After the recorded population of the world was registered at 8 billion people a week ago, – the highest yet – a slew of articles came out lamenting the declining birth rate in wealthy industrialized countries, mainly in East Asia, Europe and North America.
The journalistic take on this demographic change is strangely monolithic, and from the outset, seems objective: birth rates in these countries are declining because women have more work opportunities and education and are thus delaying marriage and childbirth.[1] Every one of them places the responsibility of reproduction on the shoulders of the woman, despite the fact that it does take two to create the child. In the article about South Korean and Japanese birth rates, there is not one potential father interviewed about whether he wants to have kids.
But when in history was reproduction a woman’s choice?
In Against the Grain, the historian James Scott examines records of skeletal remains of women in farming societies and hunter-gatherer societies in the fertile crescent.[2] What he remarks upon is that the bodies of women in farming societies were deeply damaged, after they had been forced to produce a dozen or more children throughout their lifetimes. The bodies of women in non-agricultural societies, such as those that relied on pasturing, gathering, and short-term season agriculture, showed far less degradation. Drawing on historical data and modern ethnographic data, Scott shows that non-farming people may have had one, two, or even no children during their lifetimes. It was only due to the needs of grain-based empires that people began to feel the pressure to have a lot of children in order to increase their own work force.
In an old ethnographic account by a Dutch missionary on Taiwan in the 1600s, retold by Tonio Andrade in his book How Taiwan Became Chinese, the foreign missionary recounted that the Siraya people, a group of aboriginal people who lived on the plains, did not have a child until they were in their forties.[3] Before this period, due to the demands of hunting, warfare, and a lot of other activities that required full attention, family groups did not have the resources and time needed to raise a child. In their forties, they retired to a sedentary lifestyle and brought up a child. How accurate this antique account was can be debated, but it illustrates the fact that societies have different factors that influence how many children they decide to raise to adulthood and when they do it.
In modern articles regarding low birth rates in post-industrial places, I never see these factors acknowledged. Success and survival in these societies no longer depends on your agricultural output, it depends on the quality of your labor (and ability to evade labor through careful money management). For a farming family or even a weaving family, increasing the amount of hands to work is almost guaranteed to increase the family’s wealth. There is a strong push factor to having multiple children, as many as possible. Each child that is raised up to the age when he or she can start working represents added wealth. A lot of these societies are patriarchal, even if women are valued for their labor, such as in the commercial silk industry explosion in Ming Dynasty-era Suzhou. Farming families also worked entirely “in the home.” They were operating small family businesses, and they were able to be proximate to their children, oversee them, and work alongside them.
In a post-industrial society, the reality is exactly the opposite. A family’s resources are limited by the number of children in the family. In order to raise a child up to enter a high-paying profession such as engineer, one needs to provide for that child, not just in terms of basic needs, but in terms of advanced training, for decades. This requires surplus wealth. With the squeeze on family resources becoming tighter and tighter, due to a dysfunctional housing market among other things, few families consider that they have surplus wealth. Tightening a budget is not a solution since this does not create the sense of a surplus.
In a post-industrial society such as Japan or South Korea, where labor opportunities are determined largely by enormous corporations, most laborers do not operate family businesses or work for their family. They work for other people. They will be providing labor to people outside of their family for the majority of their day and year, and as a result, they need to entrust the development and raising of their children to elderly family members or hired help. Since these options aren’t universally available, many people need to reduce their activities in the labor force if they have children or decide not to. Maternity and paternity leave is an option available to only a few elite workers, and it does not last until publicly funded kindergarten is available for children, but rather, only for a number of months. For the rest of us in the working classes, dual incomes are not a luxury but a necessity, and it is not an option to simply choose who gets to stop working for money and raise children.[4]
What benefits do average workers in a post-industrial society gain from having children? This is the question that we should be asking. Journalists and demographic scholars expend a lot of energy on tinkering with policy tools to provide benefits to offset the cost of raising a child, but I have yet to see them address this fundamental question.
A book about American society called Why Have Kids? by Jessica Valenti does just that, and she posits that just as marriage has developed from a practical, economic arrangement into an emotional bond, children are increasingly expected to satisfy their parents’ emotional needs rather than potentially providing material needs for the family.[5] When outsiders try to convince a woman to have children, they often appeal primarily to her emotions: “Children are such a joy” or “Babies are cute” or “I wasn’t sure I was ready for a baby when I got pregnant, but I could never imagine my life without my daughter now.” Children are framed as completing and rounding out a person’s emotional life and permanently generating that shallow and indefinable sensation called happiness, but is it ethical to view them this way? They are not born to be feel-good machines; they are individuals developing their own point of view.
When we discuss children and reproduction as necessary to prop up pension plans and elder care, we must remember that people, especially children, the most innocent and vulnerable among us, are not tools of production, and they are not born to be pension providers and caretakers for the elderly. When pensions become too expensive and burdensome to support, people simply won’t pay them. This is not a problem for children, but it is a dire problem for the elderly. So far, solutions have tended in the direction of wanting more people to have children, but how many aging and retiring parents are prepared to pass on their generational wealth early? Or to sacrifice for the next generation? Not to mention the many that have nothing to pass down or sacrifice.
When we hear this discussion of people being reproduced to serve the state and society, we are repulsed at the inhumanity at which human beings are discussed. Because we know that it is unethical to think of any human being in this fashion. And feeling such pressure, many people may end up never having children, which is not an unusual state of being. It is not more or less natural to have children or not.
Historical and economic developmental circumstances determine birth rates more than government policies, traditions, culture, religion,[6] gender in/equality,[7] or emotions. An agriculture or domestic manufacturing society will see higher birth rates than post-industrial societies where more children mean a decreased amount of familial wealth.
When weighing the objective facts presented by demographers against the emotional injunction (directed mainly toward women) to have children, let’s call on Kahlil Gibran to remind us of our shared humanity:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
[1] From the Guardian article: “More women are in the labor force than ever before,” said Joseph Chamie, a demographer and former director of the United Nations Population Division. “Delaying childbirth, delaying marriage … and when you delay, you often have fewer children.” Notice that only women are named as responsible for delaying having children. [2] Scott, James C. (2017). Against the Grain: a Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press. [3] Andrade, Tonio. (2008). How Taiwan became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. [4] Although the language that I use throughout this article is heteronormative, these realities exist for any kind of couple. Maybe only large committed polyamorous families will be able to afford children. I’d love to read some research on that. [5] Valenti, Jessica. (2012). Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness. Las Vegas: Amazon Publishing. Note: I do not think this book is insightful in terms of the rest of its content; it is too insular and focused on elite America. [6] Catholicism forbids birth control, yet Italy consistently has Europe’s lowest birth rate. [7] Taiwan has exceptional gender equality, yet one of the world’s lowest birth rates. Japan has high gender inequality and low birth rates.
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