Stop trying to make more babies

Studying population fertility rates and responses to them is like reading the children’s fairy tale Goldilocks: governments generally think their country’s fertility rates are “too high” or “too low” — they’re rarely “just right.”

The ideal remains elusive; yet a new report from the United Nations Population Fund reveals that the majority of the globe’s population now lives under governments with a stated intent to influence individual childbearing.

For decades, the global emphasis was on lowering high fertility rates, and it worked. As recently as the year 2000, women in 41 of the world’s countries (21 percent) had five or more children on average, while just under one-third of countries had total fertility rates under two.    

Now, the proportions are reversing. Only eight countries (0.08 percent) have fertility rates as high as five, while the total fertility rate is below replacement in nearly half of the world’s countries. As low fertility has become the norm, and populations are rapidly aging, more governments have switched their policy emphasis to try and incentivize births.  

This is a fool’s errand and risks doing more harm than good.

The policies are expensive, and they don’t work. While we know how to lower fertility rates, we don’t really know how to raise them — at least not in a sustained manner. Research shows that the expense of children — housing and childcare, primarily — depresses fertility rates, so governments have offered cash, subsidies and tax breaks in an effort to alleviate that objection to larger families. But these expenditures don’t lead to a sustained fertility increase because expense is never the only reason for deciding whether or not to have a child.

South Korea has spent $210 billion over the last 16 years trying to raise fertility and it keeps hitting record lows — now 0.79 children per woman on average. That money could have gone elsewhere, such as health initiatives or education, for a greater return on investment and to broader social benefit. What policy-makers seem not to think about is that while some of these efforts at making life better for those who are already born might have the byproduct of raising fertility rates, without making life better, the rates certainly won’t go up.

That’s because economic solutions generally don’t question or revise the social structures that pressure fertility lower in the first place. A better approach, and one that could only yield net good, is thinking less about the collective and more about how the individual operates within that collective.

What social structures give people who want to have a second or third child the support they need to realize those desires? Are work practices, like paid leave shared between multiple caregivers, in place to allow for flexible use? Are there quality, affordable and convenient childcare options available starting at early ages for those who need or want to make use of them?

These questions are just a start at recognizing the complex decision making behind childbearing, something that is an individual decision — at least, for now. There are reasons to worry that autonomy over childbearing is being eroded.

Perhaps the most worrisome part of normalizing efforts to increase births as a solution to population aging is that once the norm takes hold, we can’t control how governments pursue it, and the risk of coercion increases.

Twenty years ago, nearly all of the world’s aging countries were democracies. Now, a quarter of those countries with a median age over 35 years — the world’s oldest countries — are not free. Defining low fertility as a “problem” and offering government policy as a “solution” opens the door for whomever is in charge to define and pursue their definition of whatever their demographic ideal is. We have seen plenty of examples of coercive policies to lower fertility rates, like China’s One Child Policy, but coercion can force change in the opposite direction as well.

One egregious example is Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s campaign for more Romanian babies starting in the 1960s. Through invasive measures, like subjecting women under 45 to monthly gynecological exams in their workplace, fertility rates spiked, but at the expense of women and children. The damage has reverberated for decades.

Too often, governments consider “making more people” as the primary solution to population aging and depopulation and neglect those already born. In many societies, however, large groups of people are left behind. According to the World Bank, just 23 percent of Indian women perform paid work, and much of that is in the informal economy, putting them at risk of greater poverty in old age. Among the OECD, only 15.5 percent of those over 65 years old still work, on average. Given that there are 131 million people just between the ages of 65 and 74 in high-income countries, this is a tremendously untapped resource.

Policies to try and raise fertility are not nearly as politically unpalatable as raising pensionable ages, and they seem much more straightforward than trying to decrease inequalities in education or health disparities, so governments keep pursuing them. But unless we first accept that low fertility and population aging are here to stay, we will keep wasting money on this elusive goal — and our rights may be under fire as a result.

Jennifer D. Sciubba is the author of “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World” and senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

This post has been updated to correct an error in the cited fertility rates.