Why aren't we having babies?

A brief summary of what we know about initial fertility rate declines

Today’s newsletter is a response to a question I get all the time, and the presumption that we can boil the global decline in births down to one key factor. I don’t think so.

Globally, the average woman has 2.2 children in her lifetime—below replacement fertility clearly isn’t just something that happens in the richest countries. Thailand’s total fertility rate is just over 1 child per woman; El Salvador’s is 1.8. The transition from high to low fertility rates has been faster and more far-reaching than in the past. Here’s the quick and dirty overview of why, explained the way my brain works. Big categories. Cooking metaphors. In another Substack we’ll look at why births are super low in some places, which I think involves slightly different flavors.

Demographers frequently publish papers saying one or the other of these is most important—the “modernization thesis” was pretty dominant for a while—but since we’re talking globally, the reality is that all of these factors matter to differing degrees in different places. This is great if you’re a researcher, because it gives you plenty to study. But it also means we can’t nail it down to one factor above all else. I think about it more as a low fertility soup, where maybe there’s a dash of modernization but a heaping tablespoon of state policy. You get the drift. (I tried a Venn diagram but that didn’t feel right.)

So, broadly speaking, what drives the initial, general transition from lots of births to fewer?

Modernization: Think higher standards of living; more education (increase in girls’ primary and secondary school enrollment, which opens a new world—and informs you have babies are made!); more opportunities for women to earn money outside the home; shifts in preferences towards smaller families, with a greater investment in time and money per child.

State policy: The state can, of course, lead the initiative on education so that belongs here, too; states can lead in family planning and reproductive health infrastructure by investing money, building clinics, training staff; states can put in place carrots, like taxes or cash that reward smaller families; states can wield sticks, like forced sterilization, withholding resources from a community with high births, etc.

Birth control: Here, think about contraceptive technology and improvements over time, whether the pill in the 1960s or IUDs, which picked up starting in the late 1980s and more so in the 2000s.

So why has it been falling faster? And in unexpected places?

If wealth or education were prerequisites for fertility declines (modernization thesis) we wouldn’t have seen places like India or Thailand reach replacement level fertility rates as quickly as they did. In both of those cases, public- and private-led family planning and reproductive health programs drove the initial declines, accompanied by values shifts among the population. Later, Thailand’s worries over HIV/AIDS, starting in the 1980s, led the government and private partners to develop an even more extensive network of contraceptive providers—including shopkeepers—and make “condoms as accessible as cabbages.” The HIV/AIDS epidemic was arrested, and fertility rates continued to trend downward to super low rates as well, reaching about 1.3 children per woman today.

In Columbia’s case, the non-profit sector arguably played even more of a role in family planning architecture. Profamilia, Columbia’s Planned Parenthood, provides about 60% of the country’s family planning services. Still, such enterprises can’t operate if governments don’t make them legal, so policy still matters.

In Brazil’s case, neither targeted government policy nor wealth and education were primarily responsible for a drop in births from almost 6 per woman in 1970 to 2.3 by 2000. There wasn’t an official population policy during the decline and advertising contraceptive methods was illegal for a time. Instead, portrayals of smaller families in evening novellas—Brazil’s famous soap operas—and the allure of a more individualistic life free of family obligations, in tandem with availability of contraception, drove the drop. Think: change in preferences, and ability to act on those preferences.

Globally, there’s a strong trend towards later marriage and later starts to childbearing. Still, it doesn’t look the same everywhere. There’s a small family norm in India, but most women are done having children by the time they’re 30.

Maybe it’s just the pill?

We know that the global population growth rate has been falling since the 1960s, a decade in which the US elite began to focus on curbing population growth in third world countries (state policy), and the decade in which the almighty birth control pill enters the scene (modern contraceptive technology). It’s tempting to focus on the latter as the key variable driving low fertility given the timing, but lest we ascribe low fertility to the pill specifically, remember that the pill wasn’t legalized in Japan until 1999, decades after fertility rates had plummeted there. While condoms are super important for allowing people to act on their preferences for smaller families, it also isn’t just about contraception: abortion has often been used as family planning instead of contraception in some Eastern European contexts.

So, what do you think? If we use the old “necessary vs. sufficient” typology, is one of these absolutely necessary for births to fall? Seems to me there’s always an exception to be found, but leave a comment and let’s discuss.

Next edition (in two weeks), we’ll look closer at why fertility rates are super low. Why has the demographic transition to fewer births continued?

I spoke to two groups in Albuquerque last week and snuck in a few hours of sightseeing. New Mexico, you have a new fan.