I venture with trepidation upon a subject in many ways I have no stake in. Except, we all do, and maybe not for the obvious reasons.
For some time now there has been growing concern over the population slump. Not enough babies are being born, at least not to people in the so-called developed world. We have an aging population and the safety nets (which are under threat now for political reasons) may be inadequate to meet the situation. By 2050 or thereabouts, one in four people will be retirement age. Since we don’t yet know how the laws will be changed (though there are certainly clues now), we can’t say that all those people will be retired. Not so much that they may not be able to, but that they may not be allowed to.
Population has always been political. Regimes, nations, states of all sizes have always had an eye on birth rates. Birthrates dictate tax bases, worker supply, military size, and so forth. More babies mean more resources. In that game, the quality of those lives has not always been of particular concern. Families are expected to take care of that. And depending on when in history, where in the world, and how a given state is managed, this has staggered along from manageable to disaster for millennia. It’s a precarious drunkard’s walk through variables that until recently have been largely unpredictable, circumstantial, and unmanageable.
A peculiar thing became an issue (or perhaps just apparent) in the 20th Century, namely a link between affluence and birth rates. Mainly, that the more able people became to enjoy a higher standard of living and quality of life, the fewer children they had. Common sense tells us why. If one has the resources to live a more fulfilling life, one is less likely to encumber oneself with mouths to feed that require time away from all those other pursuits.
Royal families don’t count because with the resources of a kingship, the care and feeding of offspring is easily turned over to others. Same can be said of the very rich. People trapped in poverty simply can’t make many choices, including determining the size of their family. (Poor enough, the children die, so the issue is necessarily distorted.) No, it’s the so-called middle classes where this becomes a political issue. Because it is the middle class from which the developed world draws its skilled labor, middle management, and the pool of talent the elite rely on to improve their own lives. (We can quibble over the label “middle class” being specific to one group within the vast section of society which includes working class and upper middle class. Let it suffice for now that I’m talking about those who are wage dependent and make enough money to have choices, limited as they may be, but specifically choices about family size.)
We talk a great deal about freedom of choice. Right now that has become a touchy subject, especially with regard go this problem. Because if, as seems likely, more and more people within that pool of human resource are choosing to limit the size of their families—or choosing not to have one at all—and see that decision of fundamental to their notions of personal freedom, then redressing that “problem” as a state issue threatens to curtail those freedoms.
For some time now, the fact is we have been compensating for the loss of new, young workers by way of immigration. A lot of people don’t like that anymore because, well, reasons. The alternative would be somehow persuading or coercing people into making more babies.
Whether they want to or not.
(Side note here: back when the whole abortion debate became the toxic cesspool it is today, many people would throw the accusation that prochoice people were Nazis. I understand the way they were using the term, but the fact was that abortion was a capital offense in Nazi Germany. The Nazis were coercing people—good Aryans—into having more babies. They needed the cannon-fodder.)
Now, a personal note: we are childless, by choice. We realized early on that we would not be good parents. Not in any moral sense, but in the sense that this was not what we wanted to do with our time. I know myself well enough to realize that I would have resented the imposition. I had other things I wanted to do with my life and there was no room for children. Both of us recognized our limitations and made the decision not to. Had we been forced to, the primary victim would have been the children. If someone is disinclined to parent, why would anyone risk that child’s nurture just to meet a quota—or, worse, a social norm that counts only appearances as acceptable criteria?
Anyway, the fact is that unless one is allowed to freely make such a choice, forcing them to do other than what they wish by law or by custom is a form of tyranny.
And yet we are facing a very real problem.
What this will require is a realignment of our systems and institutions. Wealth distribution, yes, but also environmental realities and technological solutions. We are on the verge of having the kind of technological civilization that might address much of this, but the allocation of resource is whimsical and unequal. We have to stop pretending it’s still the 19th Century and that what worked then (if indeed it did, but that’s another topic) will work now.
But if we go down the road of forced birth rates, then we have to face the fact that this can only be accomplished by stripping dreams from half the population and creating a new culture of chattel bondage.