Where Have All the Children Gone?

We have referred frequently to the dramatic decline in population around the world. The following excerpt from Life Insight provides an informative overview of what is happening:

Recently the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) hosted the “Countdown 2015 Global Roundtable” in London. Its goal was to assess progress in curbing world population growth through universal access to “reproductive health care” since the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo.

Although the Cairo Conference explicitly rejected abortion as a “method of family planning,” groups like IPPF and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) have never retreated from their aggressive advocacy of a universal “right” to abortion on demand. And the Conference’s final “Programme of Action” was bad enough: promoting universal access to artificial birth control and condoning what has been interpreted as a “right” to sexual activity for children aged ten and above. By 2005, wealthy countries were supposed to pony up $6.2 billion annually to achieve these and other Conference goals. They are only halfway toward that goal.

According to some published reports, the London meeting turned into a major gripefest about current U.S. Administration policies: 1) against worldwide abortion on demand; 2) favoring abstinence before, and monogamy in, marriage over condom use to combat AIDS; and 3) refusal to fund UNFPA as long as the organization continues to support China’s coercive population program.

Tim Wirth, who led the U.S. delegation in Cairo that pushed without let-up to expand abortion “rights” and now heads the pro-abortion U.N. Foundation, complained that “the current administration has placed ideology above evidence and bias above science.”

If any side has been blinded by ideological bias, it is surely the folks at Countdown 2015. It’s not a secret that fertility rates worldwide have plummeted in the past thirty years. The UN Population Division, numerous respected demographers, economists and social scientists have described this phenomenon in official publications, books, scholarly articles, and the popular press.

Today the only sources which still warn of an impending population explosion are outdated American textbooks and diatribes from population control extremists and abortion ideologues.

Consider the demographic evidence: Global fertility rates are 50 percent lower than in 1972—2.9 children per woman, down from six children per woman. They continue to fall at an increasing pace. For population to remain stable, the fertility rate must be 2.1 in nations with relatively low infant mortality and proportionately higher than 2.1 where greater numbers of children die in childhood from communicable diseases or malnutrition.

Philip Longman, author of the new book The Empty Cradle, writes in Foreign Affairs (May/June 2004): “All told, some fifty-nine countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world’s total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid population decline, and the phenomenon continues to spread. By 2045, according to the latest UN projections, the world’s fertility rate as a whole will have fallen below replacement levels.” In Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, sociologist Ben Wattenberg states: “Never in the last 650 years, since the time of the Black Plague, have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, in so many places.”

The average fertility rate in Western Europe is a dismal 1.4 children per woman, ranging from 1.8 in Ireland and France to 1.2 in Italy and Spain. This is what a 1.4 fertility rate means for Germany: “Germany could shed nearly a fifth of its 82.5 million people over the next forty years—roughly the equivalent of all of east Germany, a loss of population not seen in Europe since the Thirty Years’ War” which ended in 1748. Western Europe is losing approximately 750,000 people a year.

Economist Robert Wright of Stirling University (Scotland) warns of a “demographic time bomb” because of “a precipitous fall in the fertility rate” in Scotland, now below 1.5 children per woman. The current population of over five million is expected to decrease by more then 20 percent by 2041. A recent survey showed that over 40 percent of highly educated Scotswomen aged forty-five to forty-nine were childless.

President Vladimir Putin calls Russia’s population loss of 750,00 people a year a “national crisis.” The yearly loss could increase to three million or more by 2050. And it is estimated that “Bulgaria will shrink by 38 percent, Romania by 27 percent, Estonia by 25 percent.”

Japan’s fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman will soon put the population into absolute decline. According to U.N. estimates, over the next four decades, Japan will lose a quarter of its 127 million people.

China’s fertility rate has dropped from 5.8 children per woman to 1.3 (Chinese census data). One scholar writes, “By 2019 or soon after, China’s population will peak at 1.5 billion then enter a steep decline. By mid-century, China could well lose 20 to 30 percent of its population every generation.”

Despite government incentives to produce more children, the industrialized nations of Asia such as South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are now at sub-replacement fertility levels.

In Canada’s Institute for Research and Public Policy’s Policy Options magazine (August 2004), the Canadian government is urged to “import” more young people to counter declining fertility rates.

“Mexican fertility rates have dropped so dramatically, the country is now aging five times faster than is the United States. It took fifty years for the American median age to rise just five years, from thirty to thirty-rive. By contrast, between 2000 and 2050, Mexico’s median age, according to UN projections, will increase by twenty years, leaving half the population over forty-two” (Philip Longman, “The Global Baby Bust,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004).

Uruguay, Brazil, Cuba and many Caribbean nations are also experiencing sharp declines in birth and fertility rates.

The U.S. fertility rate dropped to a low of 1.7 children per woman in 1975, but rose to 1.99 where it currently is, largely as a result of the slightly higher birthrates among Latino immigrants. However, the population in the U.S. sixty-five years and older is expected to double by 2035.

Why are birthrates plummeting?

To start with, forty-six million abortions occur annually, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. More or less “effective” artificial contraception and widespread sterilization have greatly reduced birthrates, especially in those developing countries where coercion is used to reach population targets. UN data report that 62 percent of women of reproductive age who are married or “in union” are using some form of artificial birth control.

But economic and “lifestyle” factors also can affect a family’s decision to have fewer children, for example:

• Migration of families from farming areas—where children’s labor benefits the family—to urban centers where there’s no immediate economic incentive for having children.

• Women’s access to paying jobs in urban areas, and the reality that many have to work to help support the family.

• The continually rising cost of raising children: in the U.S., over $20

0,000 to age eighteen, excluding college, according to the Department of Agriculture.

• High taxation, reducing the family’s disposable income.

• Young people spending more years in higher education to meet the demands of a more highly skilled workforce, which delays the average age of marriage and increases their education debt.

• The later average age of marriage, resulting in lower fertility among women and a shortened period of child-bearing in marriage.

• Divorce.

• Sexually transmitted diseases which can impair fertility are at epidemic levels due to multiple partners.

• Materialism and consumerism, fueled by advertising and television.

• Radical feminist ideology that measures women’s worth solely by the acquisition of money and power, and denigrates their contributions to family life.

As demographers examine declining birthrates worldwide, economists are beginning to raise the alarm about what this portends for the future economic health of nations when there will be far fewer workers contributing to the programs which support a growing population of the elderly.

Obviously, the benefits of raising children transcend economics. Children are a source of joy, love and hope.

They transform and sanctify their parents. Our society and our world need to recover an appreciation for the gift of children, whose presence is needed now more than ever.