Jewish births “Trending Upwards” in Israel

Marcus Roberts | 23 Jul 2014 | 

With the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza showing no signs of abating, despite the best efforts of the UN Secretary-General, I thought that this piece from the Jerusalem Post dealing with Israeli demography was interesting and challenged many assumptions that I had.  The author is Barbara Sofer, a Jerusalem writer who serves as the Israel director of public relations for Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. She makes some interesting personal observations in the course of explaining her interview with one Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli ambassador.  Sofer explains that the conversation took a turn that she was not expecting:

“I expect us to discuss Diaspora-Israel relations, but instead we talk mostly about babies – who is having them and why.

When it comes to Middle East demography, Ettinger maintains that most of us have our facts backwards. We’ve become so accustomed to thinking we’re sitting on a demographic time bomb that will implode when Jews are outnumbered, that we’ve failed to follow the latest statistics.

Indeed, Ettinger’s ideas are counterintuitive for all of us who have long believed that the demographics of our region are pitted strongly against us.”

As Sofer acknowledges, there is a perception that demography is against the Jewish population and that in time there is a danger that Jews living in the Middle East will lose the “fertility race” to its Muslim neighbours, not all of whom are well disposed to the Jewish State. I used to think as much until I wrote about this last year.  But Israeli Jews are very different from their Western world counterparts when it comes to fertility.  

“According to Ettinger, from 1995 to 2013, the annual number of Israeli Jewish births surged by 65 percent – from 80,400 to 132,000. In 2013, the Jewish fertility rate was 3.04 births per woman – and trending upwards. It’s 3.04 births when both spouses are Israeli-born, no matter where their parents were born.

‘Trending upwards” is the operational term here. There are many factors, including population age, which are important in predicting future population growth or shrinkage. But, taking all these factors into consideration, the Jewish population is growing fast, and will grow even faster.”

In contrast, the Muslim birth rate is declining:

"A CBS report earlier this year, citing UN estimates, shows there’s been a drop in family size among Muslims throughout the region. The most fertile Arab nation, Jordan, has a projected 2035 fertility rate of 2.41 children. Israeli Muslims are projected to decline from 3.37 to 2.71. This is consistent with the greater education and urbanization.

Says Ettinger, ‘Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is currently higher than any Arab country, other than Yemen, Iraq and Jordan, which are rapidly declining. The Jewish population is also growing relatively younger, which bodes well for Israel’s economy and national security.’”

But why is this? Why are Israeli Jews bucking the first world trend and why is their fertility rate increasing? Sofer states that’s Ettinger denies that is solely down to the haredim, the ultra-orthodox who make up about 12% of Israel’s total population (we’ve noted this before).

“Ettinger names the following factors: a sense of the collective and community patriotism; attachment to religious, cultural and historical roots; and optimism.”

This last point is one we’ve alluded to before on this blog. If societies and populations are confident and optimistic about the future, then they are more likely to want to share that future with future generations. Conversely, when societies lack confidence, when populations cannot think of a reason why they would want to propagate their existing culture through a new generation and when individuals are too hedonistic to have children, then you see a declining birth rate. Like we see in most of the western world. Sofer agrees:

“Optimism is the answer that resonates for me. Despite the many challenges of living here, the low-frills lifestyles in contrast to the members of the OECD whom we lead in fertility, we believe in the future and want to share it with a new generation.”

But so many would point to Israel’s intermittent wars and its almost daily dangers of battle, rocket-fire and kidnappings. Israelis live in a country where certain neighbouring groups do not recognise their state’s right to exist. What is there possibly to be optimistic about? Well, maybe Israeli Jews recognise that something worth living for is the only thing worth dying for. And a homeland for many Jews is something to preserve and to hand on to a future generation. Is that what we in the West are missing? Something we want to hand on to our children? Something worth having children for? 

This article is published by Marcus Roberts and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.

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Cruel and Unnecessary

   5:14:48 PM

The One Child Policy Revisited

Marcus Roberts | 9 Feb 2014 | 

We’ve talked many times on this blog about the One Child Policy in China. We’ve discussed its horrendous human cost: the forced abortions; the dead babies and dead mothers; the forced sterilisations; and the drastic curtailment of the Chinese people’s liberty.  We’ve also discussed the social and economic effects - the lack of girls and women, the shrinking labour force and the ageing population.  We’ve also discussed the difficulty that China will have in reversing its low fertility rate anytime soon.  Against all of these horrendous costs, the apologists (and there have been a few in the commentators on this blog) of the policy have posited its one unquestioned boon – the curtailment of China’s runaway population explosion up to 1980.
Well, today I’m going to question that boon.  In the io9 website, I came across this article that downplays the effect that the one child policy had upon China’s birthrate.  As the author says:

“...a rising group of demographers and sociologists is disputing that [the one child policy slowed China’s population growth].  By taking a closer look at population figures before and after the policy took effect, and by doing a more careful statistical analysis, researchers have found that China’s population growth rate would have decreased in any case, and the policy was not just cruel, but unnecessary.”

Cai Yong, a sociology professor at University of North Carolina has tried to reconstruct what would have happened in China had the policy not been introduced in 1980 (a hard thing to do as a counterfactual cannot be proven).  However, by studying the fertility rates of 16 comparable countries, Cai and his co-authors found that the projections of China’s future birth rate made when the policy was put in place was unrealistic. The Chinese government predicted that China’s birth rate would slow at a much slower rate than we can see the 16 comparable countries actually achieved.
Cai noted that Chinese Amercians have a fertility rate og 1.5 children per woman, similar to China’s in 2010. Japan has been around 1.3 children per woman for the last 30 years while Taiwan’s fertility rate is about 1 child per woman. Women in these countries have of course no one child policy to coerce fewer births.

“Cai and his colleagues also did a Bayesian analysis of China’s birth rate from 1970 to 1980 and tried to project what the trend would have been from 1980 onwards, if nothing else had changed. And they found a decline similar to the one observed in other countries.  So it seems likely that China could have reached a level of 1.5 children per women [sic] by 2010 regardless – but the decline might have been less steep.”

In the decade prior to the one child policy being introduced in 1980 China’s fertility rate had halved from 5.8 to 2.8 children per women.  This was in part due to governmental programmes that encouraged fewer children, but were less brutal than the one child policy.  The government made birth control easier to access, gave study sessions and meetings and the terrible economic conditions at the time also encouraged fewer children.  However, there were forced abortions stories making their way into the western press by as early as 1973.  So prior to 1980, the policy may have been less brutal, but was still pretty terrible!
Interestingly in 1974 the Chinese denounced western calls for birth control at the UN as part of an imperialist agenda. However, after experimenting with other policies over the next few years, the Chinese government had decided by 1980 that birth control and abortions were actually the way to go.  Despite the policy’s numerous loopholes, by 2005 this had resulted in 63 percent of Chinese couples being restricted to one child only.
Furthermore, the researchers have found that attitudinal changes have come about through the three decades of the policy.  Cai published another paper in which he surveyed 30,000 women in Jiangsu Province. A third of these women were eligible to have a second child but only a third of these eligible women would consider having another child.  Further, when Cai returned to the province, only four percent of those eligible women had actually had a second child.  Mara Hvistendahl, author of “Unnatural Selection: Choosing boys over girls, and the consequences of a world full of men” says that:

“Perhaps the largest success of the policy, if you can call it that, is that it really turned China into a one-child [country].  Many people just don’t want more than one child now.”

As Cai notes, it’s much easier to reduce the fertility rate than it is to increase it.  So the growth rate of China’s population will continue to shrink and Cai expects China’s population to sink in the future.  Its labour force is shrinking and China will lose its competitive edge in that field. Men will find it harder to find wives. The population will get older and greyer. In fact, there’s plenty to suggest that we should talk about the one child policy in the same category as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.  That is, it’s another tragic disaster that we can lay at the feet of an overweening despotic state. Let us hope, once again, that this disaster will be brought to an end soon.

This article is published by Marcus Roberts and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact MercatorNet for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.

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Fertility, Faith, and Culture

Paul Adams

I started to respond in the combox to Joseph Pearce's response on the Ink Desk blog of St. Austin Review to Austin Ruse's response to Sanyeev Sanjal's report (which I guess you have to be a Deutsche Bank customer to get) on the effects of the current global fertility decline.  Neither a report of a report of a report nor a post here can adequately cover all the findings, projections, and possible effects, but I think caution and a still wider perspective are needed.

Demographic projections have proved notoriously unreliable because people's behavior changes in ways demographers cannot predict.  It is true that demographic decline can lead to economic, cultural, and civilizational decline, as happened with the Roman Empire.  But that example also shows how the situation can be reversed as the rise of Christianity brought with it a new social and sexual ethic as well as, in consequence, a differential ability to survive plagues (see Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity, ch.4 on all this).  More recently, Mary Eberstadt's book, How the West Really Lost God, shows a profound effect of fertility decline on Christianity - decline of the family and fertility leads to the decline of Christianity as well as vice versa, in a double helix type of relationship.

But we should be cautious about the economic data.  There are factors than can offset some of the economic effects of fertility decline.  For example, Joseph's statement that "The proportion of the population who are of working age will shrink and the proportion who are retired will expand" needs to be qualified with the recognition that the overall dependency ratio reflects the proportion of children below working age as well as of adults above it.  Fewer children means fewer schools, fewer women at home caring for them (and so more in the workforce), less delinquency and associated costs, and so forth. At the other end, the number of seniors out of the workforce is a function of the retirement age for public and private pensions and this can be expected to continue to rise.  Immigration can offset the decline in native workers, although the effect is temporary (in many cases, though not so much in the UK, immigrants adopt host country patterns of fertility as of diet, etc.) and is complicated at a global level when poorer countries lose their most educated workers and professionals to richer ones so can end up with fewer children, more elders, AND fewer and less productive workers.  And then there is the effect of productivity increases, which enable fewer workers to produce as much as or more than the workers before them.  These are hard to predict over a long period, especially at global levels.

Still, with all these qualifications, the demographic winter is upon us.  Iran, to take one case, is undergoing the most rapid fertility decline in recorded history.  I have no doubt that such rapid declines will prove economically, socially, politically, and culturally disruptive and debilitating.  The same is true for other countries Sanyal/Ruse cites - Brazil, Mexico, and the rest.  Anyone who has visited Italy or Greece in recent years after an absence of a few decades is struck by the change in the attitudes toward children, family, and faith.  The cultural implications of a narcissistic turn away from children, from the future, from the demands that children make for self-giving and sacrifice and adult responsibility are profound.

Russia: Sick and Dying

From MercatorNet's blog, Demography is Destiny 

Russia: Sick and Dying

Marcus Roberts | 23 Jul 2012 |  (3)

Today I want to share with you a review article by a Master of International Affairs Candidate at Columbia University, Alina Smyslova, who also happens to be Russian. The anguish felt by the writer as she surveys Russia’s demographic malaise is almost palpable. “Our dear Mother Russia is sick and dying” is how the article begins and there is little that follows that doesn’t back up that startling statement.  While I knew that Russia was suffering from a lack of births and even a surfeit of deaths to births in the last twenty years or so, I hadn’t realised just how unhealthy the population that has managed to be born and hasn’t died yet is. According to Smyslova:

“Only 30% of children born in Russia are healthy; 50% of newborns lack either iodine or calcium, the leading causes of brittle bones and mental retardation; seven in every ten newborns suffer from some kind of disorder; and one in twelve babies is born underweight.”

Furthermore, the chances of dying in childbirth are six times that for a German woman.

“Combined with the high chance of giving birth to an unhealthy child and the unstable finances of the majority of the population, it is no wonder the birth rate has decreased.”

Aside from the lack of healthy babies and the risk to expectant mothers, the picture is as bleak when we look at the prevalence of disease.  While 1.1% of the Russian population is living with HIV/AIDS and the number of tuberculosis cases in the 15 to 19 year old age group nearly quadrupled between 1989 and 2002 and

“…the death rate from cardiovascular disease is four times, and the death rate from accidents, injuries, homicides, suicides, and other “external causes,” is five times higher than that of the European Union.”

Part (a large part) of the problem can be laid at the door of alcohol and alcoholism.  Alcoholism and alcohol dependency are significant factors in two-thirds of deaths for men under the age of 55 in Russia, a high amount considering that the average Russian man only lives to be 61.5 years old.

What does this all mean for the future of mother Russia?  According to Smyslova, the health crisis in Russia affects the economy in three ways: it decreases per capita output (as more people are more sick more often) and decreases consumer spending as people save more or spend on medicine and medical care instead. Secondly, a high death rate makes it unprofitable to invest in higher education and additional training for the workforce.  Finally, a declining population can affect offshore investment decisions.  As Deutsche Bank economist Markus Jaeger explained:

“Where will the investor choose to invest?  In India or China, where the income per capita grows together with the population or in Russia, where the income per capita is growing, but the consumer market is shrinking?”

Furthermore, the Russian military will also be affected by the lack of educated conscripts and recruits:

“The historically great Russian military will see a significant decrease in healthy, educated, and competent conscripts to fulfil the ambitious goals of Putin and his cabinet. In 2004, only 43% of those joining the navy finished high school and only 13% received higher education degrees.18 While the rest of the world is relying on more technologically advanced and intelligence focused security measures, Russian army will grow weaker as less and less of those enrolled are skilful enough to learn to operate the advanced computers, weapons, and other technologies necessary to protect the country in an ever advancing world.”

Unless Russia confronts its high mortality rate and low birth rate and horrendous health statistics, it will slowly slip further and further behind.  In the future we may be forced to speak of the “BIC” rather than the “BRIC” economies and watch as Russia slowly decays.

The Global War Against Baby Girls - Nicholas Eberstadt

Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.

READ MORE of this sober(ing) scientific article from the New Atlantis, Fall 2011.  A stunning article on the huge sex ratio imbalances in many countries, not just the extreme case of China, arising from what the very secular-liberal Economist magazine called "gendercide"--using prenatal sex determination technology to implement sex-selective abortion--with historically unprecedented demographic consequences.

Pew Forum on the Global Demographics of Christianity

A new Pew Forum demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all ages around the world, representing nearly a third of the estimated 2010 global population of 6.9 billion. Christians are also geographically widespread - so far-flung, in fact, that no single continent or region can indisputably claim to be the center of global Christianity.

Christian Demography

Marcus Roberts | 21 Dec 2011 |

In the lead up to Christmas, the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life has released a report on the demographic breakdown of Christianity in the world.  The report can be found here on the Pew website and comes with interactive maps and even a quiz.  Some of the more interesting findings is that there are about 2.2 billion Christians in the world – nearly a third of Earth’s population.  This proportion is roughly similar to that occupied by Christians in 1910.  The largest change in the last century has been the physical spread of Christianity throughout the world. In 1910, the centre of Christianity was clearly Europe where two-thirds of Christians lived. Instead:

“...[t]oday, only about a quarter of all Christians live in Europe (26%). A plurality – more than a third – now are in the Americas (37%). About one in every four Christians lives in sub-Saharan Africa (24%), and about one-in-eight is found in Asia and the Pacific (13%)...Although Europe and the Americas still are home to a majority of the world’s Christians (63%), that share is much lower than it was in 1910 (93%). And the proportion of Europeans and Americans who are Christian has dropped from 95% in 1910 to 76% in 2010 in Europe as a whole, and from 96% to 86% in the Americas as a whole.”

Christianity is today, as the report summarizes, truly a global faith.  It is also diverse theologically:

“About half are Catholic. Protestants, broadly defined, make up 37%. Orthodox Christians comprise 12% of Christians worldwide. Other Christians, such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, make up the remaining 1% of the global Christian population.”

Half of the world’s Christians live in ten countries, and the United States is still the largest Christian country in terms of absolute amount of professing Christians.  

There is a wealth of other information on the Pew website for you to look at, but the main point I took from it was that Christianity isn’t dying as a religion in terms of numbers, but it is spreading more widely and to every country in the world.

Retrieved December 21, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/10107

The Dying Bear: Russia's Demographic Decline

As fertility rates fall far below replacement level throughout the developed world (except the U.S.) and in many less developed countries, world population continues to grow.  Why?  Clearly not because women are having more babies than 50 or 100 years ago, they are having fewer.  But people are living longer, so that there are fewer deaths than births - for now - creating major imbalances between the old and the young who support them.  The demographic imbalance also takes the form of a declining ratio of females to males, due to sex-selective abortion and infanticide.  Both kinds of imbalance will result in a dramatic decline in the number of young women in the main childbearing years of the 20s.  The result will be, not only a declining population in absolute terms but also a declining proportion of working-age men and women to support those in their later years.

But Russia is an exception.  Its population has already entered a long-term decline that will be very hard to stop or reverse without 'heroic' and improbable increases in fertility rates in coming decades.  Why?  Because Russia, like most countries, is not only going through a sharp decline in fertility but unlike others, it is not experiencing declining mortality rates.  Quite the reverse. Life expectancy, especially for males, is shockingly low even by the standards of the poorest countries in the world ravaged by disease, famine, and war.  It has been a 'net mortality' society for almost 20 years already, with no sign that this trend will be reversed any time soon, even with net immigration.

In what follows, Marcus Roberts summarizes, for the Demography unit of the excellent MercatorNet website, the recent analysis by leading demographer Nicholas Eberstadt in Foreign Affairs magazine (subscription required, hence the summary).

Eberstadt on Russia’s Demographic Decline

Marcus Roberts | 18 Nov 2011 | 

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tags : Nicholas Eberstadt, population decline, Russia

Over the course of 2011, this blog has from time to time drawn attention to the demographic malaise affecting Russia.  Shannon blogged back in April on the lack of men in that country and how alcohol addiction has played a large part in that problem.  Indeed, the decline in Russian population since the fall of the Iron Curtain has been simply remarkable and unprecedented – it was not without reason that the first international demographic summit was held in Moscow in June this year.  The Russian political leaders have tried to reverse their declining population, including turning to the Virgin Mary for help.

Now, in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, a world renowned demographer, Nicholas Eberstadt, has published a very informative article about Russia, entitled “The Dying Bear” (as you can imagine from the title, he does not envisage a very rosy future for Russia…) Unfortunately, the article is not available free online, so I can only link you to the opening few paragraphs and urge you to try and get hold of the article from somewhere.  In essence, Eberstadt argues that Russia is in trouble demographically due to its very high mortality rates. 

The trouble is that Russia is a “net mortality society” – since 1992, about 12.5 million more Russians have been buried than have been born.  Thus, since 1992 Russia’s population has fallen every year (except 1993 and 2010) and this decline has only been softened by immigration, mainly from former Soviet states.  Although Russia is not alone in the World in suffering population decline (Eberstadt points to Germany, Italy and Japan as countries that are about to enter into or are already in sustained population decline) the difference for Russia is that its health conditions are deteriorating, adding to already high death rates. 

According to the Human Mortality Database, a research consortium, overall life expectancy at birth in Russia was slightly lower in 2009 than it was in Russia in 1961!  More shockingly, in 2009:

“…overall life expectancy at age 15 was estimated to be lower in Russia than in Bangladesh, East Timor, Eritrea, Madagascar, Niger and Yemen; even worse, Russia’s adult male life expectancy was estimated to be lower than Sudan’s, Rwanda’s, and even AIDS-ravaged Botswana’s.”

What is the cause of this terrible situation?  Apparently, it is due to:

“…an explosion in deaths from cardio-vascular disease and what epidemiologists call ‘external causes’, such as poisoning, injury, suicide, homicide, traffic fatalities, and other violent accidents.”

Why Russia’s health is quite so bad though and why death rates are quite so high in an urbanized and literate, peacetime society is anyone’s guess.  “The brute fact is that no one understands why Russians are as unhealthy as they are.” 

The Kremlin is not unaware of these facts and is trying to reverse this trend by introducing new public policies, including subsidies for mothers who have a second or third child.  Although these measures seem to have had some effect – birth rates have recently risen while death rates have decreased – there are some unavoidable features of Russia’s demographic future that will have to be overcome.  The first is that the recent birth slump has meant that there will be fewer potential mothers in the next few years:

“Women between 20 and 29 years of age bear nearly two-thirds of Russia’s babies.  In 2025, Russia is projected to have just 6.4 million women in their 20s, 45 percent fewer than today…[u]nder such circumstance, simply maintaining current national birth totals would require heroic upsurges in maternity.”

Added to this, Russia is getting older. By 2025, the proportion of the Russian population aged 65 years and older will have grown from 13 percent to almost 19 percent.  Thus, “[a]s a result of ageing alone, per capita mortality in Russia would rise by more than 20 per cent if nothing else changed.”

Taking all of this into account, “Russia is likely to remain a net mortality society for the foreseeable future”.  Russia’s federal statistics agency, Rosstat, envisions a cumulative total of deaths over births of between 4.7 and 9.5 million between 2011 and 2030.  The only way to forestall further depopulation is through massive immigration from abroad.  However, even this answer is not as complete as it once was.  Changes to education policies in former Soviet Union states means that immigrants from these countries are speaking less Russian than their parents did while Russian attitudes to immigrants has also grown less welcoming. 

This is an excellent analysis by Eberstadt, but the one glaring omission in his piece is Russia’s obscenely high abortion rate.  Over a million abortions a year is surely a massive factor in Russia’s demographic decline!  Reducing this number would be one way to reduce the surfeit of deaths over births in Russia in the coming years.

Eberstadt argues that these demographic figures aren’t just intellectually interesting.  They will have a large impact in the military-political sphere, where Russia will have to face future problems with a population base that is declining.  This means fewer people to join the army – between 2008 and 2017, the pool of prospective recruits into the conscript army is set to fall by almost 40%! Added to this, Russia’s higher education and technical training is also in disarray – Russia is “a society characterized by high levels of schooling but low levels of health, knowledge and education”.  This means that “Russia’s conventional military is on track to become the Polish cavalry of coming generations”.  However, as Eberstadt points out, Russia also has a very large non-conventional arsenal, and in a neighbourhood which includes North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics, will a worried Kremlin be more ready to reach for the threat of nuclear weapons?  All this means that “a healthy, robust Russia is not just in the interest of the Russian people; it is in the interest of the rest of the World, too”.  Let us hope that the Russian leaders and the Russian people can somehow reverse the current trend.  For everyone’s sake.

Retrieved November 17, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/9963

India's Five Million Missing Girls

Discussing preliminary data from the decennial census in India, National Catholic Register correspondent in Bangalore, Anto Akkara, explains:

More than 5 million girls have gone missing in a decade, as per the 2011 census estimates — compared to the data from the 2001 national census.

Even the news about the increase in the gender ratio, from 933 to 940 females per 1,000 men, got drowned in the alarming decline in the number of girls under 6 years: from 927 to 914 per 1,000 boys. In some states, that ratio went below 800 girls per 1,000 boys.

The numbers cannot be explained as a preference for boys in backward areas resulting from the economic conditions of rural life. Female feticide is actually more prevalent among the better educated and urban population.

The census figures showed that while the child ratio in rural areas is 918 girls per 1,000 boys, the figure is 904 girls per 1,000 boys in cities and urban areas.

“It is sad that people are using their education to get rid of the girl child instead of getting rid of their prejudices,” said Cardinal Gracias. [Cardinal Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Mumbai, is president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India.]

Prospective parents often conduct illegal testing of the sex of the child during pregnancy and abort if the embryo is a girl due to deep-rooted gender prejudice in India.

Akkara explains the roots of the preference for boys in this way:

The preference for boys, according to Akkara,

is rooted in the belief that one cannot attain moksha (liberation) unless he has a son to perform his last rites, as mandated by Hindu sacred writings.

This belief traditionally rendered the girl child unwanted and paved the way for the dowry system that has reduced her to a “liability” for the family. Worried about dowry burdens, couples often abort the second pregnancy if the fetus is a girl.

In some northern states, there are fewer than 800 girls per 1,000 boys. The proportions are much more balanced in states like Kerala where Christians are more numerous and Christian education more widespread, but Christians still only account for 2.3% of India’s population. Three-fourths of the nearly 15 million students on the rolls of 20,000 Catholic educational institutions are non-Christians.

*In the picture above, girls get a good night blessing from Loreto Sister Cyril Mooney at the Rainbow Home in Kolkata, India, Feb. 11. Rainbow Home is a care and schooling program started by Sister Mooney for the orphans and street girls.

For Akkara's full report, go to National Catholic Register at http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/female-feticide/

Declining Fertility as a Policy Problem

At the end of June, Moscow is to host the first 'international demographic summit' with over 1,000 participants. It is sponsored by the World Congress of Families.

Russia has a total fertility rate of about 1.2 lifetime births per woman (2.1 being the population replacement rate) and a decline of 6 million people over the past 20 years (12 million without immigration). According to Premier Vladimir Putin,

"Without exaggeration, the central problem of contemporary Russia is demography, strengthening the family, increasing the birth rate..."

In Russia, demographic decline is particularly evident, but throughout Europe, East and West, countries are not reproducing themselves. The conference will cover a number of fascinating topics, including culturally induced desire for smaller families, voluntary childlessness, low birthrates and economic decline, problems of an aging society and alcoholism's negative effects on demography.

The problem of low fertility, with the prospect of population decline and a rapidly increasing old-age dependency ratio is a challenge for Asia as well as Europe. According to a Reuters article,

By 2030, the share of the population aged over 60 in Japan will have grown to 37 percent from 30 percent last year. Germany and Italy will be just behind on 36 percent.

Just as striking, the proportion of elderly South Koreans is projected to double to 32 percent, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, the economics research arm of consultants McKinsey & Co.

China, of course, faces a particular policy-induced problem as a result of its one-child policy, in force for the Han majority since 1979. But China is not alone:

Right now, China has an old-age dependency ratio of 0.11, meaning there is just over one elderly Chinese for every 10 of working age. This will rise to 0.24 in 2030 and may exceed 0.43 by 2050, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a Paris-based forum for industrial democracies…China is not alone in facing a pensions bulge. In a report published last week, the World Bank said middle-income countries in East Asia can expect five times as many people as now to become eligible for a pension over the next two to three decades. Health care costs for a greying population will also jump.

I recall commenting 30 years ago to a social work dean in the region that China's policy would create future challenges as there came to be a big increase in the numbers of old people relative to those of working age and that increases in productivity and immigration would be unlikely to offset them. My impertinence elicited the response, "Do you think they haven't thought of that?" Of course I did not know then, and do not know now, how carefully China's ruling class considered the unintended side effects of its draconian state regulation of women's childbearing decisions - like the drag on economic growth that would come eventually from the high old age dependency ratio, the imbalance of the sexes that would result from sex-selective abortion and the social consequences of having large numbers of unattached, 'untamed' young adult males, and so forth.

Sources include: http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/8945/
http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/8943/
On the Moscow Demographic Summit, see http://www.worldcongress.ru/en/home
See also, Alan Wheatley, "Analysis: Asia braces for its date with demographic destiny" at http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/29/us-asia-economy-demographics-idUSTRE72S0KP20110329?pageNumber=1

Religion or Atheism: Is One Dying Out?

According to a BBC News report, a study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers. The countries were Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. (See the report at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12811197 )

These are also countries where demographic trends (total fertility far below replacement rates) pose the same question about the native-born population as a whole and not only the place of religious affiliation within it. This may help to explain why, while organized religion is growing very rapidly worldwide, atheism is in decline absolutely and relative to world population. From a global perspective, the numbers could not look more different.

According to the latest annual report from the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, which has been tracking these numbers for the past 27 years, there are 2.3 billion Christians, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, 951 million Hindus, 468 million Buddhists, 458 million Chinese folk-religionists, and 137 million atheists, whose numbers have actually dropped over the past decade. One third of the world's population are Christians, a slight rise compared with 2000 but a slight drop from 1900. Of the 2.3 billion Christians (of whom 1.2 billion are Catholics), some 1.5 billion are regular church attendees.

In terms of growth rates, by mid-2011 there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every 24 hours.

On the other hand, there have been 270 new Christian martyrs (defined as "believers in Christ who have lost their lives, prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility") every 24 hours over the past decade. Although you would never guess it from the mainstream media in the West, Christians are by far the most persecuted religious group. From 2000 to 2010, there were approximately one million Christian martyrs, according to the report, compared with 34,000 in 1900. Still, for the 20th century as a whole the number of Catholic martyrs alone, according to Robert Royal, was 20 million, an average of 200,000 per yer or twice the rate for all Christians in 2000-2010.

As George Weigel sums it up (http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/02/christian-number-crunching):

Christianity may be waning in western Europe, but it's on an impressive growth curve in other parts of the world, including that toughest of regions for Christian evangelism, Asia. Indeed, the continuing growth of Christianity as compared to the decline of atheism (in absolute numbers, and considering atheists as a percentage of total world population) suggests the possibility that the vitriolic character of the New Atheism -- displayed in all its crudity prior to Pope Benedict's September 2010 visit to Great Britain -- may have something to do with the shrewder atheists' fear that they're losing, and the clock is running.

To Have, to Hold, For a While

To Have, to Hold, For a While

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A review of Andrew J. Cherlin's latest book, The Marriage-Go-Round by W. Bradford Wilcox