Conservative Calls for Women to Have More Babies Hide Pernicious Motives

THE OBSERVER: Boosting birthrates to protect racial identity has a long and shameful history

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni whose policies protecting ‘traditional families’ variously demonise immigrants and LGBTQ communities. Photograph: Dominika Zarzycka/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
I’ve done my bit by having six children, so now you do yours”, Jacob Rees-Mogg demanded of GB News viewers recently. Not so long ago, politicians were panicking about overpopulation. Now many worry that there are – or will be – too few people in the world. “There is one critical outcome that liberal individualism has completely failed to deliver and that is babies,” one of the rising stars of the Tory party, MP Miriam Cates, told the National Conservatism conference in May.

The resurgence of such natalism has been provoked by falling birthrates across the globe. In 1950, according to a study in the Lancet, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. By 2017, that had fallen to 2.4 and is predicted to fall below 1.7 by 2100. England and Wales are almost at that figure now, the birthrate having dropped from 2.9 in 1964 to 1.61 in 2021, marking, in Cates’ view, a “population collapse”. » | Kenan Malik | Sunday, August 6, 2023

It is indeed true that the birthrate needs to go up significantly. But how are we going to achieve this in the West with current values? For women to give birth to more children, we need to return to the values of yesteryear, maybe the 50s – a time in which women, wives, wanted, even expected to stay at home to be good housewives and mothers. To achieve that state of affairs again, much would have to change, not least attitudes. It is hard to imagine how the West can ever expect to increase birthrates significantly when most women insist on going out to work, either because of necessity or out of choice. There was a lot to be said for the status quo ante. Not only did it feed the needs of commerce and industry without the need for droves of immigrants, but it was also conducive to cohesive communities. It is an undeniable fact that we have lost much that was good in our quest for modernity. – © Mark Alexander

British ‘Baby Shortage’ Could Lead to Economic Decline, Says Thinktank

THE GUARDIAN: Social Market Foundation suggests measures including better childcare provision to increase birthrate

Britain is facing a “baby shortage” that could lead to “long-term economic stagnation”, a thinktank has said.

The Social Market Foundation (SMF) said the birthrate was almost half what it was at its postwar peak in the 1960s, and the country’s ageing population could lead to economic decline.

It said ministers should set up a cross-government taskforce to consider the issue, and one helpful measure might be better childcare provision. The thinktank said typical British working parents spend 22% of their income on full-time childcare, more than double the average for western economies.

The birthrate in England and Wales peaked in 1964 when the number of children per woman averaged 2.93. Last year it was 1.58, well below the 2.1 replacement level needed to keep the population rate stable, and in Scotland it was even lower at 1.29. » | Andrew Sparrow, Political correspondent | Monday, September 20, 2021

Iran Considers Ban on Vasectomies in Drive to Boost Birthrate

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

THE GUARDIAN: Supreme leader sees family planning policy as an imitation of western lifestyle and aims to double Iran's population

Iran's parliament is seeking a ban on vasectomies and a tightening of abortion rules as the country moves away from its progressive laws on family planning in an attempt to increase the birthrate.

Two decades after Iran initiated an effective birth control programme, including subsidised male sterilisation surgeries and free condom distribution, the country is to make a U-turn.

Last year the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticised existing policy on contraception, describing it as an imitation of western lifestyle.

The 74-year-old has urged the government to tackle what he believes to be an ageing population and to double the number of people in Iran from 77 million to at least 150 million.

This week Tehran's conservative-dominated parliament, the Majlis, voted to discuss banning vasectomies and introducing punishments for those involved in encouraging contraceptive services and abortions, local agencies reported. » | Saeed Kamali Dehghan | Tuesday, April 15, 2014

The Population Crash
THE GUARDIAN: Across Europe, we are having fewer babies. In many places, such as the deserted town of Hoyerswerda in east Germany, the falling birth rate is already taking its toll

Hoyerswerda, a town two hours beyond Dresden close to the Polish ­border, has lost half its population in the last 20 years. It is an ­ageing ghost town. The young and those with qualifications have left – young women especially. And those that remain have given up having babies. Hoyerswerda (known to its citizens as Hoy Woy) seems a town without a purpose, in a corner of Europe without a future.

On the windswept roof of the Lausitz Tower, the town's only landmark, I meet Felix Ringel. A young German anthropologist studying at Cambridge University, he has passed up chances taken by his friends to ­investigate the rituals of Amazon tribes or Mongolian peasants. As we survey the empty plots of fenced scrub below, he explains that the underbelly of his own country seemed weirder and far less studied than those exotic worlds.

In its heyday in the 60s, Hoyerswerda was a model community in communist East Germany, a brave new world attracting migrants from all over the country. They dug brown coal from huge open-cast mines on the plain around the town. There was good money and two free bottles of brandy a month. But the fall of the Berlin Wall changed all that. It was here in 1989, in the towns and cities of Saxony, that the people of the east started moving west to ­capitalism and freedom. At the head of the queue were the young, ­especially young women.

Under communism, East ­German women worked more, and were ­often better educated, than the more conservative western hausfrau. But when their jobs disappeared in the early 90s, hundreds of thousands of them, encouraged by their ­mothers, took their school diplomas and CVs and headed west to cities such as ­Heidelberg. The boys, however, seeing their fathers out of work, often just gave up. In adulthood, they form a rump of ill-educated, alienated, ­often unemployable men, most of them ­unattractive mates – a further factor in the departure of young women.

Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and ­Development, calls it a "male ­emergency" – but this is not just an emergency for men. The former ­people's republic is staring into a ­demographic abyss, because its ­citizens don't want babies any more. >>> Fred Pearce | Monday, February 01, 2010

GUARDIAN DATA BLOG: Nine billion people by 2050? : The world's population is growing at a startling rate. These figures show the number of people in each country on the globe >>>

French Births Soar
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL: WASHINGTON, April 30 -- The news that France has overtaken Ireland to boast the highest birthrate in Europe is intriguing for three different reasons.

The first is that for a Europe that is worried about too few children being born to support the fast-growing numbers of elderly retirees, it suggests that public policy can make a difference. France now pays any mother with a third child about $1,200 in child support, along with massive discounts on train and public transport and subsidized day care. These incentives seem to work.

The second development to note is that INED, France's National Institute of Demographic Studies, has done some detailed research and concluded that France's immigrant population is responsible for only 5 percent of the rise in the birthrate and that France's population would be rising anyway even without the immigrant population.

That is important in a country where the number of immigrants from traditionally Muslim countries and their French-born children and grandchildren is now reckoned to be more than 6 million from a total population of 60.7 million. The anti-immigration Front National Party has claimed the rise in births came from Muslims, who were thus on track to become an eventual majority, and this appears not to be the case.

In fact in France, like everywhere else in Europe, the birthrate among immigrant mothers drops quickly toward the local norm in less than two generations. The measure most commonly used in international statistics is the Total Fertility Rate, which seeks to measure the number of children born to the average woman in her fertile years. (The formal definition of TFR is the average number of children a woman would have during her reproductive lifetime if current age-specific fertility rates remained constant over her reproductive life.)

In France, the TFR has risen from 1.66 in 1993 to 2.0 in 2003 and 2.1 last year. If maintained, that means the population of France will rise from 60.7 million today to 70 million sometime before 2050. Walker's World: French Births Soar >>> By Martin Walker, UPI Editor Emeritus

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – USA)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardcover – USA)

Muhammad Replaces Jack
THE TELEGRAPH: Rising immigration and older mothers have fuelled a 26-year high in the number of children women are having in England and Wales.

Figures released by the Office of National Statistics show the average number of children has risen for a fifth straight year to 1.87, the highest rate since 1980.

The last decade has seen a 77 per cent increase in births by mothers born outside of the UK, with the figure climbing to almost 150,000, or over a fifth of all babies, last year.

As Britain's demographics change, Mohammed is expected soon to replace Jack as the most popular boy's name. It has already pushed Thomas into third place. Rising immigration fuels 26-year fertility high (more)

Mark Alexander