The declining global fertility rate has many causes but the backdrop which enables medicine and contraception and family planning and abortion and government policy to have the effects they do, is the decline in the importance of the family. It is the side-lining of “family values” which is manifested now in so many women not wishing to have children. Not having children has been seen as a kind of emancipation. But, as Japan and many other countries are now finding it is also why the loneliness of the aged (men and women) is increasing so rapidly. Over half of all Japanese women now living, it is said, will never experience having children. The number of men so afflicted is harder to estimate but is thought to be a little higher. The period in China when the one child policy was enforced is also having its impact as families have been discouraged. Loneliness with age is the new normal.
The over-population problem is effectively over. However, the species needs a birth rate of 2.1 children per woman to maintain a stable population. A population implosion has now started and is gaining speed. The cold hand of demographics means that to change current trends will take many generations. Within the next 50 years – and this is inevitable – every country in the world will have a birth rate below the replenishment level and will have a declining population. Parts of Europe have been mitigating the loss of births by immigration but even immigrant fertility rates drop within two generations to the country average.
A return to giving a higher value to “family values” is an existential necessity. Probably we have about 100 years or so to avoid a catastrophic population collapse.
The k2p blog 