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Europeans Do It Better
Katha Pollitt, The Nation
…As Sharon Lerner noted in The New York Times Magazine (“The Motherhood Experiment,” March 4), fertility rates–the average number of children per woman–have fallen below replacement level in ninety countries, including such Catholic stalwarts as Ireland (1.9), Spain (1.3), Italy (1.3) and Portugal (1.4). Even the much-trumpeted increasing US population is mostly a product of immigration (the actual fertility rate is 2.0). While politicians in Japan (1.3) seem fatally drawn to chastising women as recalcitrant “baby-making machines,” European governments have started asking if making life easier for working mothers might do the trick.
…If fears of population implosion result in paid parental leave, improved childcare and more support for mothers’ careers, it won’t be the first time a government has done the right thing for the wrong reason. But isn’t it weird to promote population growth while we wring our hands over global warming, environmental damage, species loss and suburban sprawl?
…For decades experts have argued that heavyhanded fertility-control schemes were unwarranted and that modernization–better healthcare, women’s rights, voluntary contraception–would cause birthrates to fall naturally. And so they have! It worked! We should be cheering. Six billion people is plenty. Since women themselves are taking the initiative, why not take advantage? There’s a limit to what family-friendly policies can achieve. Even Sweden, which has done the most to help mothers keep working and is also ahead of the curve on encouraging men to take leaves, is at only 1.7.
Measures that facilitate combining work with motherhood are simple gender justice. But paying women to have kids, as in France, which offers a year’s paid leave of up to 1,000 Euros a month for a third child–that’s just nationalistic vanity. Fact is, population decline looks practically inevitable–according to the UN, in a few generations Asia and Latin America will start shrinking as well–so why not learn to live with it?
(15 March 2007)
World’s population of elderly exploding, UN finds
Don Butler, CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen
OTTAWA — By 2050, nearly one third of Canadians will be 60 or older. One in 10 will be over 80.
But at least Canada’s aging army shouldn’t be lonely. According to new United Nations populations projections, the number of people over 60 worldwide is projected to triple by 2050 to two billion, of whom more than 400 million will be 80 or more.
The newly released 2006 revision of the UN’s World Population Prospects conjures up a world whose human face is rapidly aging almost everywhere, with the median age globally expected to rise by about 10 years to 38.1 by 2050.
“The world population is in the midst of an unprecedented transformation brought about by the transition from a regime of high mortality and high fertility to one of low mortality and low fertility,” the UN report says.
(15 March 2007)
World population may reach 9.2 billion by 2050
Associated Press
Biggest boom expected in developing countries, U.N. report says
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The world’s population will likely reach 9.2 billion in 2050, with virtually all new growth occurring in the developing world, a U.N. report said Tuesday.
According to the U.N. Population Division’s 2006 estimate, the world’s population will likely increase by 2.5 billion people over the next 43 years from the current 6.7 billion — a rise equivalent to the number of people in the world in 1950.
Hania Zlotnik, the division’s director, said an important change in the new population estimate is a decrease in expected deaths from AIDS because of the rising use of anti-retroviral drugs and a downward revision of the prevalence of the disease in some countries.
(14 March 2007)
It may be time for the demographers to start factoring in global warming and peak oil. As public health specialist Dan Bednarz found out when investigating a study from WHO, many planners have not absorbed the implications of these trends. -BA
