Should we panic about plummeting birthrates? • FRANCE 24 English

Should we panic about plummeting birthrates? • FRANCE 24 English

[Music] Hello, I’m Annette Young and welcome back to another season of the 51enter show about women reshaping our world. In a special edition, we’re focusing on an issue that’s starting to seriously worry governments across the world. That is a global trend in declining birth rates. A joint UNFPA yugub study recently surveyed 14 nations that represents 37% of the world’s population. It revealed fertility rates have fallen to below 2.1 births per woman, the threshold needed for population stability without immigration in more than half of all those countries that took part. But the authors stressing a major reason being that it wasn’t that people don’t want to have children. They simply just cannot afford to. In a moment, I’ll be talking to Dr. Paula Shepard, an anthropologist from Oxford University. But first, let’s take a closer look at this important global trend. In Europe, the idea of family really started to change in the 1960s. With access to contraception, the legalization of abortion, and more women entering the workforce, things began to shift. Women could now exist in society without necessarily being a mother or a wife. In France, the number of births has been falling since 2014. It’s now at its lowest level since the end of World War II. 663,000 births per year, 20% fewer than in 2010. Even so, France remains one of the most fertile countries in Europe with 1.62 children per woman, just behind Bulgaria. Far lower down the list are Spain with 1.3 children and Italy with 1.2. In both countries, the population is now in decline. It’s also a trend that’s been taking shape in North Africa for the past 20 years with rising divorce rates and fewer marriages. But the lowest figure by far is in South Korea where women now just have 0.75 children on average. Often seen as the primary parent, many women are simply unwilling to make the sacrifice. Faced with these demographic challenges, governments are torn between punishment like restricting or even banning contraception and abortion and incentives such as offering financial support and better child care solutions. And joining me in the studio is Dr. Paula Shepard, an anthropologist from Oxford University. Paula, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you. Are governments justified to be concerned about these declining fertility rates? Um I think there is some uh sort of justification for it but I do think there’s also a much bigger panic sort of narrative. You’ve used words like crisis and panic and I think a lot of this is kind of the narrative that comes out of politicians. Um but it’s not necessarily as bad as it seems. I I don’t think um population projections are not crystal balls as they say. Um and in fact your clip talked about post-war um in 1946 demographers were very worried about um or at least politicians were very worried about uh population decline and in fact all the sort of um projections that were made all of them actually turned out to be lower than what actually happened because of course in the 60s we had the baby boom so we can’t really predict those kind of things you know it’s not perfect science so I feel that the panic and the crisis narrative is a little bit overstating the problem, but there certainly is a definite trend there. And in terms of population stability, if you’re not relying on immigration, that certainly must be a matter for concern for governments. Yes. And I mean declining birth rates are, it’s true, they are happening. We see these statistics that the numbers are real. People are having fewer fewer babies. Um I just want to sort of clarify though that the the sort of reason for declining birth weights is something that you can look at on two levels. A birth rate is very much a population level metric right it’s something that over time over the last 100 years birth rates have declined around the world and this is in correlation with countries getting richer. So the richer countries have fewer children because if you improve your health and sanitation, fewer babies die and if you have lower mortality then um people have fewer children which is sort of counterintuitive because you expect people to have more children when they’re richer. But of course this then brings us to the cost of living. But so you’ve got this population level decline which is something but then it just tells us very little about what’s happening in people’s households. How are families making decisions about having another baby? And that’s what I want to ask you about because it goes beyond just people not wanting to have children, does it? It’s about the cost of living crisis, about the economic factors, the lack of support for working parents. Exactly. All of those things. And as you said, people do want children. It’s not that they don’t want to have kids anymore. You know, we’re not going to extinct ourselves and never have children. There is still a twochild norm in most European countries. Um however there are a lot of barriers that lead to people taking so long they’re postponing child birth um having kids you know for a very long time before they can sort of get all the things they need ready and this is where various things um come into play. So, it’s quite it’s quite complex. There’s no one solution. Of course, the cost of living is is a huge pervasive thing. People need to be financially secure. But it’s more than that. And you touched on that a second ago about social support, right? We want, you know, hands-on parenting. We want our parents close by. Grandparents can really help offset the the the cost of child care. And this is how we, you know, a few hundred years ago, people lived with extended families. you had a lot of these support networks which you you don’t really have now especially in western settings. Let’s just take a pause there Paula because in China low birth rates continued with an aging population is pushing the country to the brink of a demographic crisis. As a result, the Chinese government has just announced national child care subsidies to help alleviate the financial burden of raising children. Kami Knight has this story. For decades, China punished women who tried to have more than one child and successfully slowed the population growth rate. Nearly 10 years later, that trend is proving difficult to reverse. Most recently, the government announced it would give households the equivalent of $500 a year for each child under the age of three. You’re benefiting more than 10 million families each year. These subsidies will provide fundamental support for child care, improve childare conditions, alleviate financial pressure and ensure that children receive adequate care. It’s the first time the central government has directly used financial tools to encourage births, also promising to lower the cost of preschool education. But whether it will be convincing enough isn’t clear. A prominent Chinese think tank found last year that China was one of the most expensive places in the world to raise children in relative terms. It reported that the direct cost of raising a child to the age of 18 was the equivalent of about $75,000. [Music] Raising a child is very expensive, right? Education, all aspects of raising a child. Compared to our generation, the costs have definitely increased. That includes food and daily necessities, education, health care. All these areas need to be taken into account. The idea of giving a few hundred dollars as a subsidy is no longer so appealing to people of our generation who already have a child. We will not give birth to another child just for a few hundred because giving birth to a child and raising a child is not just a matter of money. First of all, the money is insufficient. Secondly, even if you had enough money, who would take care of the child? In 2024, China recorded its third consecutive year of overall population decline. As the country moves ever closer to a demographic crisis, the UN predicts China’s population will shrink by over 150 million by 2050 and that by then people over 65 will make up 30% of the population. I’m watching that report. With me is Dr. Paula Shepard, an anthropologist from Oxford University. As we see there, governments are panicking, particularly China. Is it at all possible to reverse the trend just by a a sort of implementing a series of government measures? However, I mean, it’s hard to predict exactly, you know, what what works and what doesn’t. In some countries, birth rates have actually had like a sort of uptick um but then they’ve gone down again as policies change. But my broader feeling is that if you make a society that is conducive to um combining work life and parenting then this will just make it easier in all sorts of ways financially and as they said you know you can’t just throw a few dollars at it or even a few thousand. It needs to be sort of inbuilt structurally to make you know flexibility at work make you know women have always had kids and women have always worked but making those two things compatible or the incompatibility of them as you see now is quite new. Um and that’s that’s the thing to focus on making parenting not exclusive from working. But it’s also is it not about this sort of aspirational lifestyle that you see very much these days on social media which effectively everybody across the world is accessing and everybody wants and so when it comes to having a child does that not you know become a factor as well? Yeah, this is an interesting thing and this sort of refers to this paradox I mentioned earlier where you would expect people rich people have more money than they’ve ever had before even though the cost of all this is exactly the thing costs increase with the money that you have and so people have this really inflated kind of idea of what it costs to raise a child. Um and and so you know it of course on one level it doesn’t really cost a million pounds or whatever to raise a child but if you want your child to go to university and get their first house and help them get a car and do all the things and music lessons and everything and so this kind of middle class culture is is what’s doing that. It’s really pushing the price of of parenting up. Is immigration the answer as well? Partly I mean why not? uh you know um people panic again when they worried about migrants migrant fertility tends to adjust you know so people who come and live in uh you know in in a European country for example they will within a generation or two adjust their fertility down so it’s not really about migrants having more kids it’s more about migrants contributing to the workforce at those different levels where you need it in an aging population if you bring in younger people then they will support the older and of course Right-wing nationalist governments such as Hungary and more recently the United States are using falling birth rates as a weapon against women and reproductive rights, aren’t they? Absolutely. And I I genuinely don’t think that’s the solution. Women are not going to go back into the kitchen and go go back to these sort of traditional ways. Traditional ways, this is a very kind of Victorian or 1950s tradition. Um but before that, it wasn’t like that. again work and and childbearing and having parenting were compatible. That’s the way to make it happen. Not sending people out of work and back into into the home. Um so I I don’t I think these things come from a different political agenda than really, you know, increasing birth rates if that’s what they want to do. Paula, it’s been great speaking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. And that’s it for this edition. So until our next show, bye for now. [Music]

In a special edition marking the start of a new season, we dive into an issue increasingly alarming governments around the world: a global decline in birthrates. A recent joint study by UNFPA and YouGov — spanning 14 countries and covering 37 percent of the world’s population — reveals a stark trend: fertility rates have dropped below 2.1 births per woman in over half of the nations surveyed. That’s the critical threshold needed to maintain population levels without immigration.
#Fertilitycrisis #Birthrate #Family

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