Falling birth rates – in developed and developing nations - are threatening to cause a crisis of underpopulation.
Overpopulation was once the big worry
For most of the last fifty years world leaders have been worried about overpopulation. In 1950 world population was 2.5 billion. This had more than doubled by 2000. Some feared that it might double again by 2030 and impose unsustainable demands on our planet’s scarce resources. Every geography student was presented with graphs that showed global population levels rising at an accelerating rate. Many political leaders panicked at these graphs and many took extreme actions to tackle rising population numbers.
China – so worried about overpopulation – introduced a policy of one child per family. Many traditionalist parents, wanting a son, murdered their firstborn if it was a girl. Mothers who had had their one allotted child were forcibly sterilised. Mothers who evaded the sterilisation policies and became pregnant had their unborn child forcibly aborted. Britain – through the UN – helped to fund these outrageous policies.
The UN has also insisted that aid to other very poor countries be dependent on acceptance of family-limiting sex education programmes. In order to reduce birth rates the UN’s Population Fund and other UN agencies have promoted ‘safe abortion’ – a euphemism for ‘legal abortion’ - in the more than 100 supposedly independent UN member states that restrict or outlaw abortion rights.
It turns out the UN’s population graphs were wildly inaccurate. Birth rates are falling across the world – in countries of very different religious and cultural backgrounds – and whether or not they were subject to coercive UN population programmes.
Birth rates have tumbled in the developed world…
A ‘Total Fertility Rate’ of 2.1 children per women is required for populations in Developed Regions to remain stable. The TFR is slightly higher in Developing Regions where more children do not live to ages where they can start reproducing.
The TFR was a population-boosting 2.7 during the 1950s in most developed nations and a baby-booming 3.8 in the USA. By the 1970s that rate had dropped to the equilibrium rate of 2.1. Today the TFR in every one of the world’s 44 developed nations has sunk below 2.1. The average in the EU is 1.4. In Japan it is 1.3. Only America - at 2.0 - is close to the population replacement level. Conservatives can be encouraged that all of the breeding is concentrated in Republican-voting states!
Within the European Union falling birth rates are powering annual depopulation levels of an average 700,000 people. This (if we believe statisticians’ graphs anymore) will grow to 3,000,000 a year by 2050. Russia is already depopulating by 1,000,000 every year. Western nations are facing a serious demographic timebomb because of these trends.
…birth rates are also tumbling in the developing world
The fall in the TFR has been even more dramatic in the less developed world. In 1970 the average woman was giving birth to six children. Twenty years later the TFR had dropped to 3.8 and today it is only 2.7. The same patterns of declining birthrates appear evident in Muslim and Catholic nations.
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For Ben Wattenburg’s thoughts on underpopulation – written for The New York Times - click here.
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