Confronting "the Fertility Crisis"
Women in modern industrialized countries now do many things women have not traditionally done: they pursue advanced degrees, command large corporations, and win positions of power in all branches of government. But these accomplished modern women have apparently given up on one indispensable traditional female task: they are not bearing children. So while environmental extremists continue to warn against the perils of global overpopulation, the industrialized world has quietly slipped into what some scholars are now calling a "fertility crisis." Throughout Europe and in parts of Asia, completed fertility rates have tumbled in recent years to below 1.5 births per woman. Since a country must maintain a completed fertility rate of at least 2.1 births per woman to ensure population replacement, these depressed fertility rates augur dramatic population contraction in the decades ahead.
The scope and causes of this stunning demographic development recently received thoughtful analysis from scholars at Australian National University in the pages of Population Studies. Although the Australian scholars acknowledge that global fertility decline can be traced to "the early 1960's in the USA," they focus their attention chiefly on "the new phenomenon of very low fertility" as it has emerged in twenty-eight countries in East and formerly Soviet Asia and in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe. In all of these countries, total fertility stood at below 1.5 births per woman in 2002. Though also depressed by historical standards, total fertility rates in other industrialized countries have remained somewhat closer to replacement level: total fertility rates have ranged between 1.6 and 1.9 in Sweden, France, Belgium, and Britain and between 1.5 and 2.1 in Britain's "'Western Outshoots' (the English-speaking countries of overseas European settlement, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand)." In classifying the United States as a country with relatively high total fertility, the analysts do note, however, that America's "higher fertility is partly a reflection of immigrant Hispanic reproductive behaviour."
In the twenty-eight countries that receive most intense scrutiny in the new study, total fertility has now fallen to between 0.9 and 1.4. The list of very-low-fertility countries includes Germany and Austria in Central Europe; Italy, Spain, and Greece in Southern Europe; Poland, Ukraine, and Russia in Eastern Europe; Armenia and Georgia in formerly Soviet Asia; and Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in Eastern Asia. In trying to account for the retreat from childbearing in this diverse list of countries, the Australian scholars identify some developments peculiar to specific countries - they note, for instance, the "socio-economic shock" experienced by formerly communist countries in adjusting to capitalism and "the collapse of arranged marriages" in westernizing Japan. But these researchers concede that "there are too many different groups of countries with very low fertility and different specific explanations ... for us not to conclude that there must be a common deeper explanation for all their conditions." In groping toward that deeper explanation, the authors of the new study highlight "a global economy [which is] governed by liberal economics [simultaneously] creating a high degree of individual insecurity" and "the almost limitless temptations of the modern consumerist society." In this new "world economic system," the analysts emphasize, "children are of no immediate economic value to their parents."
Nor do the researchers see the de-valuation of children as simply an economic issue: the emergence of "post-modern values" has meant "a decline in the influence of organized religion" and a new "tolerance of non-conformism in family formation, and the meaning attached to parenthood." Predictably enough, this shift in values has fostered "rising divorce levels, high levels of premarital sexual activity, and cohabitation especially among the young, many ex-nuptial [i.e., out-of-wedlock] births, women employed even when children are still babies, and the postponement of births."
According to one analyst cited by the Australian scholars, "Many of the more important value changes affecting fertility are bound up with major educational and job gains by women, which have led to greater economic independence and increasing emphasis on values of individualism and equality between the sexes." Indeed, in the theoretical analysis of American demographer Kingsley Davis - whom the Australian researchers credit with having advanced perhaps "the broadest explanation" of fertility decline - "the reproduction of the species is not easily compatible with advanced industrial society." Because that society has lost "the 'breadwinner' system" in which husbands supported homemaking wives and mothers with a sexually egalitarian system which favors "a career for women outside the home," Davis and his collaborators considered it quite likely that the current industrialized social order "will be replaced by another - either one that supports traditional sex roles or some new order that rewards women adequately for reproduction."
Despite the potentially profound effect of globally depressed fertility, the Australian researchers documented "only limited discussion" of the phenomenon in the media outlets surveyed in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan. "Perhaps," the authors of the new study suggest, "people used to living for the here and now may have difficulty appreciating the long-term consequences beyond their immediate horizon."
But if there are no babies beyond the immediate horizon, the world simply ends.
