordell Riley is the institutional research analyst at the Bermuda College, and a former research statistician for the Government. He can be reached at criley@college.bm. The full position paper, A Failure to Fornicate: Bermuda’s Population Crisis and its Rod of Correction, is forthcoming in the Bermuda Journal of Academic Research