INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS

Talk in the 1960s of a demographic time bomb has now turned to fears of a worldwide baby bust. "Global fertility rates are in general decline and this trend is most pronounced in industrialized countries, especially Western Europe, where populations are projected to decline dramatically over the next fifty years," reports the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The Wall Street Journal claims stagnant economies will be the result. "Simply put, companies are running out of workers, customers or both. In either case, economic growth suffers."

In an article called "Breaking the Baby Strike," the Economist reports: "As birth rates decline, more countries are turning pro-natalist (not long ago, Iran and Turkey worried that their populations were growing too fast, and handed out free contraceptives). And the baby-boosting is becoming fervent, even desperate."

All the largest economies, as defined by the value of their economic output, have seen below-replacement birth rates: the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and the UK. (To be clear, I'm not saying this is a crisis for ordinary people. My point is that employers and governments are alarmed.)

Here in the United States, it's regarded as a fringe idea that the ruling class concerns itself with the birth rate. But political leaders in dozens of other countries openly discuss their low birth rates and promote policies to raise them, publicly deliberating about birth control, abortion, and family policies such as childcare and paid parental leave.

Perhaps those countries have a problem we don't have in the United States. Isn't our birth rate higher than theirs? Among developed countries, we do have a high birth rate, but it's not substantially higher, and lately it has become lower than some countries where politicians are publicly agonizing about low birth rates (see chart). Since these United Nations estimates, the U.S. total fertility rate has dropped to 1.76.

Perhaps, then, the nation's secret is that we have a high immigration rate — working-age adults who are alleviating any demographic crisis. Still, Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and Sweden have more immigrants as a percentage of population. And our immigration rate is much too low to compensate for the deficit in births. (I take up immigration in chapter 7.)

In some places, like Turkey and Poland, leaders attack reproductive rights with the open goal of raising the birth rate. In others, with stronger feminist movements and institutions, governments promote policies that support parents to encourage more childbearing. Some countries, like Russia, are doing both, increasing maternity leave and monthly government payments to parents while they gnaw away at access to abortion and contraception. In all cases, the reasons for the policy are in the open — how can we get women to make more babies?

That question has led some to an answer that echoes feminists: equality at work. Steffen Kroehnert, a researcher for the Institute for Population and Development in Berlin, explains: "For a long time, politicians said that the high participation of women in the labor market is responsible for the low birth rate, because when women go into the labor market, they don't have children anymore. But interestingly, when you look at ... western European countries, the fertility rate is higher in countries with a higher labor market participation of women."

As an example, French demographer Laurent Toulemon listed the obstacles Japanese women face. "A [Japanese] woman entering into a relationship must also accept marriage, obey her husband, have a child, stop working after it is born and make room for her ageing in-laws. It's a case of all or nothing. In France the package is more flexible."

"Ask Turkish women about work and motherhood, and the response is a torrent of grievances. Husbands do little housework. ... Employers are unsympathetic," reports the Economist, explaining the falling birth rate in Turkey. "In short, mothers are generally still expected to stay at home. ... Until that changes, Turkish women will perceive a sharp choice between work and parenthood, and often [go] for the first."

U.S. journalist Stephanie Mencimer puts it more bluntly: "Conservatives thought that if they only made it harder for mothers to work, women would stay home. Instead, women stopped having kids."

"The question today is not if women will work," says Kroehnert. "The question is if they will have children."

Japan

The Washington Post frets that the entire global economy is being put at risk by the low birth rate in Japan, which has the world's third-largest economy after the United States and China. "The Japanese economy is in serious enough trouble that it could set the rest of us back," the Post warns, citing Japan's stagnant growth and large debts. "And the biggest source of that trouble is demographic: Japanese people aren't having enough kids to sustain a healthy economy." By healthy, the author means healthy for employers and businesses.

Japanese women face overwhelming pressure from their employers to quit their jobs when they get married. As a result, many refuse to get married, further driving down the birth rate. Sexists label women who continue to work after they get married oniyome, "wife from hell." Japanese women have set up Angry Women Clubs to strategize against rampant job discrimination, and women are suing employers for firing them rather than accommodating their pregnancies.

Female resistance to lousy child-rearing conditions has put the ruling conservative government in a tight spot. Because of the falling working-age population, the government is trying to press more women into the workforce, to ease a tight labor market that threatens to drive wages up. The ruling party "used to be the defender of the housewife," noted Haruko Arimura, the government's minister for women's empowerment. "Now it is sticking up for working women."

But at the same time, they want women producing more children. So the government has slowly taken measures to increase the availability of childcare. The Japanese childcare system is plagued with long waiting lists and a shortage of teachers willing to fill the low-wage positions.

Some Japanese politicians have proposed more coercive methods. In 2013, Seiko Noda, a member of Japan's House of Representatives, proposed banning abortion and increasing adoptions. In the country's biggest newspaper, she wrote: "With 200,000 pregnancies being terminated per year, if we are to counteract the falling birthrate, then we must begin there. I intend to have this reviewed in the party's Special Committee on Population...