From the Office of National Statistics:
‘The total fertility rate (TFR) decreased to 1.49 children per woman in 2022 from 1.55 in 2021; the TFR has been decreasing since 2010.
Fertility rates decreased overall and in each age group, except for women aged under 20 years where the fertility rate increased.
There were 605,479 live births in England and Wales in 2022, a 3.1% decrease from 624,828 in 2021 and the lowest number since 2002; the number remains in line with the recent trend of decreasing live births seen before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.’
From Breibart:
‘Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that the total fertility rate fell to 1.49 children per woman in 2022, far below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain population levels and the lowest since records began in 1939.
According to the statistics there were 605,479 live births recorded in 2022, a 3.1 per cent decline over the previous year and also the lowest overall figure since 2002.
The data also showed that the rate of women having children was highest between the ages of 30 to 34, compared to 25 to 29 just twenty years ago, suggesting that British women are delaying having children.
Commenting on the birthrate decline, chief executive of Pregnant Then Screwed, Joeli Brearley told The Guardian: “It is no surprise to us that fertility rates have hit the floor. Procreation has become a luxury item in the UK. Childcare costs are excruciating, and that’s if you can secure a place.
“Our research found that almost half of parents have been plunged into debt or had to use savings just to pay their childcare bill,” she said.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2024/02/wont-anyone-think-of-children-part-one.html
Speaking to the globalist Financial Times newspaper, James Pomeroy, an economist at the HSBC bank said that without mass migration, the birthrate decline would result in the British population falling by 25 to 30 per cent over the next generation. He claimed that a declining native population either needs “more immigration, higher taxes, worse public services or a higher retirement age”.
[There’s a far better solution. Do HSBC employed or any other economists know about Socialism?]
However, Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson of the Women’s Budget Group said that the native birth rate was likely declining due to economic factors, such as the price of childcare but also the soaring price of housing in the UK.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/02/24/birthrate-falls-to-record-low-in-england-and-wales/
From the Socialist Standard September 2020
‘For
centuries, women have been denied the opportunities for personal
advancement in the name of religion and tradition. Religious and
cultural institutions where patriarchal attitudes were legitimised
have had a deep effect on the role and status of women. Yet it is now
women who are the key drivers in defusing what was once popularly
called the ‘population bomb’. Everything has changed so much that
choosing to have no children, or just give birth to one child, is for
women just as convenient as choosing to bear two or three.
Globally,
the fertility rate – the average number of children a woman gives
birth to — is falling below the replacement level and this means
nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of
the century, based on the expectation that women will have fewer
children. This does not mean the number of people living in these
countries is falling, at least not immediately, as the size of a
population is a mix of the fertility rate, death rate and migration.
It can be a generation before changes in fertility rate take hold.
Although fertility rates continue to fall the world population will
continue to rise because the fall in fertility rates takes a while to
show up, a phenomenon known as population momentum.
Falling
fertility rates go hand-in-hand with better education and more career
openings for women and the access to contraception and abortion. When
more infants survive, fertility goes down and population growth draws
to an end.
The more secure and prosperous people become,
the lower will be their family sizes.
According to
Wolfgang Lutz, of the Vienna University of Economics and Business,
one reason for the fertility decline is women’s education:
‘The brain is the most important reproductive organ,’ he explains. Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children and how many to have, she immediately has fewer of them and has them later.
Paid
to reproduce
Some countries are so concerned about their
shrinking populations and fear of the alternative – a policy of
immigration – has led nationalist and xenophobic leaders to
introduce policies that could only be described as a return back to
an earlier time when women were viewed as baby-producing machines.
Across Europe, governments have introduced benefits aimed at
stimulating population growth, implementing baby bonuses for each new
child and promoting ‘traditional family values’.
Victor
Orban of Hungary is heavily investing in such things as cash loans to
young married couples. Each time a child is born, payments are
deferred. If the couple have three children within the requisite time
frame, the loan is completely written off, otherwise they have to pay
it back. Government IVF clinics will offer free treatment for all
women who want them (just as long as they are under 40 and not
lesbians). In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice Party introduced the
500+ policy in 2016, under which mothers received 500 złoty (£99)
per child per month from the second child onwards, later expanded to
include all children. Russia launched a one-off payment of £5,800 to
families with two or more children, with Putin explaining that
‘Russia’s fate and its historic prospects depend on how many of
us there are, it depends on how many children are born in Russian
families.’
Sweden is one country that used a package of
policies including childcare, flexible working conditions and
generous maternity and paternity leave packages to reverse its
population decline. But the increase to the fertility rate was
marginal – just 0.2 children per woman.
As Wolfgang Lutz
points out, ‘Once a woman is socialised to have an education and a
career, she is socialised to have a smaller family. There’s no
going back.’
Fertility rates
Just as the Catholic
Church’s anti-contraceptive dogma was blamed for rises in
population only to be punctured by women defying their priests, the
argument switched to the Muslims, with its emphasis on strict
traditional hierarchal gender roles, and it would be they who would
go against the trend of smaller families. But then fertility rates in
majority-Muslim countries such as Iran, Bangladesh and Indonesia
fell, as well.
Now the blame for over-population has
shifted to sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that African high fertility
rates with four or more births per woman will not buck the trend and
cause over-population. But even here, there are signs of change in a
growing number of countries.
Countries such as Nigeria
which are struggling to make progress to provide education and
employment opportunities and provide quality healthcare should be
seen as the last hold-outs against the global triumph of small
families.
International agencies found that over 20
percent of women in this region of Africa want to avoid a pregnancy
but have their needs unmet by any family planning outreach. It
results in almost 20 million — or 38 percent — of the region’s
pregnancies each year being unintended. The World Health Organization
estimates that globally 270 million women who want contraceptives
have no access to them.
Practices such as early marriage,
which is associated with an early start to child bearing, are common.
In sub-Saharan Africa, approximately 38 percent of women are married
by the age of 18. In Niger, three-quarters of girls marry by the age
of 18. Child marriage denies girls an education which leads to a lack
of ability to find work in later life and so handicaps girls’
decision-making power and their right to choose.
The gap
between desired and actual family size suggests that women are not
fully able to realise their reproductive rights. But choice can
become a reality everywhere, including the African continent. In the
past, women in Botswana would have seven children on average. Now
they have fewer than three. It was accomplished by enabling women to
control their fertility and reducing child mortality rates – moves
that almost inevitably lead to them having fewer babies. When more
girls attend school, a country’s adolescent fertility rates dip,
more women wait until adulthood to have children and are armed with
much more sophisticated knowledge-tools to make better decisions for
their health and future offspring.
It took the UK 95 years
to drop from a fertility rate of six children per woman to three, but
it took Botswana only 24 years, Bangladesh 20 and Iran only ten
years.
Overpopulationism
Blaming our environmental
problems on population pressures is all too common among
eco-activists and it has resulted in a sordid history of top-down
population control programmes violating women’s reproductive rights
with such measures as uninformed sterilisations. All women should
have full access to contraception and safe abortion as part of
overall health services. Family planning, however, is not the answer
to our environmental problems. Babies and yet-to-be-born babies are
not responsible for today’s environmental problems. Reducing
population numbers will not stop climate change, nor rising
sea-levels. Many environmentalists will cite the fallacious carrying
capacity in their argument that we have too many people on the planet
but the over-emphasis on individual consumption distracts from
industrial and military consumption. Capitalism is the reason for
ever-increasing resource depletion, CO2 emissions, waste and
pollution. It should be held accountable, not the innocent victims of
global warming.
More people bring more ingenuity, more
talent and more innovation into the world. Every human born is not
just an extra mouth to feed but also another pair of helping hands
and an additional thoughtful brain. Yet we are being told by
environmentalists that it means less for each of us. We get informed
that we will need to radically reduce humanity’s carbon footprint
on the environment by reducing our numbers, as well as changes to our
lifestyles and that until the world’s population stops growing
there will be an urgent need to squeeze people’s consumption.
Does
pushing population growth down actually put the environment on a more
sustainable path? And if so, what measures would the policy makers
have to apply to actually bring about such a change?
The
answer to environmentalists attracted to the over-populationist
argument is that the birth-control campaigns are, in the end, just
one more patriarchal attempt to control women’s reproduction, and
that improving child survival rates, giving girls access to
education, and empowering women to control their own reproduction
(and that means allowing women themselves to make their decisions)
are what will sustainably and non-coercively lower birth rates.
Family planning and reducing family sizes, however, is not the answer
to our environmental problems.
Environmentalist focus on
population is mistaken and can lead to equally misguided action.
Over-population is a thinly veiled misogynist racist myth that is
accepted by both right-wingers and progressives alike. People who
claim to be against genocide and eugenics push this myth with no
sense of the irony. Those accepting the over-population argument
obscure the more immediate causes of suffering under capitalism.
Because of its short-termism, its unrelenting drive for profits, and
international conflict, capitalism expresses a tendency toward
planetary crisis, regardless of the total number of humans living on
earth. The amount of waste and pollution under capitalism is enormous
with its preponderance of the production and distribution of useless
products, the wasted labour and the creation of mounting piles of
garbage as a result of planned obsolescence and single-use
products.
The concentration on so-called over-population
confuses symptoms with causes, validating apologists for the system
and perpetuating Malthusian anti-poor arguments. The central concept
in the ideological armoury of capitalism is the idea that there isn’t
enough to go around. Hence, we are confronted with the idea that
there isn’t enough food, aren’t enough jobs, not enough housing,
or we haven’t enough classrooms or hospital beds because there is a
certain fixed amount of all these things. People who claim that
population growth is the issue are shifting the blame from the rich
to the poor.
Those who believe reducing the population to
be an answer to global warming say very little about which policies
would spare the planet many more billions of people, particularly
when the existing trend is already towards smaller family sizes. We
should forget all about prioritising population control and instead
help each and every woman bear a child in good health whenever she
chooses to have a baby. It might sound counter-intuitive for
stabilising and lowering the population but giving women control over
their lives and of their own bodies controls population growth. We
need no more misanthropic pronouncements about too many people or
that humanity has somehow exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity
or that humanity is a parasitic species on the Planet Earth’s
ecology.
Giving women control of both their lives and
their bodies is what will control population growth. The best family
planning and contraceptive is the empowerment of women.’
ALJO
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