Demography

Parenthood is seen as a troublesome burden

As the media cycle lurches from the promotion of one existential crisis to another, demography continues to dominate. In the UK, low birth rates and ageing populations mean we won’t be able to afford healthcare and pensions; we have too many of the “wrong type” of immigrants and too much of the “wrong type” of emigration. Of course, some countries have it worse. China, having shot itself in the groin with its one-child policy, is set to become smaller than India, for whom a growing population could be either a blessing or a curse (take your pick). Globally, fertility rates are falling, but eco-worriers remind us that “overpopulation” continues to contribute to the climate emergency.

The UN recently announced that India will become the most populous country in the world, surpassing China by the middle of this year. That’s only the tip of the iceberg in a massive global shift in population that will alter the balance of world power in the next 30 years.

China lost population last year for the first time in six decades. As Axios reports, China will eventually end up in the same boat as Japan — an aging population with a workforce insufficiently large to care for it.

Worldwide demographic decline will soon pose a serious challenge for humanity.

Today, the spectre haunting the global order is not communism, as Marx predicted, but seemingly relentless demographic decline. We can already see its consequences in everything from the fight over pensions in France to the persistent labour shortages across almost all the high-income world. In the future, a lack of human labour is also likely to accelerate a shift towards automation, reshaping economic and political conflict for decades to come.

The example of South Korea is a warning shot

In an article for the Atlantic, Anna Louie Sussman examines why South Korea’s total fertility rate has fallen so precipitously. In what the Koreans call a “gender war”, Sussman suggests that the cause is the “deterioration in relations between women and men”. “I think the most fundamental issue at hand is that a lot of girls realize that they don’t really have to do this anymore,” one South Korean women tells the author. “They can just opt out.”

To stop their population implosions, countries are turning to immigration, stimulating birth rates and strengthening social services. None of them might be enough – and the long-term fix might be a radical one

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had a grim message. The country’s extremely low birth rate had placed the nation’s future in peril.

“Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” he declared in a speech in January to the country’s national legislature, the Diet.

“Focusing attention on policies regarding children and child-rearing is an issue that cannot wait and cannot be postponed.”

Interesting read. Nothing can be done about Canada, mass immigration will not solve population decline but will increase societal destruction.

After giving birth to her first child in August of last year, 24-year-old Autumn Oliver-Giasson has decided to hold off on having more children until the high cost of living in Canada eases.

“It’s just not plausible. It doesn’t make sense,” she told Global News from McQuade, N.B.

My Mom was for the most part a stay at home housewife, though she did do “sewing” for a small clientele. Later she did work both full and part time as a seamstress doing alterations for clothing stores and dry cleaners for about 4 or 5 years.

Stay at home Mom’s were common during my childhood, my parents managed to raise 7 kids on a working class salary.

No we were not well off but no one starved despite occasional hard times.

“Where are all the children?” My three-year-old recently asked this after we arrived at the park. Fair question, kid. All too often the swings hang empty, pot shops have replaced ice cream parlours and stores are void of little feet. Though low fertility gained some attention during COVID, when fertility fell even further, we mostly avoid the topic or assume the long-term decline is a good thing.

The new push for more babies: How tech elites think it will save the planet

Soon after China reported that it saw more deaths than births last year, its first population dip in 60 years, Elon Musk, father of 10, again sounded the “population collapse” alarm, tweeting that a decline in birth rates globally heralds an “existential problem to humanity, not overpopulation!”

FOR the first time since records began in 1845, most children are now born outside marriage, figures from the Office for National Statistics show. In England and Wales, 51.3 per cent of 624,828 live births in 2021 were to women not married or in a civil partnership, while 48.7 per cent of babies were born in wedlock. 

At the beginning of the 20^th century, 96 per cent of births were within marriage, but this fell to 80 per cent in 1985, 70 per cent in 1991 and 60 per cent in 2001.