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Family Update, Online!

Volume 06  Issue 05 1 February 2005
Topic: (In)Fertile Ground

Family Fact: IVF: In Vitro Facts

Family Quote: Unasked & Unanswered Questions

Family Research Abstract: Rich and Sterile

Family Fact of the Week: IVF: In Vitro Facts TOP of PAGE

"Researchers at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Perth analysed 25 studies from around the world and concluded that IVF babies consistently showed a 25 to 40 per cent greater risk of abnormalities.

...The same researchers released a study in 2002 claiming the incidence of abnormalities in IVF babies was twice the level for those who were conceived naturally.

...About 5000 Australian babies a year are born using some form of IVF, about 2 per cent of total births."

(Source: Clara Pirani, "Defect risk is 40pc higher with IVF," The Australian, January 28, 2005; http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12074304%255E23289,00.html.)

Family Quote of the Week: Unasked & Unanswered Questions TOP of PAGE

"[W]e call for a federally funded prospective study on the health and well-being of children born with the aid of assisted reproductive technologies. Over a million such children have been born worldwide, but to date we know next to nothing about how well they are faring.

...issues raised by the rapidly growing powers to intervene still further in human reproduction, adding techniques of genetic screening, genetic manipulation, and sex selection to existing and expanding techniques of assisted reproduction. This whole field is today largely unmonitored and unregulated. We need to find ways to govern these practices. While we seek them, we urgently need to legislate important moral boundaries and shift the burden of persuasion to those who would transgress them, while no one is paying attention."

(Source: Leon Kass, commenting upon the President's Council on Bioethics report, "Reproduction and Responsibility: The Regulation of New Biotechnologies," in Kathryn Jean Lopez, "The Doctor Is In," New Republic Online, April 05, 2004; http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/kass200404050833.asp.)

For More Information TOP of PAGE

The Howard Center and The World Congress of Families stock a number of pro-family books, including Guaranteeing the Good Life: Medicine and the Return of Eugenics, part of the Encounter Series, with General Editor Richard John Neuhaus. Please visit:

    The Howard Center Bookstore   

 Call: 1-815-964-5819    USA: 1-800-461-3113    Fax: 1-815-965-1826    Contact: Bookstore 

934 North Main Street Rockford, Illinois 61103

Family Research Abstract of the Week: Rich and Sterile TOP of PAGE

Why has fertility plummeted so dramatically in modern societies? Because he finds previous explanations of "very low fertility" so unsatisfying, demographer John C. Caldwell of the Australian National University in Canberra has recently set forth his own analysis-an analysis focused largely on economic "modes of production." In this analysis, Caldwell identifies the phenomenal wealth generated by the modern industrial economies as a prime reason so many young men and young women now delay or forgo child-bearing and child-rearing. 

In assessing previous attempts to account for the very low fertility now seen in modern societies around the world, Caldwell complains that colleagues who have allowed the Baby Boom aberration to blind them to longer-term patterns have also too often viewed "attitudinal and behavioral changes ... [as] the fundamental driving forces behind fertility decline" and have frequently falsely supposed that the changes in family life witnessed in the last quarter of the twentieth century are now largely over. Caldwell interprets currently depressed levels of fertility as the inevitable consequence of a societal shift premised upon traditional "home production whether on the farm or in the house" to modern "extra-domestic or industrial production."

Within this broad-gauge interpretation, Caldwell views low fertility as part of an overall social transformation. "At the beginning of the twentieth century," he writes, "probably half of all consumption was still of goods produced within the home: made-up clothes, prepared food, child care, and many other products. By the middle of the century industry had made only limited advances against this type of home production, and it was still largely the product of women in the home.  During the second half of the century, partly under pressure from women working outside the home, extra-domestic production began to compete successfully with home production in all of these areas." What is more, the move from home- and family-farm-based production changed people's fundamental social orientation, as it "allowed secularism to develop, and [fostered] new ways of interpreting behavior and new doubts about the divine endorsement of the old ways." And, of course, secularism offered no resistance at all to the use of the "better contraception" that became widely available beginning in the Sixties.

In Caldwell's interpretive scheme, the Baby Boom counts as no more than "a partial detour" in the larger economic and social transformation. Taking that larger pattern as the fundamental reality, Caldwell argues that the sheer wealth-producing capacity of modern industry made "the collapse of the baby boom" inevitable. "It is unlikely," Caldwell reasons, "that married women would have continued to stay out of the workforce, given that the economy was expanding and offering more jobs ... and ever-more tempting consumer products were appearing, even had there not been a steep rise in women's education or a move toward gender equity in wages." As the stunning economic developments of the second half of the twentieth century enticed (or pulled) more and more women into paid employment, the unprecedented "movement of most adult women to join most adult men in the workforce [became] the engine of the fertility decline" seen in recent decades.

But observers are very much mistaken, Caldwell asserts, if they suppose that the economic dynamism of the modern world has finished the changes it will make in family life. "That the Industrial Revolution is continuing," he remarks, "is shown by the average annual growth rate of per capita income during the last quarter of the twentieth century of 1.78 percent in Western Europe (a rate implying a doubling every 39 years) and 1.33 percent in the world as a whole (a doubling every 52 years)." It is, in Caldwell's opinion, "this huge increase in wealth that allowed young adults-even young married adults-to further their own training and to seek occupational advancement rather than, as in previous times, placing their hopes in their children's views." That is, "at the level of the individual in the industrial society there is no necessity for either families or fertility."

Given the strength of this overall pattern, Caldwell finds it strange that many of his colleagues have asserted that "the changes [in family and social life] were largely finished, rather than concluding that, as incomes continued to rise in increasingly secular societies, there were almost unlimited possibilities of continual social change and family disintegration." To colleagues who have proclaimed a "postmodern era" in social patterns, Caldwell responds skeptically: "The use of 'postmodern' implies that the great period of economic, social, and demographic change is over.  But this is far from true."  After all, for those who join Caldwell in taking the long view, "we are still in the midst, perhaps in the early stages, of the progression from a society structured for agricultural production to one structured for industrial production." 

Though Caldwell himself regards the disintegration of family life with utter insouciance, for those who earnestly seek a renewal of family life his provocative analysis underscores the deep need to recover traditional modes of home-based production-and to devise new ones.

(Source: John C. Caldwell, "Demographic Theory: The Long View," Population and Development Review 30 [2004]: 297-316.)
 

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