All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
The fall is astonishing. At its height, the global fertility rate hit 5.3 births per woman in 1963, but it has been in near-constant decline ever since. Sixty years on, it is now only around 2.2. In many countries, it is far lower than the roughly 2.1 babies per woman that would sustain current population sizes, known as the replacement rate.
With the birth rate now sitting at about 1.4 to 1.6 in countries like the UK, Australia and the US – and as low as 1.2 in Japan and 0.75 in South Korea – our understanding of the global fertility decline has so far been driven by demographers, who take whole-population views and try to predict the future.
What this misses, argues Paula Sheppard, a cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Oxford, are the nuances: which groups of society are having fewer children, and the different reasons why.
Penny Sarchet: There seems to be a lot of panic about birth rates at the moment.
Paula Sheppard: There’s a misconception: people think they’ve never been this low before, but they’re actually not [a record low]. After the second world war, rates were very low as well, and demographers, politicians and policy-makers were panicking. Demographers were trying to project what the population would look like – would birth rates recover? But the projections made in the late 1940s, when people weren’t having many babies after the war, were lower than what actually turned out to happen. Nobody got it right, because no one predicted the baby boom.
I’ve wondered if women simply don’t want to have the replacement level of children, and women with more education have more control over how many children they have. But your work has found that they are having fewer children than they would like?
People still want two or three kids. Not everyone does – there are always some people who don’t want kids at all. But in the UK, for every three babies that are wanted, only two are born.
However, higher-educated women are quite prepared not to have kids unless they’re sure that the father is going to invest as heavily as they are as a co-parent. I think it is because women take a higher career penalty.
It famously takes a village to raise a child and, due to urbanisation, more people than ever don’t have that village.
This is the crux of the matter. Social support was the most important thing in the study. A defining feature of our species is that female humans are able to have multiple dependent children at once. You don’t see this in chimpanzees, for example.
This cooperative breeding is literally what makes us human, and in every group I studied, they wanted support from their partner or their parents. The higher-educated women also wanted friends’ support – they wanted to know that there were mothers’ groups they could join and that their friends were also having kids.
You found that higher-educated women see it as unusual to have children before their 30s, which is quite old, anthropologically speaking. What’s driven this?
I think the reason people are waiting that long is because families are struggling to have all their proverbial ducks in a row before they’re ready to have a family – or have another child. If you made work and parenting more compatible, I think people would have kids younger.
Amid all the headlines and political commentary around birth rates, what’s the one thing you wish people could know about the issue?
It is about making parenting and working compatible, whatever that means for different people, and stopping pitting them against each other. They always used to be compatible. Women have always worked and they have always had kids. It’s just that now we live in this patriarchal setting: the office is the office, and children don’t go there. Instead, let’s change this whole culture.
Source: RemovePaywall | Free online paywall remover
