Note: For one compelling answer, see Mary Eberstadt's new book about the relation between family (and fertility) and faith.  It offers persuasive answers to this question in the course of laying out a new theory of secularization.  I plan to review it shortly.  PA

Carolyn Moynihan 

Why is Europe committing demographic suicide?

Frankly, not even the experts have the faintest idea.

Everybody knows about the economic woes of Europe. In the media you cannot get away from it. What we seldom hear about is a problem that puts debt crises and austerity riots in the shade: the region’s demographic suicide. Europeans, on the whole, are not having enough babies to replace themselves -- a trend which threatens the workforce, support of the aged and even the continued existence of some nations. It is a problem that goes back well before the recent housing bubbles and busts, bank failures and bailouts. It is probably a cause of the latter.

Yet it is a mystery to the people we rely to predict such things. Demographers, economists and psychologists are scratching their heads over a phenomenon that breaks all their statistical models and paradigms of human behaviour. Why would people who are prosperous (and, despite the current situation, western Europe is) not want to do what human beings have always done and leave a posterity? How can they contemplate the eclipse of their nation?

One answer might be that the public is simply not aware of what is happening. Lant Pritchett, an economist and Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, told MercatorNet: “Scientists of perception study ‘change blindness’ and can show people have a hard time even visually seeing gradual change, much less gradual change at the social level. Unlike the advocates for climate change there are no ‘extreme events’ like Hurricane Sandy in demography so it is hard to get attention onto the inevitable consequences of current fertility.”

Dr Pritchett and colleague Martina Viarengo are the authors of an essay, “Why Demographic Suicide? The Puzzles of European Fertility”, which is part of a collection of essays published recently by the New York based Population Council in honor of a distinguished scholar, Paul Demeny. The papers are heavy going but repay the effort to grasp what population experts are saying right now.

This is certainly the case with “Demographic Suicide…”, which states clearly the seriousness of persistent low fertility and the fact that the usual experts simply do not know how to account for it, let alone come up with a remedy. The authors speak of below replacement fertility (BRF) as “a revolution in human affairs”, a “paradigm-shattering phenomenon”. They are not exaggerating. They end by posing the “big open question of how children fit into an overall pattern of ‘family’ in the post modern era.”

“Replacement” as the goal of population policy

Sixty years ago the question was completely different. Influential people like the founder of the Population Council, John D. Rockefeller III, were worried about population growth in the developing world resulting from the fall in death rates (thanks to better health care) and continuing high fertility. They thought that people could not have good quality lives with so many mouths to feed. The fact that former colonies of Europe were becoming independent and you never knew what they might do politically added to First World jitters. Nothing but a concerted effort to stabilise population would do. Demographers did their projections and “replacement fertility” (2.1 children per woman) became their holy grail.

With backing from the UN and the cooperation of Third World governments the “war against population” (as economist Jacqueline Kasun has called it) was launched. The contraceptive pill was rapidly deployed with government subsidies. Abortion became a reproductive right. These methods had their strongest effect in the rich countries, where fertility had been in decline anyway but was boosted by the post-war baby boom. Developing countries took to draconian methods such as sterilisation campaigns in India and the one-child policies in China. Economic development, education and health care also contributed to lower birth rates.

Globally, the goal of replacement level fertility is now within reach. According to the UN’s medium estimate the average woman today will have 2.36 children – down from 4.95 in the early 1950s. New research suggests the 2.1 mark will be reached by around 2050. The trouble is that, while some countries will still be above that magical figure, some will be well below. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that even globally population will stabilise; decline is more probable. Already half the world’s nations, including many of the less developed, have total fertility rates (TFR) below replacement.

Some of the lowest rates in the world are in East Asia, but among the 27 countries of the Europe Union not one currently has a TFR of 2.1 or more, although Ireland, Iceland, Turkey and perhaps France are around 2, and the UK and the Nordic countries have rates between 1.87 and 1.98. At least a dozen EU countries are under 1.5; Spain and Germany are on 1.36 and Italy 1.41 (2010-2011 figures).

Behind these figures are the decisions of women and men shaped not by the imperatives of evolution or the rationales of economics – let alone the assumptions of demographers -- but by factors that experts in those fields are not even equipped to understand.

Demography, as Pritchett and Viarengo point out, is a descriptive discipline and cannot make predictions without a behavioural theory to go with them – which is did not have when its practitioners assumed that fertility would magically stabilise at replacement.

Evolutionary psychology, a popular source of behavioral theory, might (might) tell us what humans will do about procreation in the context of limited resources (have fewer but better quality offspring), but it seems quite useless to explain why people whose wealth and social status are increasing would stop having children. “BRF in Europe seems a paradigm-shattering phenomenon for evolutionary psychology,” Pritchett and Viarengo note.

The economic model

That leaves economics, Pritchett’s own discipline and one that he admits is also at a loss to fully account for persistent low fertility. “The joke about economists is that they are people with a head for numbers that lack the personality to be actuaries,” he told us in an email.

We had asked what could motivate nations to turn this problem around. He said: “I am pretty good with numbers but not only do I not know the answer to this question, being a new phenomenon, we have yet to discover numbers and data from experiences of turning it around so I don't know even what to do to begin answering this question: that is why the piece was titled ‘puzzles’ not ‘answers’."

All the same, economics has a lot to say about procreation and most of it is a little bit shocking to the layperson who comes across it for the first time. Roughly it goes like this.

Children are “complex capital goods” in whom parents invest with the expectation of a return, or “child services”. These services can be produced by a large number of low quality children or a small number of high quality children. In conditions of rising income people want fewer but higher quality children, investing more in their education and so on. 

This drives up the price of a child -- together with an opportunity cost in the form of the time it takes to consume the services (pleasure or satisfaction) a child produces -- compared with other goods, such as a summer holidays or a better house.

The trouble with this type of behavior is that children can be priced off the market completely – and perhaps unintentionally – because once you get down to one child the next step is not a “little bit” of high quality child, but none at all; not a gradual change but a “massive discontinuous drop in the demand for child services,” as Pritchett and Viarengo put it. This can be seen in rates of childlessness in a few European countries at or approaching 20 percent among women aged 45. (There are sub-regional differences which are interesting and worth looking up in the essay.)

Substitution

Clearly, childlessness is the biggest challenge for population theorists. What might people be choosing instead of a child? Pritchett and Viarengo look at possible substitutes for the “little hedonic bundle” that a baby represents and find two likely candidates.

The first is social security for the aged, which replaces the support aged parents once expected from their children – something that is unsustainable, though, in conditions of population decline. The second is the market work that women have embraced and that may return them more meaning and status than motherhood has done up until now.

When it comes to a substitute for the love and intimacy that having children provides in traditional family life, however, the authors of “Demographic suicide” are stumped.

They note that “sexual activity, childbearing and marriage have become disconnected so that increasingly it is socially acceptable to have one without either of the other two,” particularly in northern and western Europe. But: “It is not at all obvious to us what is going on with the ‘demand for intimacy’.” While in some countries people continue to have children without getting married, and in others to marry but have very few children, there are signs (in Finland, for example) that marriage and fertility – especially through an increase in childlessness – are declining together.

“What is substituting in the lives of women and men for the love and intimacy that came from parent–child relationships? It is certainly not a significant increase in marital love and intimacy without children substituting for less marital love and intimacy with children—particularly in countries where marriage and long-term cohabitation have declined.”

One answer to this question might be “same-sex relationships”. But even where children are added to these partnerships by technical means they can hardly solve the social problem of low fertility. And even if they are regarded as married that is not going to boost the birth rate.

Yet marriage, properly defined, does seem to be the answer – the only one we know from long experience -- to the demand both for intimacy and for enough children to give the human race a future. Pronatalist policies such as baby bonuses, paid parental leave and gender equity in the workplace appear to have made some difference to the birth rate in countries where they have been introduced, but there are human motivations that such incentives do not touch – things like till-death-us-do-part commitment to a spouse and the willingness to sacrifice easier pleasures for the joy of seeing mutual love bear fruit in the form of a child.

The question, finally, is what can foster such motivations. In the past it was religious faith. Is there any substitute for that? 

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

This article is published by Carolyn Moynihan 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.

Love and nationality

Carolyn Moynihan | 15 Nov 2011 |

Australian-born Crown Princess Mary, and Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark - and twins.
There can be few extended families today where someone has not married a spouse of a different nationality. In a globalised world, where people go abroad to study, find work, take holidays or to settle, international marriages are increasingly common and are drawing countries closer together. There may be as many as 15 million marriages between people of different nationalities among 25 to 39-year-olds -- the majority of them in the richer countries.

The Economist at the weekend ran an interesting feature article on the phenomenon, which some demographers have been beavering away at to discover its scale and precise features. The paper begins with some examples from the political class:

To confine examples to politicians only: the French president Nicolas Sarkozy is married to the Italian-born Carla Bruni and his prime minister François Fillon has a Welsh wife, Penelope Clarke. Nelson Mandela is married to Graça Machel (from Mozambique). Denmark’s new prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt is married to a Briton, Stephen Kinnock. And two leading ladies of Asian countries, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and India’s Sonia Gandhi, are both widows from international marriages. In rich countries alone such unions number at least 10m.

And let’s not forget royalty -- like Princess Mary of Denmark, the Australian girl who married Crown Prince Frederik.

There are difficulties in tracking this trend. Some countries don’t keep good statistics, and there are problems of definition -- such as the marriage of two foreigners in a third country. However, some answers are coming.
Distorted marriage markets tend to drive the trend in Asia: Taiwan and South Korea are leaders, but Japan has also seen a steep trend. This is partly due to women in those countries not marrying and the men looking elsewhere. In Europe, gaps in labour markets tend to drive migration and then marriage. In Europe, too, cross-border marriages are more common between people with the same language (German-speaking Swiss will marry Germans, French-speaking Belgians will marry French).

Language remains a persistent barrier to international marriage in Europe and the spread of English as a second language does not seem to have changed that.

The scope for victimisation and trafficking of women, especially in Asia where older men from richer countries take young and poor brides from countries such as Vietnam and China, is an important issue. And yet, this is not the dominant pattern, The Economist reports:

Though the gap in background, age and education between spouses in international marriages is greater than in those between compatriots, it does not seem to affect these unions’ durability. Doo-Sub Kim plotted the time that cross-border marriages have lasted in South Korea against the couples’ ages and educational backgrounds. Amazingly, the bigger the difference, the longer the marriage. It is hard to know why this should be. Maybe those who marry foreigners invest more in their marriages. Or maybe younger, poorer wives find it harder to leave.

Trade links often make a foreign bride invaluable. And it’s not always poor girls who marry rich foreigners:

Not all international marriages in Asia are those of poor brides in rich lands. In a “reverse migration” Japanese women from rich Tokyo have married into poor peasant families in South-East Asia—especially in Bali and Thailand—and settled down to live a more “authentic” rural life, perhaps as a way of escaping the strictness of Japanese family life. That same impulse may well be behind the surprising growth in the numbers of Japanese women married to Africans in Japan (probably as many as 3,300 in all). As one wife told Djamila Schans of Maastricht University, “I had doubts marrying a foreigner but he waited for me at the station every day. Sometimes even with flowers! A Japanese man would never do such a thing.”

Governments are wary of rapid increases in such marriages, but they seem, by and large, for good:

Marriage remains, for the most part, an institution that promotes economic improvement and personal happiness. It also tends to boost social assimilation—the main exception being when a second-generation immigrant weds a girl from a village his parents had left long before. Over the next few years, international marriage is likely to continue its quiet upward crawl. Governments should protect its victims—but not prevent the process.

There is no word in this report about cohabiting couples. Probably the picture is complicated enough already. And, anyway, such unions are much more likely to break up than marriages are. In which case they might help to mix populations up more but they would hardly strengthen international bonds in the way that lasting marriages could.

Graph: The Economist


Retrieved November 15, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/9953

Why America might pull through the demographic collapse

Denyse O'Leary | Monday, 31 October 2011

Why America might pull through the demographic collapse

it is mainly religious people who raise children, and more women in America are religious.

First, the context: Modern political science -- which readily understands imperialism, resistance, and clash of competing interests -- does not similarly understand “the wasting away of nations.” That, says David Goldman, author of How Civilizations Die: (and why Islam is dying too), is because political scientists tend to assume that people will follow their rational self-interest. In fact, they often don’t.

From antiquity, he notes, a symptom of a civilization’s decline has been the destruction of children:

Macedonian poet Poseidippus of Pella wrote: “Even a rich man always exposes a daughter.” A 200 BCE survey of seventy-nine families in Miletus, an ancient Greek colony on the Western Turkish coast, show a combined total of 188 sons but only 28 daughters.

One Greek author, Polybius, suggested as a last resort “passing laws for the preservation of infants.” But most Greek colonies were finished already.

Rational self-interest would dictate raising enough girls to keep the population going, but clearly that didn’t prevail. Indeed, it is generally believed that the Christian prohibition of abortion and infanticide was a key factor in how Christians ended up in charge of the Roman Empire 300 years after Christ’s birth. The prohibition worked, one might argue, for rational self-interest, but it was actually motivated by fear of God.

And without fear of God? If the present low fertility rate continues, three-quarters of all Japanese and half of all Europeans will be elderly dependants. That’s where the collapse comes in.

Why the current collapse of Christianity in Europe and not the United States? In Goldman’s view, Christianity had long nourished the seeds of serious setbacks in Europe. Many Christian kingdoms in Europe were not clear how much was Christian and how much was kingdom. He cites the damage wrought by the Thirty Years War (1618-1648, 8 million dead in Germany). The carnage was not, as often believed, Catholic vs. Protestant; indeed, Catholic kings who believed in their own divine election to rule would sent Protestant armies to devastate the countryside governed by other Catholic kings. “The tragedy of the Catholic Church was to believe that it could turn such patriotism to its own purposes.”

Goldman, an observant Jew, believes that an inability to establish the Church as a kingdom not of this world helps to explain both the secularism and the hopelessness of Europe today. Everywhere, traditional Catholic nations, Poland, Ireland, Spain, and Quebec (Canada), for example, are collapsing at the core because, he argues, “faith rooted in blood and soil weakens when people step out of traditional society into the modern world.” The average Polish woman now has only one child. Ireland is lost to posterity. Spain has the lowest birth rate in Europe. Even so, who would have believed that by 1982 in Quebec - once famed for its proud Catholic heritage in the teeth of opposition - more than 42 percent of men and women still in their reproductive ages had undergone voluntary sterilization, with 41 abortions for every 100 live births?

The United States is the one exception in Goldman’s view.

If a single characteristic makes America exceptional, it is the fact that American fertility has stabilized at replacement. ... In the second half of this century most of the great powers of the past - Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, and Japan, among others - will cease to function. A century later they will have ceased to exist.

 What makes America utterly and completely exceptional among the industrial countries, in short, is that it will still be here in a hundred years.

It’s easy to dismiss predictions for two centuries from now, but historically, very few nations pull out of a demographic death spin. Of course they could. Double income-no kids couples could suddenly think of the future - but experience shows they rarely do. Having long since ceased to believe in a transcendent religion, they want all the toys now. Instead of buying toys on special occasions for Junior and Little Miss.

A key reason America may be spared is the persistence of personal (not national) religiosity. As Phillip Longman noted (in alarm), it is mainly religious people who raise children. Half of all American women of childbearing age say that religion is important to them, versus one in six of European women.

That in itself provides evidence that Americans will replace themselves and Europeans will not: “When children become a cost rather than an asset, prospective parents must identify with something beyond their own needs in order to sustain child-raising.” Especially in a modern welfare state where those who raise no children expect a comfortable retirement based on the labour of the children of others. Raising children then becomes an act of faith with no earthly reward. One undertaken by evangelicals and observant Catholics but not so much by mainline Protestants.

The really remarkable and hopeful thing we learn is that the vital American model of Christianity (including sustainable populations) seems to be taking root in the global South.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Retrieved October 31, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/why_america_might_pull_through_the_demographic_collapse

Islam's demographic freefall

Denyse O’Leary | Monday, 24 October 2011
tags : demography, Islam, population

Why Islam is in as much trouble as the West

Many countries in the Muslim world, including Iran, are also in demographic freefall.

David Goldman | Why Civilizations Die | Regnery, 2011, 256 pages
ISBN: 159698273X

David P. Goldman, who blogs at the Asia Times as “Spengler,” has written an insightful book challenging the truisms of the commentariat on both the rise of Islam and the decline of the West: How Civilizations Die: (and why Islam is dying too)

History buffs will recognize that the pen name Spengler honours Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), author of Decline of the West. Goldman’s initial observations about the decline are most helpful but not unprecedented. From a much less religion-friendly perspective, American demographer Phillip Longman has been saying the same thing, and so has Canadian demographer David Foot.

It is what Goldman says about Islam that will surprise many readers: Islam is dying too because the Muslim birth rate - according to reliable statistics - has crashed. How badly?

Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts.

Whatever they believe about Islam, they have one or two children, but rarely three or four. Not enough to deliver their societies from demographic collapse, given the size of the families they came from. For example,

The average young Tunisian woman - like her Iranian or Turkish counterpart - grew up in a family of seven children, but will bear only one or two herself.

Education for women doesn’t in itself cause birth dearth, but abandonment of the land does. Muslims are not immune from the urbanization that turns children who were once a source of wealth into a major cost centre. Increasing numbers of people, there as here, hope that others will undertake the trouble.

But surely some Muslims have large families? Those who do live in areas that are considered backward, and they cannot indefinitely prop up an unsustainably low urban birth rate. But because demographic decline happened so quickly in Muslim societies, the Western problem of too few young people supporting too many seniors will be much more severe, especially in countries with few natural resources, like Turkey.

One might ask, why can’t Islamism reverse the decline by demanding that urban women do their duty? A look at Iran, Goldman says, reveals a related crisis of effective faith. For example, according to a suppressed report, more than 90 percent of Tehran prostitutes are said to have passed the university entrance exam, and 30 percent of them are studying. Their career choice is, they say, voluntary. Drug abuse among students is rampant, fuelled by cheap opium from neighbouring Afghanistan. The Islamist could exemplarily punish a few prostitutes or drug addicts - but thousands?

More generally, when modernization comes quickly, without warning, and from elsewhere, a declining birth rate can be accompanied by worse, not better, conditions for modern women. In Turkey, for example, only 22 percent of women sought employment outside the home in 2009, down from 34 percent in 1988 - despite their intervening fertility crash. About this, Goldman observes, “If we are surprised by Muslim demographics, it is because we have not listened carefully enough to what Muslims themselves have been trying to tell us.” Islamism is more of a last stand for many than a resurgent force, hence the glamour of suicide. If all this is correct, demographic collapse will increase rather than decrease the risk of terrorism, because “there is no such thing as rational self-interest for people who believe they have nothing to lose.”

Those inclined to dismiss Goldman’s contrarian analysis might point out that if there are few young people for the Islamist to recruit, there will be few suicide terrorists. Not necessarily; a culture’s suicidal resistance often increases at precisely the point where a huge conflict is irretrievably lost. This was true of the South in the closing days of the Civil War, and of Germany and Japan in World War II, for example. Many won’t be trying to win, only to inflict damage on the victor.

Compounding the problem is that Islam is - at present - much less well-adapted to political systems that produce stability in a modern environment. The rule of life among Islamists is authoritarianism in every facet of life. Authoritarianism results in either accepted oppression or revolt, but not the consensual stability that a modern society needs. And imams provide little guidance as to how to get there, because many see the very behaviours that hamper progress as ordained by Allah. For these reasons, Goldman thinks, the threat to the West from Islamism is generally overrated; internal demographic collapse is a much more serious threat. No civilization has ever survived a situation in which a small number of young adults must support a large number of retirees as well as raise children to support them.

Interestingly, he think that the United States has a much better chance of surviving the collapse than Europe or the Muslim world, for reasons we will explore in Part II next week.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

This article is published by Denyse O’Leary , 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.

Retrieved October 24, 2011 from http://bit.ly/srprIu

The Kinderwunsch Gap

Why is there such a gap between the number of children European women say they would like to have (their Kinderwunsch) and the number they actually have? As the story I posted yesterday points out,

Indeed, surveys taken a few years ago by Eurobarometer of women’s child preference came up with a majority response of two or three children.

Yet almost all European countries have fertility rates below, and many well below, the natural replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. The latest data showed a rise in the fertility rate from 1.47 children per woman in 2003 to 1.60 in 2008-2009, but this is still below the natural replacement rate and well below the average Kinderwunsch.

EU countries vary widely in the extent and generosity of their family policies - paid parental leave, day care, and the like, but it is not clear that these policies make much difference. (One exception was East Germany - German Democratic Republic) - which had a very low fertility rate and very high female labor force participation. The introduction of a very generous paid maternity leave policy did lead, nine months later, to a marked increase in the birth rate.)

Clearly, the wish for children competes with many other desires - especially but not only for female labor force participation (especially important for survival, not just self-realization, where there are high rates of divorce, single parenthood, and cohabitation). Even a generous substitute provider in the form of the 'cuckolding state' cannot ensure anything close to the optimal family structure for bearing and raising children. Later marriage also produces lower fertility and the sandwich generation stresses of caring simultaneously for dependent children and those children's grandparents.

It used to be that low fertility was associated with the northern European welfare states like the Scandinavian countries and high rates with southern European countries like Italy, Spain, and Greece. For some time, we have seen the opposite tendencies, with rising fertility in Sweden, where female labor force participation is still very high, and the lowest fertility in countries like Italy, Spain, and Greece. France now has a natural increase in population (net of immigration) not seen in 30 years. Outside Europe, such widely different countries as Iran and Brazil, India and China have all undergone rapid declines in fertility rates.

Some decades ago, I developed a theory - well no, I didn't develop it, it was never more than an idea - that there is a curvilinear relationship between the status of women and their total fertility rate (TFR). As the opportunities for women increase, the opportunity costs (the sacrifices required, the desired goods given up) of having children, and so of realizing their Kinderwunsch, increase. But as their prosperity grows and family policy supports a balance of family and work life and spreads the cost burden of childrearing more evenly between men and women, parents and non-parents (as Swedish family policy aims to do), so the sacrifices or tradeoffs of having the number of children you want begin to decline.

So as a country develops and industrializes, fertility first expands and more babies survive, (the first great demographic transition). Then it declines rapidly as the economy grows and the status and opportunities of women increase, leading to a big gap between Kinderwunsch and TFR. (As formal replaces informal old age and disability insurance (aka children), your 'social security' also ceases to depend on having your own children and socializing them effectively in an ideology of filial piety.) Then, as prosperity and status increase further, women are able to come closer to having the number of children they desire. They come somewhat closer to being able to have it all.

OK, it's just a thought, and doesn't explain a lot of things like the postwar baby boom.

There's Life in the Old Girl Yet

It is important when analyzing low total fertility rates in Europe and elsewhere, to look at the gap between the number of children a woman would like to have - her 'Kinderwunsch' in German - and the number she expects to have or actually does have.
______________________________________

Vincenzina Santoro | Tuesday, 19 April 2011

Europe for Families, Families for Europe
The most recent figures show an uptick in European birth rates. Is this a sign of renewed vitality in the Old World?

Optimism about families is not a common sentiment at international talkfests. But just in time for the Easter holiday, the European Union issued a surprisingly positive snapshot of population developments.

According to the third “Demography Report” the EU population has now surpassed 500 million, Europeans are living longer, and most importantly, the fertility rate has actually been rising since 2003.

While a possible end to the “birth dearth” seems to have escaped the doomsayers, the latest data showed a rise in the fertility rate from 1.47 children per woman in 2003 to 1.60 in 2008-2009. Moreover, an increase was noted in all EU countries save three, Luxembourg, Malta and Portugal. The largest increases over this period were observed in four of the former Eastern Bloc countries that had among the lowest fertility rates a few years ago.

The highest fertility rates in 2009 were recorded in EU aspirant Iceland with 2.23, the only European country to achieve or surpass replacement level of 2.1 children per woman; followed by Ireland at 2.07, France at 2.00 and the United Kingdom at 1.96 (2008). At the bottom of the ranking were Latvia (1.31), Hungary and Portugal (1.32) and Germany (1.36). Portugal had the dubious distinction of witnessing the sharpest drop in fertility, a factor that may have been due to the adoption of abortion on demand in 2007.

Europeans are also living longer. Life expectancy at birth in 2008 was 82.4 for women and 76.4 for men. France had the highest life expectancy among women at 85.1 while Sweden ranked highest for men at 79.4 years. Over the last 50 years, life expectancy rose by about 10 years for both genders.

Despite the pickup in fertility, the main contributor to population rise in the EU was immigration. As of 2010 there were 32.4 million foreigners living in the EU27 of which 12.3 million were EU nationals residing in another EU country. The country with the highest number of foreigners (7.1 million) was Germany while Luxembourg had the highest proportion of foreigners (43 percent) per population.

The longer living, rapidly aging European population has created new challenges for families while worried governments are anxiously searching for effective family-friendly policies. To deal with these concerns, Hungary, which currently holds the Presidency of the European Union, recently sponsored a conference entitled “Europe for Families, Families for Europe” at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Gödöllő, near Budapest. The conference featured scholarly presentations by eminent demographers, social scientists and others, and concluded with a “Family Festival with Europe.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán opened the conference on April 1 with surprising frankness. “Europe is losing in the demographic race of major civilisations,” as its population is aging and shrinking, he declared.

“Let’s call a spade a spade, our common home, Europe, is trailing behind great civilisations in this race… The EU should not build its future on immigration, instead, families and societies have to reproduce themselves, without external help to ensure long-term balanced and peaceful operation.”

Family policies are a national prerogative but the European Union can and does take legal action through the European Parliament to pass legislation that subsequently ends up in national parliaments for debate. Indeed, a few months ago the European Parliament approved an extended “mandatory” maternity leave.

The current status of family policy varies significantly from one European country to another. The most generous in terms of economic pro-family provisions are France and the Scandinavian countries. They offer ample child care services, both public and private, and generous maternity and paternity policies.

Giving the resounding success of lengthening life spans, not all the eldest are in good health and many require assistance of one form or another. What emerged from the latest European demographic research is that more than half of all “carers” are persons who are employed. Many of them, especially those who married later in life, are caring for parents and children while maintaining employment. Family leave policies will have to be more flexible to allow for care for both young and old family members.

The conference issued a declaration on work-life balance. Perhaps the most significant point was the following:

“In many countries, very often low birth rates do not reflect the childbearing preferences of women and men for various reasons, such as social and economic situation, gender inequality, and difficulty to reconcile work, personal and family life.”

Indeed, surveys taken a few years ago by Eurobarometer of women’s child preference came up with a majority response of two or three children. As to why women were not having the desired number of children, respondents listed many obstacles that still need to be resolved.

The theme of the family – in Europe and elsewhere – will be much more on the front burner in the next few years as the EU may declare a European Year of Families in 2014. In the past, much time and effort has been put into one form or another of “family planning” – an effort that continues at the United Nations. What Europe and other developed countries need today is more emphasis on “planning families.” The Budapest conference was a good start, seconded by the sobering data and analysis of the EU’s latest “Demographic Report.”

Vincenzina Santoro is an international economist. She represents the American Family Association of New York at the United Nations.

This article is published by Vincenzina Santoro, 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.

Retrieved April 21, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/europe_for_families_families_for_europe/