Don’t pin the birthrate problem on the birth givers
The time has apparently come to panic about global declining birth rates, again.
“America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population,” worried the Economist, in one of many representative headlines I’ve spotted over recent months. “The EU faces a major demographic decline,” warned Euronews. “Japan’s Latest Plan To Reverse Declining Birthrate,” teased a recent Newsweek headline. “South Korea’s low birthrate budget needs an overhaul” opined the editorial board of the Chosun Daily. The Wall Street Journal put the finest point on it: “Suddenly There Aren’t Enough Babies.”
In the United States, this discussion could be linked to some April news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The fertility rate in the United States decreased by 3 percent between 2022 and 2023. Aside from a 1 percent increase in 2021 - a pandemic blip, maybe - that’s the eighth year since 2014 that fertility rates have fallen in America. The 2023 rate of 54.4 births per 1,000 females is a historic low, and below the 2.1 children per woman that is considered the “replacement level” needed to replenish the population.
And so, the headlines. And so, the worrying. And so, the Guardian, the Telegraph and Business Insider have all run profiles of the same young Pennsylvania couple, Malcolm and Simone Collins, who have positioned themselves as the poster family for the “pronatalist” movement. Pronatalism, popular among the highest echelon of tech bros (see: father of 12 Elon Musk), is the push to encourage more Americans to have more children “to save mankind,” as the Telegraph put it. The Collinses seemed earnest and sort of reasonable - though, they did name one child “Industry Americus” - until a reporter went to dinner with them and, she wrote, witnessed the dad casually smacking his 2-year-old in the face.
Perhaps you are wondering, as I did, why we should care about this population decline. Have studies shown that women and couples are happier if they have more children? Not to my knowledge. In fact, many show the opposite: that although children may bring tremendous joy, they also bring tremendous stress to marriages. Do women want to have more children, but they somehow feel they are unable to? Maybe - though it appears that the birth rate is declining even in countries that have implemented family-friendly policies, such as extended parental leave. Are more humans on Earth better for the planet? LOL.
So what exactly are we talking about when we say that suddenly there aren’t enough babies? Enough babies for whom?
“Where will a nation’s economic growth come from if companies cannot recruit enough workers?” asked a recent BBC article. “And how can a smaller workforce afford to pay for the pensions of a much larger retired population?”
Ah. Aha. It turns out that when news articles and the economists quoted in them worry about the declining birth rate, what they’re saying, almost without exception, is that there aren’t enough babies for the economy. There aren’t enough babies to support the worldview that humanity’s purpose is to make more people to take more jobs to buy more things to be purchased by more people who will in turn make more babies.
Which means that … this is not my problem. Or rather, it is my problem, because one day I, too, would like to receive the Social Security benefits I’ve been paying into since I was 15. But this seems like a matter for policies, not pregnancies. And I am curious to know why an economic dilemma, the kind you might expect to be tackled by corporations or governments or NGOs, is instead presented as a dilemma to be solved by uteruses.
Social Security running out? Maybe we need more women to get pregnant. Older people are entering into a shaky retirement without the security of the defined benefit pensions that retirees once had? Maybe we need more women to get pregnant. Companies cannot get enough workers who want the jobs they are offering under the terms they are being offered? This sounds like the kind of MBA-level scenario that can only be solved by the reproductive system of a 28-year-old named Claire.
Plenty of researchers studying population decline have attempted to figure out what is happening to begin with. But, unfortunately, it turns out the answer is that we really don’t know. What we do know is that, almost without exception, when women live in places that allow them access to birth control, access to education and access to jobs, they overwhelmingly have fewer children. Even if, as in Taiwan, Russia, Italy and Greece, the government literally gives women cash money for reproduction. Even if, as in South Korea, the government has been addressing the issue from every possible angle, including building a high-speed rail system designed to shorten commutes and make more time for family life.
The only parts of the world where the birth rate seems to be steady or increasing right now are in places in which birth control is hard to come by and where women’s roles are relegated to domestic labor. It’s almost as if, when women are given the chance to control their own reproduction, and when they have the education to have the option of working outside of the home, and when their society welcomes their contributions in fields beyond motherhood, and when they are paid for their work - it’s almost as if leveling the playing field between women and men has allowed women to truly choose how many children they really want to have. And that answer, for a lot of women, seems to be: fewer.
This seems like something that shouldn’t be anyone’s problem, frankly, unless it turns out that global economic strategy is actually just a pyramid scheme. Unless it turns out that the sharpest minds in the world have really noodled on this problem and that their best solution is hoping that the condom breaks. Unfortunately, it sounds like this might, in fact, be exactly where we’re at.
In which case, you start to wonder whether we’re even asking the right questions.
Instead of asking, How do we get more people to have babies? maybe it’s asking, How do we best care for the people already on this planet? Instead of asking, How do we make our economy spin faster? maybe we ask, Is a world that is required to spin faster and faster or it collapses a good idea for a world?
Now we’ve gone far afield of pregnancy and even of policy, and into something murkier: paradigm. Is growth always the right answer, or is discernment the right answer? What do we think that we are owed, and who do we think owes it to us, and what do we owe in return?
But back to the birth rate. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we really are in a dire emergency and we really do need the population to grow. What are we supposed to do about all of this?
One answer, some demographers have said, is to consider the long game. Although it’s true that countries’ efforts to raise the birth rate via social policies haven’t seemed to be effective - at least, not yet - that doesn’t mean they won’t be. And building societies with better work-life balance, more high-quality child care and better public transportation is a net positive for everyone who lives in that society, regardless of whether it results in population growth. Policies such as paid parental leave and subsidized child care should be considered investments in the population a country already has, rather than as bribes for future children.
Another answer is not to panic. Trent MacNamara, a history professor at Texas A&M University who has studied fertility trends, told Vox last year that just as fertility rates may have mysteriously fallen recently, they have also mysteriously risen in the past: “Exactly zero demographers saw [the post-World War II baby boom] coming,” MacNamara is quoted as saying. “Even today no one is quite sure why it happened and why it lasted so long.”
A third answer is: I have no idea. I’m not an economist or an elected official! I’m just a random woman!
But that is entirely the point. Random women, or rather, their reproductive systems, cannot be the only solution for making sure the economy does not go to hell. They are going to make choices about whether to have kids, and how many kids to have, and we can’t count on them to happily agree to birth as many as they have in the past.
We need a backup plan. One that does not involve women on their backs.
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