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Mommies on strike
The reasons for the birth dearth are pretty obvious, and there’s little we can do about it
MARGARET WENTE
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Every so often I get together with a dozen female friends to eat, gab, laugh, and drink. Among these women are a lawyer, a PR consultant, a couple of entrepreneurs, a magazine editor, and a judge. We’ve always got lots to talk about. But we don’t talk much about our children, because almost half of us don’t have any. We’re typical highly educated boomer women, but what’s missing from our resumés is motherhood.
So much for maternal instinct. When women have lots of options, other instincts turn out to be a lot stronger than that one. That’s the way it’s shaping up across the developed world. The higher the education and the income, the fewer the babies.
Why didn’t we have children? We’re not really sure. We had interesting jobs. We liked our independence. We never did see ourselves as happy-housewife types. It was never the right time. It seemed like too big a sacrifice. Children are expensive, and they need a huge investment of parental energy. Couldn’t find dad material that we liked. And so on.
Canada’s fertility rate is holding steady at 1.5 children per woman (the replacement rate is 2.1). And in spite of an alleged mommy-outbreak in Alberta, there’s no sign that our daughters, if we have any, will be any more productive than we were.
The mommy strike will profoundly transform Canada. If we can’t replace ourselves, the country will shrink and grow poorer. That’s why we need immigrants (though even doubling the immigration rate wouldn’t be enough to replace the babies we’re not having). The result is that Anglo-Saxon Canada will slowly dwindle away before our eyes, especially in the cities.
Immigrants are now a majority in Toronto and, before long, most Torontonians will be visible minorities. Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and the rest of rural Canada are depopulating. Moose Jaw and Carbonear are destined to be ghost towns, unless we can persuade Chinese and South Asians to settle there, which I doubt. Your caffe-latte-coloured great-grandchildren (if you are lucky enough to have any) will be amazed to learn that people once lived there, and that Canada was once overwhelmingly white.
Everybody knows what’s happening in Europe. Fertility rates have crashed. Without more immigration - and more social unrest - Europe will account for only 7 per cent of the world’s population by 2050. The United States, as usual, is the exception to the rule, which is why it will get richer and richer and the rest of us won’t.
It’s fashionable these days to blame the birth dearth on the loss of values in our secular, postmodern culture. Why have kids if people live only for themselves, nobody believes in sacrifice, and life is meaningless? The West has lost its way, and we’re committing cultural suicide.
This theory is not without appeal, but things aren’t that simple. Political economist Nicholas Eberstadt, writing in The Wilson Quarterly, points out that fertility rates have also plunged below replacement levels throughout South America and East Asia, including poor nations such as Vietnam and Myanmar (Burma). They are now below replacement in Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon and Iran. They are even below replacement in Calcutta, Mumbai and New Delhi. (New Delhi was the city that inspired Paul Ehrlich to write The Population Bomb, the book that predicted mass starvation was right around the corner.) Mr. Eberstadt estimates that more than half the world’s population may now live in countries with “sub-replacement” fertility.
The mommy strike has driven the demographers (most of whom are men, need I add) around the bend. They were sure that birth rates would never fall below replacement levels. They were wrong. Then they assumed this would only happen in rich, developed nations like ours. Wrong again. It turns out that poor people who can get their hands on birth control want smaller families too.
So why aren’t we having babies? I think it’s pretty simple. If you’re an illiterate peasant, children are an asset. They’re free labour. They are also your old-age insurance, because they will probably feed you when you’re old and useless. When society becomes literate, children become an expense, because you’ve got to educate them. And, in more developed nations, the state will feed you when you’re old and useless.
When women become highly educated income-earners, the cost of having children soars. American economist Shirley Burggraf argues that for upper-middle income families, the financial disincentives to childbearing have become so high that it’s amazing professional women have any children at all. “No society until recent times has expected love alone to support the family enterprise,” she writes. “To put it another way, parental love has never cost so much.”
Throughout the developed world, politicians are desperately offering bribes to defray the cost of parental love. In Russia - where the population is in free-fall and the most endangered species is the Russians - Vladimir Putin announced this week that parents who have a second child will get a baby bonus of $10,000 - a stupendous amount - plus higher monthly subsidies and better-paid maternity leaves. In Japan, another fast-shrinking nation, The New York Times reports that local municipalities are offering extra cash in hopes that they won’t vanish off the map. In Singapore, where the fertility rate has dwindled to about 1.0, parents get $3,000 for the first child, $9,000 in cash and savings for the second, and up to $18,000 for each one after that.
Good luck to them. So far, there’s no evidence that incentives work—not family-friendly policies, or generous parental leaves, or free daycare for all, or cold, hard cash. None of it seems to make any difference at all. Perhaps one day we’ll get so desperate that fertile young women will be offered jobs for life as professional breeders, in return for anything they want. Meantime, we owe every mom out there a big vote of thanks. Your country needs you like never before.
