The Missing Children Problem

By Donald Devine

All of a sudden, everyone knows the “population bomb” was a dud. From Malthus in the 18th century to Paul Ehrlich’s bomb book title in the 1960s, most intellectuals thought overpopulation would devour world resources. Today, United Nations data make it absolutely clear there will be a massive world population decline over the coming years. Islamic nations might be the only exception. Elsewhere, politicians are now frantically devising plans to avoid the peril of depopulation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin made the decline of his country’s population, from its present 146 million down to a projected 100 million by 2050—a one-third loss—the center of his annual message to his parliament. ”We need to reduce mortality, have an effective migration policy and increase the birthrate,” he vowed. While a nation requires a “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per childbearing-aged woman to maintain the present level of population, the U.N. reports Russia has a woeful 1.4 fertility rate. Presenting an ambitious and expensive government program to increase births, Putin quoted Russia’s Nobel poet Alexander Solzhenitsyn that solving this demographic problem is literally necessary for “saving the people” and the nation.

Russia is by no means alone. Europe has an almost identical fertility rate. The Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine are even worse at a mere 1.2 replacement rate, with Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain not much better at 1.3. Only Ireland is at a self-sustaining level, while France is at 1.8 and Britain, Denmark and Sweden are also somewhat above average at a below-replacement rate of 1.7. In the rest of the world, countries most influenced by the West are declining rapidly too, such as Japan with its own 1.4 fertility rate. In the most recent data, the average replacement rate in the whole developed world dropped from 4.4 in the 1970s to 1.8 in 2003. In the developing world, rates dropped dramatically too but only from 5.9 to 3.9. Islamic countries have kept up their birth rates relative to other nations and among the more fervent Muslim nations population rates are still increasing.

Many countries have preceded Russia in using government to increase fertility, including devoting very large resources to the task, such as in France, Canada, Poland and Sweden. Indeed, the reputed success of these policies in France and Sweden has led many social conservative commentators in the U.S. to look with favor on the “family friendly” policies of the early New Deal and propose that these be emulated and enhanced today. The substantial baby bonuses, family incentive programs, tax deductions, child care, discounts on services and other supports by the government proposed for Russia and adopted by France and Sweden have all been proposed as solutions here too.

The U.N. data, however, suggest the policies do not work. Sweden did increase its fertility rate from 1.7 in 1980 to 2.0 in 1990 after spending substantial funds during the 70s and 80s—but the rate declined even further again in 2001 to 1.6, below the starting point for its programs. The rate inched up again to 1.7 in 2003 but that still was below its 1.9 rate in 1970. In sum, over the last half-century there has been a substantial decline that has not been reversed. France has been the model success story for fertility planning, praised for increasing its rate since the mid-1990s through aggressive government spending on family incentives. While the U.N. data do show an increase in fertility from 1.7 in 1994 to 1.8 in 2001, the rate was also 1.8 in 1975 before the government policy was adopted. As with Sweden, the reported gains seem trivial and transitory. Over time, the fertility rate clearly has declined and no level of government spending that has been tried thus far has created a rate that would grow or even sustain a population.

There is always the promise that future scientific gains and even the artificial creation of life might come to the rescue, although Hitler and eugenics have given that whole project a bad name. Optimists do believe it can all work out naturally if a nation has the level of freedom available in America. They point to the U.S. rate of 2.1 in the U.N. data, down only slightly from 2.5 in 1970. Fertility has even improved somewhat over time from a low of 1.8 in the 1990s. Yet, even here the numbers are misleading. U.S. government data show that the non-Hispanic, non-black fertility rate in the U.S. has remained below replacement, essentially at 1.8 over this whole period. What caused the U.S. increase were a stable African-American replacement rate of 2.1 and a strong Hispanic fertility rate of 2.7 (mostly among Mexican-Americans) and an increased proportion of Hispanics overall. In any event, the increase in the fertility rate that did occur came without a government policy to do so and the rate is down from 3.5 in 1950, similar to the general European decline.

The usual suspects for the decline are urbanization, women working outside the home, divorce, the decline in number of marriages, later marriages, high taxation, the decline of traditional ways and religion and, of course, contraception. As the great economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted during World War II, when peoples’ “inarticulate cost accounting” under capitalism makes them “aware of the heavy personal sacrifice that family ties, especially parenthood, entail under modern conditions” unlike under agricultural feudalism, they would calculate that children cost too much and would stop having them—as in fact they did just a few years later, after the postwar recovery. Modern contraception and more free choice only made the reasoning easier. The state did too.

As the U.N. bragged in its media announcement accompanying the release of its most recent data, “Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the median level of contraceptive prevalence (any method) among all 192 countries increased from 38 percent of women currently married or in a union to 52 per cent.  Among developing countries, median contraceptive prevalence rose from 27 per cent to 40 percent. Government policies have played an important role in modifying reproductive behavior.  By 2001, 92 per cent of all governments supported family-planning programmes and distributed contraceptives either directly (75 per cent), through government facilities, or indirectly (17 per cent), by supporting the activities of non-governmental organizations, such as family-planning associations.”

Even if these policies were ended, there is little reason to think the state could do much to solve the missing children problem, as the data even for Sweden and France demonstrate. While Plato might be disappointed, the state has neither the will nor the ability to change demographic trends, the most human of all social activity. Indeed, as the social theorist Charles Murray argues, by arrogating individual, family and community responsibility from these voluntary institutions to itself, the modern welfare state “drains too much of the life from life.” Specifically, it treats children as a financial and social burden that must be alleviated or avoided, which encourages citizens to think the same way and stop having them, or having only one, producing the social and economic torpor of modern life in the West, especially in its advanced stages in Europe, which mostly cannot summon the grit even to have children.

The fact is: nothing influences a nation’s safety and prosperity more than children or the lack thereof. At a minimum, new population is critical to maintain armies and supporting taxation. As Philip Longman notes, “Ultimately, it is often the number of boots on the ground that changes history. Even with a fertility rate near replacement level, the United States lacks the amount of people necessary to sustain an imperial role in the world, just as Britain lost its ability to do so after its birthrates collapsed in the early 20th Century.” In addition, “Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic problems that dominate today’s headlines. The long-term financing of social security schemes, private pension plans, and healthcare systems has little to do with people living longer. Gains in life expectancy at older ages have actually been quite modest, and the rate of improvement in the United States has diminished for each of the last three decades. Instead, the falling ratio of workers to retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were never born.”

“Single-child families are prone to extinction,” Longman continues. “A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one’s own folk or nation … Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry.”

In his new book, In Our Hands, Murray proposes more resources for voluntary institutions generally and less for the welfare state as a way out of a future of decline and languor--to encourage individual responsibility, including the responsibility and joy of children, which he sees as a natural response to more freedom and less government “help.” Longman’s insight is that the free institution of religion will particularly shape that future. Religious nations like the U.S. and Ireland (but also Islamic ones) will have children and grow. More religious regions like the “red” states will too. Within localities, more religious families with more children will have disproportionate growth. Without children, nations die, but governments cannot make the babies to sustain themselves. The dominance of the welfare state has obscured the reality that it depends utterly upon the voluntary and local institutions it has done so much to stifle, at the peril of its own existence.

Donald J. Devine is the editor of Conservative Battleline.

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