The international community is spending too much on diseases like AIDS and TB and not enough on family planning, a British expert on sexual and reproductive health told the annual conference of the UK’s Optimum Population Trust. Professor Judith Stephenson, of University College London, called for a global fund to invest in family planning, like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. "People have taken their eye off the ball and think the job has been done. But there is a lot of unmet need for contraception, and this is highest in the poorest sections of society."

Oddly enough, there seems to have been little reaction to Professor Stephenson’s contention that world health leaders have raided the coffers of the fight on fertilty for funds to fight AIDS. Only a couple of weeks ago, the Pope was pilloried for expressing scepticism about the wisdom of funding AIDS campaigns.

The OPT’s conference produced a rich harvest of absurdity, self-justification, and self-contradiction. It was promoted with a startlingly insightful headline on the conference press release: "Sex drives world population growth". John Guillebaud, an Emeritus Professor of family planning and reproductive health at UCL, said that people engage in sex more often than they need for the babies they want. Therefore there must be a vast unmet need for contraception.

He used an unfortunate example to illustrate his point: Iran, where the average number of children fell from 5.5 to 2 in just 15 years. The local mullahs had endorsed edicts requiring all couples to learn about family planning before they marry.

He seems oblivious to Iran’s abyssmal track record on women’s rights. Writing in the London Times in early March, the Iranian woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, Shirin Ebadi, said

"The law looks disfavourably on Iranian women - literally with a male face. Since the 1979 Revolution Iranian women have been forbidden from serving as judges. In Iran a woman's evidence in court is worth half that of a man. Men can have multiple wives, while young girls can be married off to older men by their fathers. Sentences of stoning to death for adultery are still imposed, disproportionately on women, a practice denounced as grotesque and horrific by Amnesty International."

Has the OPT filled in the dots between human rights abuses, low status of women and wildly successful Iranian family planning programs? Apparently not.

Japan’s economy is stagnant; its politics seem broken. Is its demographic decline the missing link? Recent comments in the New York Times by Masaru Tamamoto, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, suggest that they are:

Signs of despair are everywhere. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates among rich countries. There may be as many as one million “hikikomori,” from teenagers to those in their 40s, who shut themselves in their rooms for years on end. Then there are all those “parasite singles” — or unmarried adults living with their parents. But by far our most serious problem is a declining and aging population. Given present trends, total population will likely decline from around 130 million to under 90 million in 50 years or so. By that same time, 40 percent of Japanese could be over 65.

If we want to survive as a nation, we must shed our deeply rooted resistance to immigration. Contrary to widespread prejudices in favor of keeping Japan “pure,” we desperately need to dilute our blood. Our aging nation will need millions of university-educated middle-class immigrants with high productivity, people who will put down roots and raise families, whose pride and success will be the affirmation of new Japanese values.

Mr Yamamoto’s main theme is not demography, but that Japanese society is highly risk averse. But what is riskier than daring to bring a new generation into the world? The real mystery how to fill the Japanese with hope for the future. 

 

The UK’s Sustainable Development Commission has just published a report -– Prosperity without Growth? -- arguing that the pursuit of growth has had disastrous environmental consequences. Arguing that the current economic crisis is too valuable to be wasted, it calls on the upcoming G20 summit in London to adopt a 12-step plan to make the transition to a fair, sustainable, low-carbon economy.

Remarkably, the SDC relies heavily upon the thoroughly discredited theories of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich to unravel the arithmetic of growth. The report’s message is that the crisis is directly linked to the pursuit of economic growth. Reliance on debt to finance this has created a boom and bust economy and has made Britons unhappy by hooking them on consumerism.

The report was skewered by a columnist for the London Times, Dominic Lawson. He believes that the report’s real agenda is population control, which is, he says, “nothing more than an idea in search of an argument”.

“Down the years the anti-humans have always been skilful in adapting the fashionable concern of the day to their own peculiar obsession. In the cold war they argued that an uncontrolled surge in young men in the Third World would be prey to the recruiting sergeants of international communism. Nowadays they argue that the same supernumerary youngsters are the future foot soldiers of Islamist terrorism. This is their eternal wail: cull or be killed.”

Can’t the Obama Administration understand that its views on “reproductive rights” might not be received too well in Pakistan and Afghanistan? If it is really interested in winning hearts and minds there, surely it needs to exercise some cultural sensitivity. But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed oblivious to this when Planned Parenthood Federation of America gave her a Margaret Sanger Award, its highest honour, on March 27. Apart from announcing a US$50 million grant to the United Nations for family planning, she insisted that:

... as we integrate our military and civilian aspects with a mission of disrupting and dismantling and defeating al-Qaida and their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we cannot lose sight of the fact that assisting women’s development in those two countries is part of America’s strategy to be successful in our mission.

It’s not clear from this whether development aid will be conditional upon accepting family planning and abortion facilities in these countries. However, Secretary Clinton told her audience that

“reproductive rights and the umbrella issue of women’s rights and empowerment will be a key to the foreign policy of this Administration. You see, I believe that women’s rights and empowerment is an indispensable ingredient of smart power and therefore is integrated into our renewed emphasis on diplomacy and development.”.

The number of babies born in the United States reached a historic high in 2007, and new estimates for that year show that unmarried women in their 30s account for a large part of the baby boost.

The 2007 total of more than 4,317,000 births surpasses the peak of the post-war baby boom in 1957, says a new government report. Births to Asian and Pacific Island women and among American Indian teenagers showed the greatest increases.

Birth rates for most age groups were up about 1 per cent over 2006. The teenage birth rate rose by 1 per cent in 2007 after a 4 per cent increase from 2005 to 2006 -- rises that have interrupted a 34 per cent decline in teen births from a peak in 1991 to 2005.

But birth rates for women aged 25 to 29, and 30 to 34 increased by 2 per cent -- double the average increase. For women in their early 30s the general fertility rate was almost 100 births per 1000, the highest since 1964 (when it was 103.4) at the end of the US baby boom. The rate for women in their late 30s continued its nearly three decade rise, and births to women aged 45 to 54 were up 5 per cent.

It was unmarried women, however, who did most to push the figures up, bringing their share of all births to nearly 40 per cent (39.7). Their birth rate rose 5 per cent in 2007, and births to the unmarried in each age group 15 years and over “far outpaced” the increase in total births for women aged 15 to 39 years, says the report. The 2007 total is up 26 per cent from 2002, when the recent steep increases began. The largest increases in non-marital births were to women aged 25 to 39 years -- up 6 per cent or more over 2006. While the great majority of births to teenagers are non-marital, 60 per cent of births to women aged 20 to 24, and almost one-third of births to women aged 25 to 29 were also non-marital.

In terms of population, the US has strengthened its position, since its total fertility rate (TFR)* is over 2.1 -- replacement level -- for the second year in a row. However, increases in single and cohabiting parenthood raise concerns about the future of the family. ~ Centers for Disease Control, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol 57, No 12, Births: Preliminary Data for 2007; March 18, 2009

*TFR summarises the potential impact of current fertility patterns on completed family size by estimating the average number of births that a hypothetical group of women would have over their lifetimes, based on age-specific rates in a given year.

Cross-posted from Family Edge, another MercatorNet blog. 

Welcome to Demography Is Destiny, MercatorNet’s new blog about human dignity and population.

We have launched this after seeing two themes crop up constantly in the media: that humans are a cancer which is destroying our planet and that world population is spiralling up to unsustainable levels.

Although many people dress up these concerns in global warming T-shirts, the underlying issue is the Population Bomb. Back in the 1960s the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich proclaimed that Malthus was right: the world faced mass starvation because there was too little food and too many people. Well, Ehrlich was proved wrong over and over again, and over and over again the fear comes back, like a vampire sucking optimism and hope out of modern society. I hope that this blog helps to put a stake through the heart of this dangerous and indefensible idea.

Dangerous, because the unsupported notion that the world cannot support its population is being used to promote human rights abuses, including coercive population programs.

And indefensible, because world population, is actually on track to a steep decline. You could call it catastrophic, except that we are trying to avoid fostering apocalyptic fears on MercatorNet. I’d prefer to leave that to climate-change scaremongers. But it will certainly bring about enormous problems. At the moment, world population is about 6.8 billion. By the year 2050, it will rise to 9 billion, according to a United Nations scenario for mid-range fertility rates. But this global statistic conceals the fact that populations in many developed countries will actually decline. The number of elderly will increase enormously. Russia’s population will decline by one-fifth by 2050, for instance.

Huge problems are looming because of this “demographic winter” – social, financial, human rights, geo-political, cultural, and religious. We hope to track these changes, puncture illusions, and foster hope with Demography Is Destiny. And there is plenty of room for hope. After all, in the oft-quoted words of economist Julian Simon, people are the “ultimate resource”. We may not be over-populated, but we do have plenty of intelligent, inventive, adaptive people.

Where did we get the name? The catchphrase “Demography is Destiny” has almost become a cliché. It seems that it was coined by the French philosopher and sociologist August Comte in the 19th Century. But it still rings true.