After the Spike: A Liberal Argument for More Babies
“The Spike” – that is what demographer-economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso call the dramatic rise in the world population in the recent past, and the equally dramatic population decline projected for the near future.
Historians are familiar with the part of this story that’s in the past. Nineteenth and early twentieth century improvements in nutrition, living conditions, and public health turned infant and child death from a seeming inevitability that haunted most families to a rarity. The population exploded as most children survived to have children of their own. That pattern repeated in developing countries in the mid-twentieth century.
Alarmed by the prospect that the population would quickly outgrow the earth’s resources, population control activists and policy makers pushed hard for the broad use of birth control. In 1968 scientists Paul and Anne Ehrlich published a best-seller, The Population Bomb, that projected a future of famine and war, and urged people to have at most two children. Zero Population Growth, the activist organization they led, spread the gospel of small families. State public health offices and international development organizations urged contraception upon Black and Brown people at home and abroad. Middle-class Americans, already choosing relatively small families for themselves, learned to scorn parents with big families as out of control, greedy, and heedless of the planet.
I hear echoes of this today on my social media feeds. Young people say that they do not want to have children because it will contribute to overpopulation. Unlike Ehrlich, the liberals in my circles do not blame and shame people from developing countries. But when liberals want to criticize white conservatives who show off their big families with an air of biblical self-righteousness, they often call those parents selfish for having many children and blame them for environmental catastrophe.
Most of this is a knee-jerk reaction to conservative attempts to criminalize abortion, defund Planned Parenthood, and push women out of the workforce and into homemaking. And in that sense, lashing out is understandable. But the terms of the backlash—portraying small families as virtuous and large families as greedy and selfish—is a habit from the 1960s and 1970s that we should rethink.
Because as Spears and Geruso show, we are on our way not to population stability but to population collapse, as fertility is projected to rapidly trend below the replacement rate of approximately two children per woman. And population collapse would have dire implications for economic and social stability, not to mention future progress.
Until very recently, demographers and planners were focused on the potential for overpopulation and tended to assume that replacement-level fertility constitutes some kind of natural minimum. But that’s wrong. Fertility has continued to drop below replacement, in some places far below. Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore have rates barely above one child per woman. Italy, Poland, and Spain are below 1.5, and the United States is at 1.6. American conservatives have more children than liberals, but their numbers are also dropping. And even the places in the world with the highest fertility are seeing a long-term shift toward fewer children. Unless something changes, the population decline after about 2080 will be as rapid as the population expansion of the past three centuries.
Spears and Geruso persuasively argue that a big reduction in world population will not actually solve the problems many of us imagine they will solve. The biggest is climate change. Too many commentators are hoping that a shrinking population will naturally put less pressure on the environment. But as Spears and Geruso show, we need human-made solutions to climate change long before population size could possibly make a difference. Even if fertility rates drop as fast as projected, the top of the population spike will be in about 2080. We will only get back down to our current population in about 2150. One way or another, we need accelerated, human-created solutions to climate change.
Spears and Geruso also describe how a larger population would actually be a help rather than a hindrance. The centuries of the population explosion were also the centuries of rapid innovation in science, medicine, and technology. More people meant more potential inventors and innovators, as well as more capital that could be consolidated and invested in discovery. Wealthy nations can fund enormous research enterprises because with a very large tax base, only a few dollars from each person can add up to lots of research. Part of the reason green energy initiatives are succeeding is that we have a population big enough to support massive efforts.
For all of their arguments about why we should care about global fertility, Spears and Geruso are careful to distance themselves from coercive efforts to boost fertility. They are well aware of the abuses of population control, including eugenics-based forced sterilization in the United States, India’s forced sterilization campaigns in the 1970s and the 2010s, and China’s One Child Policy. They also point to Romania’s forceful efforts to make people have more children under Nicolae Ceausescu in the 1960s. They denounce this kind of coercion, and should anyone be tempted, they also point out that none of these state campaigns to change fertility actually shifted the curve in the long term compared to other parts of the world.
As the authors explain, “This book is not about whether or how you should parent. It’s about whether we should all make parenting easier.”[1] While they do not explicitly point to the reproductive justice movement, their views fit with it. As activists and scholars Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger have stated, reproductive justice is “(1) the right not to have a child; (2) the right to have a child; and (3) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments.”[2] Black reproductive justice leaders have long called for us to make childbearing and parenting easier, safer, and healthier for all families, in addition to giving women choices about contraception and abortion. Spears and Geruso want policymakers to figure out what social and economic structures best support parenting, and let people make choices within that milieu.
But Spears and Geruso admit that it’s not well understood why the global fertility shift happened, and without a good understanding, it’s hard to know exactly what to do about it. They show that fertility, while higher in the past, has actually been slowly declining since we have a record of it, starting in the early eighteenth century in France. Birth control grew up in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the midst of the population explosion in the West. And it was the result of individual choices, often against the wishes of state authorities. White American families shrank slowly but continuously throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, even as politicians lamented the low fertility of white Protestant women and states resisted legalizing birth control. After emancipation, Black Americans were able to exercise greater control over family size.
These “choices” were often highly constrained by economics, by family expectations, and by racist policies, and individuals frequently felt a real lack of control over their fertility. But reducing childbearing became a real possibility, culturally and eventually technologically, in a way that it hadn’t been. And while forced births and forced sterilizations have rightly been highlighted in our narratives of the history of American reproduction, the broader fertility pattern was created mostly by quiet, private decisions made within families.
This is where historians ought to come in. Many of us have already written about fertility choices and the social and cultural forces shaping fertility. It would be worthwhile to revisit this history with the global pattern in mind. When I was researching The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America, I found that demographers largely looked for economic incentives for smaller families, and presumed that male heads of households were making fertility choices. They posited that in industrializing and urbanizing societies, fathers had incentives to invest more resources in fewer children, especially as infant mortality fell. Cultural historians such as Susan Klepp (Revolutionary Conceptions) demonstrated that women made choices too, and starting around the time of the American Revolution, they began to imagine the possibility of planning their families and investing more loving care into fewer numbers of children.
Spears and Geruso express some skepticism about liberal modernity as the cause of population decline. They point out that relatively conservative cultures have also seen a decline in fertility. But I think this understates the global influence of Enlightenment ideas about individuality. Modern democracy was born shortly after the beginning of the population explosion, and the reduction in birth rates happened first in France and the United States — the first of the modern democracies. Capitalism, too, is an innovation of this cultural moment. Democracy and capitalism both assume a kind of individualism in which individuals desire to make choices about their own lives, and believe they should have the kind of control over their lives that would make choice possible. The ideas that sparked modern science, democracy, capitalism, and the industrial revolution, and brought the public health breakthroughs crucial to the population boom, also underlie the conviction that people could and should plan their families and invest deeply in each child. Even where people do not live under democratic or capitalist governments, exposure to these ideas is hard to avoid, and hard for governments to suppress.
The question for historians, sociologists, and demographers is whether replacement level fertility is compatible with modern values of individuality, choice, and control, and if so, how. It clearly would take a lot more resources than the child tax credits and parental leave that various governments have tried. But that’s not entirely impossible to imagine. After all, who would have expected a century ago that we would spend almost 18% of our gross national product on health care, and have such access to lifesaving and life-improving therapies? We have not yet seriously conceived of a world where we value, respect, and properly compensate the people who spend their days caring for children. And we have not yet prioritized creating social structures that allow people to reliably combine meaningful work with a commitment to parenting. We might give lip service to the idea that every child is precious, but as the reproductive justice movement has demonstrated, we are far from acting on that idea as a society. After the Spike shows why we all have a stake in at least giving it a try.
Notes
Featured image caption: Newborn babies at Provident Hospital in Chicago, IL, 1942. (Courtesy Library of Congress)
Lara Freidenfelds is a historian of health, reproduction, and parenting in America. She is the author of The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: a History of Miscarriage in America and The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America. Sign up for her newsletter and find links to her op-eds and blog essays at www.larafreidenfelds.com.
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