Posts Tagged ‘fertility’
“A world that is safe for mothers is safe for all”*…
There’s much discussion today of falling fertility rates and the prospect of a shrinking population. In her terrific newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist, Katelyn Jetelina explores the (real) reasons why, and what can be done…
In the U.S.—and across much of the world—fertility rates are falling, and populations are projected to shrink.
The reasons people are worried vary. Some fear a loss of global influence or long-term human survival. Others approach the issue through religious, political, or ideological lenses—or just out of curiosity. Whatever the motivation, the question keeps coming up: What can we do?
In response, the new administration—guided in part by Project 2025—is considering financial incentives to encourage people to have more children. Ideas include education, like on menstrual cycles, or a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers with six or more children, as well as financial incentives like a $5,000 cash baby bonus or Fulbright scholarships reserved for mothers.
Globally, paying families to have children has yielded mixed results. In Russia, for example, payments ($10,000) have increased fertility rates by about 20%. However, in Canada during the 1970s, similar efforts yielded only a short-term increase.
So no—we don’t need to blindly throw spaghetti at the wall. We have the evidence: if we want people to have more children, we need to create a society that actually supports parents…
[Jetelina unpacks the dynamics at play: access to affordable health care, the lack of support for new parents, the cost of raising a child, the climate of fear of maternal mortality, and the dismantling of programs that support women…]
… People aren’t having fewer children because they don’t care about family, faith, or their future, or the future of this country. They’re having fewer because the system makes it too hard, too risky, and too expensive. A $5,000 payment is a drop in the bucket compared to what is required of families in this day and age.
If the government wants to be part of the solution, it shouldn’t just throw out incentives. It should invest in the foundation: affordable care, parental leave, safe childbirth, and supportive systems.
Let’s focus on what matters: building a society where families can thrive. If we do that, everything else—including birth rates—may just follow…
It’s not rocket science: “Birth rates are falling. But solutions are focused on the wrong thing,” from @kkjetelina.bsky.social.
(Image at top: source)
* Abhijit Naskar (@naskarism.bsky.social)
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As noodle on nativity, we might spare a thought for Edouard Van Beneden; he died on this date in 1910. An embryologist, cytologist and marine biologist, he made discoveries concerning fertilization in sex cells and chromosome numbers in body cells. His studies (of the roundworm Ascaris) showed that sexual fertilization results from the union of two different cell half-nuclei. Thus a new single cell is created with its number of chromosomes derived as one-half from the male sperm and the other half from the female egg. Van Beneden also determined that the chromosome number is constant for every body cell of a species. His theory of embryo formation in mammals became a standard scientific principle.
“By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down”*…
… And increasingly across the globe, starting in the developed world, we’ve been doing a better job of that. Indeed, some are beginning to worry about a kind of problem that the modern world has never faced– depopulation.
History Today offers a fascinating snapshot…
During the 1930s and early 1940s, many Americans held off on starting families because of the economic insecurity of the Great Depression and uncertainty of World War II. But the prosperous postwar era led to an increase of births between 1946 and 1964 that gave the baby boomer generation its nickname. Over this 19-year period, the booming birth rate helped the U.S. population grow by more than 50%. The country’s demographic makeup shifted so rapidly that by 1960, there were 64.2 million Americans under age 18, out of 180 million overall — a whopping 36% of the population. For context, in 2022, an estimated 22.4% of the U.S. population was under 18.
General fertility rates in the baby boom era peaked in 1957 at 122.9 live births for every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 — that’s 4.3 million babies that year alone. The general fertility rate took a nosedive throughout the 1960s as the birth control pill became more widely available and women entered the workforce at much higher rates. By 1970, the general fertility rate was 87.9, and the much smaller Generation X was well underway.
The baby boomer generation didn’t reproduce at the same rapid clip as their parents, but because there were so many of them, they still produced a lot of offspring. Indeed, 1990 — the year all those 1957 babies turned 33 — was another banner year for births, with 4.2 million millennials entering the world, despite a general fertility rate of just 70.9…
Consider these population pyramids from the U.S. Census Bureau:
This picture is of course in aggregate: some locales (e.g., Utah) continue to grow and are “younger”; others, like Alexander County, Illinois are much “older.” And globally, the picture is even more mixed:
The global population reached nearly 8.2 billion by mid-2024 and is expected to grow by another two billion over the next 60 years, peaking at around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s. It will then fall to around 10.2 billion, which is 700 million lower than expected a decade ago. However, changes in global population are uneven and the demographic landscape is evolving, with rapid population growth in some places and rapid ageing in others…
… The world’s overall fertility rates are dropping, with women having one child fewer on average than they did around 1990.
In more than half of all countries and areas, the average number of live births per woman is below 2.1 – the level required for a population to maintain a constant size.
Meanwhile, nearly a fifth of all countries and areas, including China, Italy, the Republic of Korea and Spain, now have “ultra-low fertility,” with fewer than 1.4 live births per woman over a lifetime. As of 2024, population size has peaked in 63 countries and areas, including China, Germany, Japan and the Russian Federation, and the total population of this group is projected to decline by 14 per cent over the next thirty years…
While the slow growth or decline of populations is occurring mainly in high-income countries, rapid population growth will occur in low-income and lower-middle-income countries.
Specifically, Angola, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, and Somalia, very rapid growth is projected, with their total population doubling between 2024 and 2054.
This population growth will increase demand for resources, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and, combined with poorly managed urbanisation and rising living standards, it will worsen environmental impacts.
Climate change, a major challenge, affects these countries the most, where many rely on agriculture – and food insecurity is prevalent.
In countries including India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the United States [our inherent decline offset to some extent by immigration… at least until now], population is also expected to increase through 2054 and could potentially peak in the second half of the century or later…
Implicit assumptions of a growing population underlie many– if not most– of the decisions we’ve made about everything from social policies (e.g., social security) to business plans (e.g., growing markets).
Populations grow for some combination of three reasons: fertility is above replacement level, people live longer, and/or immigration swells the ranks. For quite a while, the U.S. was hitting on all three cylinders; more lately, on the latter two. But recently, life expectancy has stalled.
Immigration is currently strong (and, as noted above, keeping U.S. population growth positive), but it’s looking increasingly uncertain: political energy to restrict (indeed, to undo) immigration is high, even as the pressures of climate change and political upheaval are increasing numbers of people from around the world hoping to find a home in the U.S.
If, as Comte is said to have suggested, demography is destiny, then what is ours? “In 1960, more than a third of the U.S. population was under 18.”
Apposite: “Why people over the age of 55 are the new problem generation,” gift article from The Economist
* Bill Gates
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As we dig into demographics, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Robinson Jeffers; he was born on this date in 1887. A poet renowned both for his longer (narrative and epic) verse and his shorter work, he was an icon of the environmental movement. His philosophy of “inhumanism” argued that transcending conflict required human concerns to be de-emphasized in favor of the boundless whole.
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”*…
… something that nature seems to know. The population of the world, now roughly 8.1 billion, seems poised to shrink. To some, this is good news; to others, a cause for alarm. Phoebe Arslanagić-Wakefield and Anvar Sarygulov, co-founders of Boom, fall into that latter camp. But their provocative analysis of the dynamics of the Baby Boom is relevant to anyone concerned with the future of population on earth…
… In the countries that it touched, the Baby Boom created generations massive in size. In the US alone, 76 million babies were born in its peak 18 years, 30 million more than were born in the previous 18, a demographic difference bigger than the 1960 population of Egypt, the Philippines, or Ethiopia. By 1965, people born during the Baby Boom made up 40 percent of America’s population.
Today, a fifth of both the UK’s and the USA’s population are baby boomers and we live in the world they created. Despite that, as mentioned above, the most widely known piece of information about the Boom is its most pervasive myth, that it was caused by the end of World War Two.
The Baby Boom was not the result of people making up for lost time during the war: it saw total lifetime fertility rates rise, meaning that people did not simply shift when they had their children but had more of them overall. And in many countries, including the US, UK, Sweden and France, the rise in birth rates began years before the war had even started, while neutral Ireland and Switzerland experienced Booms that began during the war, in 1940.
Instead, to explain the Baby Boom, we must consider why it was that the iron law of fertility – that as incomes go up, births must come down – was suspended for this extraordinary period of time…
Fascinating and important: “Understanding the Baby Boom,” from @PMArslanagic and @ASarygulov.
By way of further background on our current situation: “Population bomb, bust – or boon? New UNFPA report debunks 8 myths about a world of 8 billion.“
[image above: source]
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As we grapple with growth, we might send hygienic birthday greetings to Melville Bissell; he was born on this date in 1843. An inventor and entrepreneur, he created and marketed the first modern carpet sweeper… which, as explained in the article featured above, was a seminal contribution to the advances in household technology that helped fuel the Baby Boom.
Barry White was already booked in North Korea…
Vladimir Putin has often insisted that fertility is key both to Russia’s internal security and to Russia becoming more influential on the global stage. More specifically, he’s been enjoining his countrymen (and women) to have three children per family.
Now (The Moscow Times reports), in support of this thrust, Putin has enlisted that most potent of aphrodisiacs, sweet soul music… in the persons of the Wanya Morris, Shawn Stockman, and Nathan Morris– AKA, Boyz II Men.
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As we slip into something more comfortable, we might spare a thought for Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky; he died on this date in 1881. The author of eleven novels (including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov), three novellas, seventeen short novels, and three essays, Dostoyevsky is considered one of the greatest “psychologists” in world literature– and the cartographer of the Russian soul.
Firing blanks…
Since the early 70s, academics and NGOs concerned with population growth have understood that the single most effective “lever” a society can pull to achieve population “control” (short of authoritarian birth bans, a la China) is the enhancement of women’s roles in the economy and society– the better educated, the more engaged a country’s women, the lower its fertility rate– and almost always, the more robust its economy, the more stable its polis, the healthier its environment, etc., etc. [c.f., e.g., here].
While experience continues to support this understanding, research is also suggesting that there may be another, complementary force at work; Pacific Standard reports that “French Semen Is Not What It Used To Be.”:
French men are losing sperm, and not in the fun way, according to a new study in Human Reproduction. Researchers examined semen samples given by 27,000 French men at fertility clinics, and found that the average sperm concentration fell more than 32 percent between 1989 and 2005.
Those findings echo a growing heap of research going back to the 1970s suggesting that the semen quality of men in industrialized countries is steadily declining. The most commonly-cited explanation is chemicals in the environment. Bear in mind, though, the supposed sperm-concentration drop is not a settled matter – many of the studies over the years were poorly designed, had overly-small sample sizes or were otherwise flawed. But if the ranks of men’s sperm are being thinned, for whatever reason, it could have serious implications for couples’ chances of conceiving.
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As we ponder potency, we might send biological birthday greetings to Erasmus Darwin; he was born on this date in 1731. Erasmus was an accomplished doctor (he declined an offer to be personal physician to Charles III), but is better remembered as a key thinker in the “Midlands Enlightenment”– a founder of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and author of (among other works) Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life, which contained one of the first formal theories of evolution… one that foreshadowed the theories of Erasmus’ reader– and grandson– Charles.
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