EXCERPTS FROM “WHERE HAVE ALL THE CHILDREN GONE?” –
Life Insight – September/October 2004
Consider the demographic evidence: Global fertility rates are 50% lower than in 1972 – 2.9 children per woman, down from 6 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 of malnutrition
Philip Longman, author of the new book, The Empty Cradle, writes in Foreign Affairs (May/June 2004): “All told, some 59 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 while 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” (quoted in M. Meyer, “Birth Dearth,” Newsweek International on-line, available at
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6040427/site/newsweek.)
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. Meyer (above) describes what a 1.4 fertility rate means for Germany: “Germany could shed nearly a fifth of its 82.5 million people over the next 40 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 5 million is expected to decrease by more than 20% by 2041. A recent survey showed that over 40% of highly-educated Scotswomen aged 45-49 were childless (“The demographic dilemma: where ae all the babies,” The Herald (U.K.), Sept. 21, 2004, available at
www.theherald.co.uk/business/24363 shtml).
President Vladimir Putin calls Russia’s population loss of 750,000 people a year a “national crisis.” The yearly loss could increase to 3 million or more by 2050. And it is estimated that “Bulgaria will shrink by 38 percent, Romania by 27 percent, Estonia by 25 percent” (Meyer, above).
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). “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” (Meyer, above).
Despite government incentives to produce more children, the industrialized nations of Asia such as South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and HongKong are now at sub-replacement fertility levels.
In Canada’s Institute for Research and Public Policy’s Policy Options magazine (Aug. 2004), the Canadian government is urged to “import” more young people to counter declining fertility rates (reported by Steven W. Mosher in Population Research Institute’s “Weekly Briefing,” – Aug. 23, 2004)
Mexican fertility rates have dropped so dramatically, the country is now aging five times faster than is the United States. It took 50 years for the American median age to rise just five years, from 30 to 35. By contrast, between 2000 and 2050, Mexico’s median age, according to UN projections, will increase by 20 years, leaving half the population over 42” (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 (Meyer).
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 US. 65 years and older is expected to double by 2035. . .
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