overpopulation

Dropping Birth Rate has Many Governments Worried

Sue Fagalde Lick declining birth rate, overpopulation, Population Bomb , , , , ,

My great-grandmother Louisa Gilroy had 10 siblings. Her husband, my great-grandfather Joe Fagalde, had 12. Joe and Louisa raised three sons. Those sons, Clarence, Louis, and Lloyd, had two, three and no children respectively. My dad, one of Clarence’s two sons, had two children. My brother has one biological and one adopted child. I have non

Lest this start to sound like tiresome “begats” chapter in the Bible, I’ll stop there. What I’m saying is each generation seems to be having fewer children. Experts who study these things are starting to worry. We have this huge bulge of baby boomers who are all moving into their senior years, leaving fewer younger adults not only to care for them but to do the work needed to keep society going. Also fewer people to contribute to programs like Social Security and Medicare in the U.S.

It’s not just here.

Recent news reports have talked about how Japan’s birth rate is the lowest it has been since the 1800s. The population is aging rapidly, with a shrinking number of workers.

The median age is 49, highest in the world. The government has been offering incentives such as more parental leave and childcare allowances, but it’s not having much of an effect. Young couples are just not that interested in procreating. It costs a fortune to raise a child in Japan and young women pursuing their careers are not eager to take on a traditional role raising children.

The same thing is happening in China, where the population is decreasing. The situation was exacerbated by the one-child policy put in place in 1980, where it was illegal to have more than one child. Now that has backfired. Deaths exceed births, and the workforce is getting smaller. The one-child rule ended in 2015, but young people raised in homes with only one child are not jumping to take on the costs and sacrifices of having multiple children.

Many other countries are looking at aging populations and fewer births. Why? We at Childless by Marriage can tick off the reasons:

* Birth control and abortion offering more choices

* Women waiting until their late 30s or early 40s when their fertility is already waning

* Couples struggling to finish their education and build their careers before having children

* The high cost of raising children

* The lack of support such as childcare

* Being attracted by other options in life

* Infertility and other health problems

* Partners who are unable or unwilling to have children

* The rise in divorces and multiple marriages, increasing the chances that childless people will marry partners who have already done the parenting thing and don’t want to do it again

For most people, it’s probably a combination of reasons. Nearly all of us shudder at the thought of the enormous families of a century or two ago, especially when we consider that these are just the ones that survived birth and childhood. It’s relatively safe now, so why not have a couple of kids? But a lot of people are saying “no thanks.”

When I was young, the buzz was all about the horrors of overpopulation. Read 1970’s The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich. That book caused a lot of couples to choose the childfree life. Fifty-three years later, we still have too many people. Look at traffic, pollution, starving people in third world countries, and the homeless camping on our American sidewalks. The problem is more who and where than how many.

I’ll be gone by the time the low birth rate is a major problem, but what do you think?

Do population numbers have anything to do with your own childless situation? If your government was pleading for more babies, would you have children for the sake of your country? Or does that seem ridiculous?

I welcome your comments.

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Book predicts decreasing birth rate will lead to disaster

Sue Fagalde Lick childfree, declining birth rate, Jonathan V. Last, Laura Carroll, overpopulation, shrinking population, The Baby Matrix, What to Expect When No One's Expecting

What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan V. Last, Encounter Books, 2013. 

After years of hearing that we have too many people on this planet and that we have to decrease our population, here comes Jonathan V. Last to tell us that if we don’t start having more children, we’re in trouble. We’ll have a population of old people with no young ones to support them. Other authors tell us the exact opposite. Whom should we believe? This book is a slow read, a scholarly compilation of statistics that show the birth rate going down below replacement level in most first-world countries. Last blames it on many factors of modern life, including the cost of raising children, women going to college and having careers instead of babies, the decline of marriage and religion and the general belief that having children will take all the fun out of life. He details the efforts, mostly unsuccessful, that have been made to encourage people to have more children and makes suggestions for how to encourage more births. Last has a strong conservative bias and occasionally laces this footnote-fest with sarcasm, but there’s a lot of interesting information here, and it certainly provides food for thought. 

There’s no doubt the birth rate has been going down. In some countries, such as Germany and Japan, the population is shrinking at a rapid rate. The question is whether this is a problem. I had this book with me at the doctor’s office a couple days ago. When I showed my doctor the cover, she exclaimed that a smaller population is a good thing, that this world has too many people in it. That’s what most people think. Just visit any large American city at rush hour. Wouldn’t fewer people and more open space be good? Yes, we’d have to work out how to manage things like Social Security with fewer workers contributing to it, but wouldn’t it even out in time? 

And how does this affect our individual decisions on whether or not to have children? Certainly overpopulation is often cited by the childfree crowd as a good reason not to have kids. If we’re to believe Jonathan V. Last, anyone who has more than two children should be rewarded with tax breaks and other incentives. But Laura Carroll maintains in The Baby Matrix, reviewed here in February, that couples should be given tax breaks for NOT having children. 

So what’s the answer? I think if you want to have children, you should have them, and if you don’t want them, don’t have them. The population will sort itself out. 

What do you think?  

Is population control a good reason not to have babies?

Sue Fagalde Lick Baby Matrix, Laura Carroll, limiting number of children, overpopulation, Population Bomb, population control, Zero Population Growth

The world’s population has reached seven billion and is still growing. In her new book, The Baby Matrix, Laura Carroll insists that if our culture keeps encouraging people to have babies we will destroy the planet. People who care will not have children, or if they must, they will have only one biological child. If that’s not enough, they will adopt additional children. The overriding theme of this book is that our “pronatalist” society’s belief that having children is the right and natural thing to do is wrong, wrong, wrong.

For baby boomers like me, Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968, was required high school reading. In it, he predicted that if we didn’t do something about our ever-increasing population, the world would become so overpopulated it would self-destruct. This book became the bible for the Zero Population Growth movement. It started about the same time as birth control and abortion became legal for most people in the U.S., so people really did start having fewer kids. The average family produced two children instead of three, six or a dozen.

Still, Carroll says we need to cut back even more. When I talk to people who are childless by choice, many mention overpopulation as one of the reasons not to have kids. It’s rarely their main reason, but it’s one of them.

All of this makes me uncomfortable. Weren’t our bodies designed to make babies?

I was happy to find some articles that report the population has started decreasing, that maybe we’re not headed for disaster. This one from Slate, “About That Overpopulation Problem,” explains that some countries, such as Germany, have already lowered the birthrate so much that the overall population is going down.

With couples waiting until they’re older to have kids, with birth control being available to most people, and more and more choosing not to have children at all, it would seem likely that our population would stop growing. If not, I suppose the natural methods of population control that work with non-humans–predators, natural disasters, lack of food–would eventually balance out the numbers.

What do you think? Do you believe we should limit births to keep the population down? Has anyone in your life suggested this as a good reason not to have kids?