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Human birth rates will continue to drop drastically over the coming century, and within just 25 years, over two-thirds of countries’ populations will be in decline. That’s the finding of a new study published in The Lancet. The extensive team of international scientists behind the paper warns that governments must prepare for the massive changes we will face in the coming decades, as a result of these changes to global population patterns. These future trends in fertility rates and live births will completely reconfigure the global economy ….Story continues…
By: Jess Cockerill
Source: ScienceAlert
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Critics:
In the 20th century, several authoritarian governments sought either to increase or to decrease the birth rates, sometimes through forceful intervention. One of the most notorious natalist policies was that in communist Romania in 1967–1990, during the time of communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, who adopted a very aggressive natalist policy which included outlawing abortion and contraception, routine pregnancy tests for women, taxes on childlessness, and legal discrimination against childless people.
This policy has been depicted in movies and documentaries (such as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and Children of the Decree). These policies temporarily increased birth rates for a few years, but this was followed by a decline due to the increased use of illegal abortion. Ceaușescu’s policy resulted in over 9,000 deaths of women due to illegal abortions, large numbers of children put into Romanian orphanages by parents who could not cope with raising them, street children in the 1990s.
(when many orphanages were closed and the children ended on the streets), and overcrowding in homes and schools. Ultimately, this aggressive natalist policy led to a generation who eventually led the Romanian Revolution which overthrew and executed him. At the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania, women’s issues gained considerable attention. Family programs were discussed, and 137 countries drafted a World Population Plan of Action.
As part of the discussion, many countries accepted modern birth control methods such as the birth control pill and the condom while opposing abortion. Population concerns, as well as the desire to include women in the discourse, were discussed; it was agreed that improvements in women’s status and initiatives in defense of reproductive health and freedom, the environment, and sustainable socioeconomic development were needed.
Birth rates ranging from 10 to 20 births per 1,000 are considered low, while rates from 40 to 50 births per 1,000 are considered high.[12] There are problems associated with high birth rates, and there may be problems associated with low birth rates. High birth rates may contribute to malnutrition and starvation, stress government welfare and family programs, and more importantly store up overpopulation for the future, and increase human damage to other species and habitats, and environmental degradation.
Additional problems faced by a country with a high birth rate include educating a growing number of children, creating jobs for these children when they enter the workforce, and dealing with the environmental impact of a large population. Low birth rates may stress the government to provide adequate senior welfare systems and stress families who must support the elders themselves. There will be fewer younger able-bodied people who may be needed to support an ageing population, if a high proportion of older people become disabled and unable to care for themselves.
In stark contrast to Ceaușescu’s natalist policy was China’s one child policy, in effect from 1978 to 2015, which included abuses such as forced abortions.[17] This policy has also been deemed responsible for the common practice of sex-selective abortion which led to an imbalanced sex ratio in the country. Given strict family size limitations and a preference for sons, girls became unwanted in China because they were considered as depriving the parents of the chance of having a son.
With the progress of prenatal sex-determination technologies and induced abortion, the one-child policy gradually turned into a one-son policy. In many countries, the steady decline in birth rates over the past decades can largely be attributed to the significant gains in women’s freedoms, such as tackling forced marriage and child marriage, access to contraception, equal access to education, and increased socioeconomic opportunities. Women of all economic, social, religious and educational persuasions are choosing to have fewer children as they are gaining more control over their own reproductive rights.
Apart from more children living into their adult years, women are often more ambitious to take up education and paid work outside the home, and to live their own lives rather than just a life of reproduction and unpaid domestic work. Birth rates have fallen due to the introduction of family planning clinics and other access to contraception. In Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, women are less likely to have two children (or more) than they were before 1999, according to Australian demographer Jack Caldwell.
Bangladeshi women eagerly took up contraceptives, such as condoms and the pill, according to a study in 1994 by the World Bank. The study proved that family planning could be carried out and accepted practically anywhere. Caldwell also believes that agricultural improvements led to the need for less labour. Children not needed to plough the fields would be of surplus and require some education, so in turn, families become smaller and women are able to work and have greater ambitions. Other examples of non-coercive family planning policies are Ethiopia, Thailand and Indonesia.
Myanmar was controlled until 2011 by an austere military junta, intent on controlling every aspect of people’s lives. The generals wanted the country’s population doubled. In their view, women’s job was to produce babies to power the country’s labour force, so family planning was vehemently opposed. The women of Burma opposed this policy, and Peter McDonald of the Australian National University argues that this gave rise to a black market trade in contraceptives, smuggled in from neighbouring Thailand.
Latin America, of predominately Catholic faith, has seen the same trends of falling fertility rates. Brazilian women are having half the children compared to 25 years ago: a rate of 1.7 children per woman. The Vatican now has less influence over women in other hard-line Catholic countries. Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru have all seen significant drops in fertility in the same period, all going from over six to less than three children per woman.
Forty percent of married Brazilian women are choosing to get sterilised after having children, but this may be because it only requires confession on one occasion. Some observers claim this to be a triumph of modern Western values of freedom for women against states with Catholic values. The country with the highest birth rate is Niger at 6.49 children born per woman and the country with the lowest birth rate is Taiwan, at 1.13 children born per woman.
However, despite not having any official records, it can be presumed for obvious reasons (only men are allowed to be Catholic priests) that the Holy See has the lowest birth rate of any sovereign state. Compared with the 1950s (when the birth rate was 36 per thousand), as of 2011, the world birth rate has declined by 16 per thousand. As of 2017, Niger has had 49.443 births per thousand people. Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world with 8 per thousand people. While in Japan there are 126 million people and in Niger 21 million, both countries had around 1 million babies born in 2016.
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