Saturday, March 27, 2021

Birthrate decline in the West is accelerating

During the past year, living in the shadow of Covid, I have been completing a book on the big global trends in population. This forced me to ask – what effect will the pandemic have on birth rates? There are countless factors to consider.

On the one hand, with more time at home and fewer distractions, we might expect there to be a baby boom. On the other, with couples under each other’s feet from dawn to dusk, sexual attraction may be waning. Delayed weddings, a lack of dating opportunities and a shortage of contraception in the developing world will all be taking their toll in various ways, too.

Then there is the fear factor. With the pandemic raging, women don’t necessarily want to get into a situation in which they will end up in a hospital, where the chance of picking up an infection is high. We now know that a woman of child-bearing age is unlikely to get seriously ill from Covid, and the chance of her passing on any infection to a foetus is probably zero – but that was not clear at the start of the pandemic and might have had the effect of putting some couples off procreation. Economic uncertainty and job insecurity compound the fear.

Overall, in more developed countries like Britain, the data shows that the net impact of these various factors has been a sharp drop in birth rates. Surveys of couples during the early days of the pandemic suggested that many were abandoning plans to start or grow a family, both in the short term and permanently. Meanwhile, early data suggests that the number of children born in the US this year will fall by at least half a million. In continental Europe, the picture is worse: in France, it looks like births are down 13 per cent, in Italy and Spain, 20 per cent.

If this were just a short-term dip, the overall economic impact would be limited. But it isn’t short term. Before anyone had heard of Covid, births were depressed across the developed world. Fertility rates in North America and Japan have been below replacement level for decades, and sinking. Even the better performers among the rich countries – the US, the UK, France and Scandinavia – were already set for steady population decline, mitigated only by ever higher levels of immigration. And small family syndrome is catching. The end of the One Child Policy has done little or nothing to increase childbearing in China; an increasingly educated and urban population, focused on material advancement and now long accustomed to small family size, has no interest in taking up the increased rations in family size now permitted to them by the Communist Party.

Read the rest here.

8 comments:

John (Ad Orientem) said...

Reposting the below comment which I suspect was posted in error in the story on the SNP...

Blogger rick allen said...
Not to be provocative or anything, but doesn't this suggest that we should be welcoming the kids coming over our southern border, finding families for them, educating them and letting them work so that they're paying taxes and social security like everyone else?

rick allen said...

Thanks for the correction.

Not intended to be a snarky question, by the way.

Stephen said...

As I read the stats, in the US the population has remained stable, with the number of immigrants coming into the US over the last 50 years offsetting almost equally the number of babies aborted in the US.

The Anti-Gnostic said...

Because then it won't be America; it will just be Northern Mexico. And your children will be deprived of the stable, high-trust culture which was your moral duty to bequeath to them.

123 said...

Historically ignorant racism. Self-styled Americans said the same thing about Germans, Irish, Italians, French, Greeks, Slavs, blacks, etc. High trust is just code for homogeneously whatever you like. You should be ashamed of yourself and banned to the depths of Reddit and/or the Republican Party.

123 said...

Racism. Self-styled “real Americans” have said the same thing about every wave of immigrants whether Germans, Irish, Italians, French, Greeks, Slavs, blacks, etc. “High trust” is just code for homogeneously whatever you like, and it’s anti-American and ugly as it’s always been. You should be ashamed of yourself and be banned to the depths of Reddit where you don’t embarrass the Church.

The Anti-Gnostic said...

I bet your house is in a "good school district."

The earlier waves of European immigration came at a time when the immigrants didn't have welfare and civil rights laws to beat their hosts over the head with. Note also that we had to kill or imprison a lot of Italians for them to fit in.

Every multi-national empire in human history has ended. The US will be no exception.

John (Ad Orientem) said...

Empires are by definition multi ethic.