America
The Birth Dearth
A decline in fertility rates is threatening American prosperity and could even trigger global instability.
D BY TROY ANDERSON
eclining u.s. and global fertility rates could have dire consequences, includ- ing threatening economic
stability — even pushing nations to the brink of war, a groundbreaking new book warns. At home, the decline could wreak havoc on Social Security, already on course to run dry within 10 years, some analysts predict.
Jonathan Last, a senior writer at the
Weekly Standard, writes that “throughout recorded human history, declining populations have always followed or been followed by very bad things. Dis- ease. War. Economic stag- nation or collapse.” Last says he started thinking about a global
12 NEWSMAX | MARCH 2013
population implosion when a chil- dren’s boutique in his upscale Alexan- dria, Va., neighborhood was replaced by a doggy spa. He was stunned to learn that today, pets outnumber chil- dren by more than 4 to 1 in America. In his book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Com- ing Demographic Disaster, Last argues that falling fertility rates in the United States, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere pose potentially cataclysmic prob- lems. Consider that in 1979, the world’s fertility rate was 6.0. That meant there were six live births that year, on average, women
for of every 1,000 child-bearing
BABY BANE Author Last lays out how a declining birth rate could have devastating consequences.
age. Just to keep the population from gradually declining, it is necessary to maintain a fertility rate of 2.1. Since 1979, the global fertility rate
has dropped dramatically — to just 2.5. And in developed Western nations, it is even lower. The rate is 1.3 in Japan, and
between 1.3 and 1.5 in most European nations. In China, which has enforced a highly controversial one-child policy for decades, the rate is 1.6. The developed nation with the
highest fertility rate in the Western world? That would be the United States, where fertility stands at 1.95 — still signifi cantly less than what would be required to keep the nation’s popu- lation from entering a gradual decline. Why the decline? Social scientists
cite a complex constellation of factors. Certainly the 55 million abortions in
NURSERY/ISTOCKPHOTO
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