On World Population Day, population is not the problem

Today’s women have just half as many as their mothers — an average of 2.6. Not just in the rich world, but almost everywhere.

This is getting close to the long-term replacement level, which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. Women are cutting their family sizes not because governments tell them to, but for their own good and the good of their families — and if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.

This is a stunning change in just one generation. Why don’t we hear more about it? Because it doesn’t fit the doomsday agenda.

Half the world now has fewer than the “replacement level” of children. That includes Europe, North America, and the Caribbean, most of the Far East from Japan to Thailand, and much of the Middle East from Algeria to Iran.

Yes, Iran. Women in Tehran today have fewer children than their sisters in New York — and a quarter as many as their mothers had. The mullahs may not like it, but those guys don’t count for much in the bedroom.

And China. There, the communist government decides how many children couples can have. The one-child policy is brutal and repulsive. But the odd thing is that it may not make much difference any more. Chinese women round the world have gone the same way without compulsion. When Britain finally handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it had the lowest fertility in the world — below one child per woman. Britain wasn’t running a covert one-child policy. That was as many children as the women in Hong Kong wanted.

What is going on? Family-planning experts used to say that women only started having fewer children when they got educated or escaped poverty — like us. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh.

Recently I met Aisha, Miriam, and Akhi — three women from three families working in a backstreet sweatshop in the capital Dhaka. Together, they had 22 brothers and sisters. But they told me they planned to have only six children between them. That was the global reproductive revolution summed up in one shack. Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest nations. Its girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their mid-teens. Yet they have on average just three children now.

India is even lower at 2.8. In Brazil, hotbed of Catholicism, most women have two children. And nothing the priests say can stop millions of them getting sterilized. The local joke is that they prefer being sterilized to other methods of contraception because you only have to confess once. It may not be a joke.

Women are having smaller families because, for the first time in history, they can. Because we have largely eradicated the diseases that used to mean most children died before growing up. Mothers no longer need to have five or six children to ensure the next generation, do they don’t.

There are holdouts, of course. In parts of rural Africa, women still have five or more children. But even here they are being rational — they need the kids to mind the animals and work in the fields.

But most of the world now lives in cities. And in cities, children are an economic burden. You have to get them educated before they can get a job. And by then they are ready to leave home.

The big story is that rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslim or Catholic, secular or devout, with tough government birth-control policies or none, most countries tell the same story: Small families are the new norm.

That doesn’t mean women don’t still need help to achieve their ambitions of small families. They need governments or charities to distribute modern contraception. But this is now about rights for women, not “population control.”

It is also true that population growth has not ceased yet. We have 6.8 billion people today, and may end up with another 2 billion before the population bomb is finally defused. But this is mainly because of a time lag while the huge numbers of young women born during the baby boom years of the 20th century remain fertile.

With half the world already at below-replacement birthrates, and with those rates still falling fast, the world’s population will probably be shrinking within a generation.

This is good news for the environment, for sure. But don’t put out the flags. Another myth put out by the population doom-mongers is that it’s all those extra people that are wrecking the planet. But that’s no longer the case.

Rising consumption today is a far bigger threat to the environment than a rising head count. And most of that extra consumption is still happening in rich countries that have long since given up growing their populations.

Grist