Birth rates are steadily decreasing worldwide for the first time since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Russia and China have been struggling with its effects for decades; Europe, India and South Korea have recently started to contend with this phenomenon.
Since 1804, the global population has grown from 1 billion to an astonishing 8 billion people, thanks in a large part to greater agricultural productivity and medical advancements. World population growth hit its peak of 2.1% annually in 1968 but has since slowed to 1.1%.
So now the demographic concern has shifted from a fear of overpopulation to a concern with haemorrhaging polities and pronatalism is on the rise once again. It’s been a pet theory of both Fascist and Communist dictatorships, who see population size as a means to amass greater power. More recently, tech oligarchs also started to hop on this bandwagon.
Pronatalist policies could very well be a non-partisan issue when aimed well, Kristijan Fidanovski argues in his article titled The right policy for the wrong reasons. But the policies in vogue favour restrictive measures, such as opposing effective birth control and abortions, and curbing women’s opportunities. The discourse often features strong racial overtones as well, and class implications, quite like Elon Musk advocating for wealthy people to have more kids.
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In a political and economic mindset tuned to the idea of perpetual growth and measuring national economies against one another, there is rising resistance against immigration, even in economies directly built on immigrant labour, quite like in Europe and North America.
Is there room for concern?
Despite the questionable overtones, there are good reasons to be concerned. Most economies, especially in welfare states, are built on a model where active generations of wage earners provide for their contemporary dependents through an intricate system of taxes and dues that sustain health care systems, schools and pensions, and more.
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Is there a way to remodel developed economies so that fewer people can provide for more dependents? Not only are birth rates decreasing, so is the relative taxation of the highest earners across much of the globe. Are we ever going to entertain the idea of taxing the rich?
Do women have a choice?
This discourse focusses very heavily on gender norms, societal expectations and put a lot of pressure on the people who dare not utilize their wombs for reproduction. Sociologists Claudia Rahnfeld and Annkathrin Heuschkel conducted a deep study on the subject and found:
The decision to become childless is made much more on the basis of individual motives and not because of the framework conditions, which was previously assumed. The main reasons for women are a desire for self-realization, free time and more freedom. These motives are far ahead of other motives such as the ecological footprint.
Yet, the level of freedom and free time varies wildly across social strata and societies, depending on the availability and price of childcare, the quality of public education and health care systems. In some of the richest countries, such as the US and UK, parents have to spend a significant proportion of their income on childcare just to be able to go to work to have any income whatsoever.
It’s important to note a surprising fact: according to new research childless women have not only been ever present, and important pillar of our communities and wider society, but also rather numerous across the past century. For example in Austria they constituted 29.1% of the population in 1900.
Having children, or not having them is such a deeply intimate and personal question that many legitimately want policy makers to take a step back and instead of exerting pressure, rather provide circumstances so that the babies people want to have can actually be born and raised, respecting people’s individual lives and decisions.
In this Standard Time Episode we have invited three experts to talk about pronatalism, population decline and childcare!
The guests
Dr Regina Fuchs heads the Population Directorate at Statistics Austria. This is where statistics on demographics, health, the labour market, education, living conditions, research and digitalisation are compiled. She is also responsible for the Science Centre with the Austrian Micro Data Centre (AMDC).
Kristijan Fidanovski studied Politics and East European Studies at University College London, and Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at Georgetown University. He is a doctoral candidate in Social Policy and Demography at the University of Oxford.
Mag. Dr. Gerlinde Mauerer, senior scientist at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna, Austria. She primarily works in research on gender and family, empirical sociology, health and social inequalities, critical masculinities.
Creative team
Réka Kinga Papp, editor-in-chief
Daniela Univazo Marquina, writer-editor
Merve Akyel, art director
Zeynep Feriha Demir, producer
Zsófia Gabriella Papp, digital producer
Management
Priyanka Hutschenreiter, project manager
Judit Csikós, financial manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, office administration
OKTO Crew
Senad Hergić, producer
Leah Hochedlinger, video recording
Marlena Stolze, video recording
Clemens Schmiedbauer, video recording
Richard Brusek, sound recording
Postproduction
Milán Golovics, dialogue editor
Dániel Nagy, dialogue editor
Nóra Ruszkai, video editor
István Nagy, post production
Art
Victor Maria Lima, animation
Music by Crypt-of-Insomnia
Hosted by Kaffesatz at Gleis 21.
In partnership with Display Europe, cofunded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Directorate‑General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.