Changing population, economy, and technology drive changing birth rates

I’m writing this diary as a direct response to “The birth rate is declining because the U.S. is a hostile place to raise a kid” by Wagatwe Wanjuki. I felt a diary response was needed because Wagatawe’s diary, while noting genuine current and ongoing concerns about rearing children in the U.S., failed to note that birth trends in our country are really no different from the majority of the world — regardless of political and societal attitudes. The maps above show the decreasing rates from 1970 to 2014. Internationally, birth rates have been dropping steadily since the 1950s for a variety of well-documented reasons.

It’s a well established fact that when societies move from agrarian to industrial to technological, birth rates trend downward. You can see this trend even in the short time span that the above maps display. There are several reasons for the change, and they relate in various ways to changing economy and technology. For example, in areas where people continue to rely heavily on farming and mining for income, you’ll still see higher birth rates than those which have converted largely to industry and technology. That’s partially because the children of farmers and miners also work the land, and it also has to with the number of children who survive to adulthood.

There’s a higher death rate both of children at birth and from illness/injury where technology hasn’t stepped in (either through development or simply availability) to protect them. Examples include commercial fertilizers, modern plumbing, and many more. To keep it simple, I’ll just discuss one example of a technological advance directly altering the number of childhood deaths worldwide in this diary: immunizations.

In the early 20th century, the reduction of death and disability from childhood illnesses where vaccines were now available markedly reduced the number of children people birthed to guarantee that some would survive to adulthood. This is a fairly recent historical change. Although some vaccines were developed earlier, it wasn’t until the 1940s that technological developments in production made many vaccinations available on a large enough scale to effectively protect populations. The diseases those vaccines protected against could and did kill. Measles, diphtheria, influenza and rubella are all examples of diseases that could heavily affect world population yearly prior to the development of vaccinations.

Immunizations have had a direct and quantifiable effect. Around the 1950s, in a post-immunization world, world population started to jump. Around the same time, and after the post-WWII baby boom, birth rates began to decline. Where vaccines weren’t as readily available, the numbers stayed higher. Although still largely agrarian, the above maps show a recent birth rate drop in African countries. Several of those countries also only recently gained access (in 2011 for one) to widespread immunization through the WHO. An article from Nature on that topic can be found here.

We currently live in a world with enough people on it to recognize what overpopulation ultimately means. People internationally have begun to accept that continued population growth isn’t sustainable. After all, you can’t just keep adding to the numbers in a finite space with limited resources without ever worrying about what to do when there’s no more room and not enough food or water to go around. One result of that realization can be negative population growth, with some people choosing to actively limit their number of children.

So is a negative birth rate really a bad thing at all? Current world population is 7.5B and most experts agree that the planet cannot produce food to sustain a world population larger than 10B. At our current international rates, projected growth rates are still 0.75B to 1B people worldwide each decade. Without a further drop in birth rates, a child born now will be an adult in a world where there simply isn’t enough to go around. So it would seem that, unless caused by something other than choice (like a war or a pandemic), declining numbers of births worldwide is not a thing to be concerned about or to assign blame for.