By Sarah Murnane
The current hot topic issue developing within the social discourse is how we are going to manage the worldwide falling birthrate. In essence, the birthrate everywhere has steadily been falling. Initially this was confined to first world wealthy, liberal countries, but is now extending to more conservative third world societies. The global birthrate is now at around 1.7 per 10,000 people. For context, in order to maintain our population at the current rate the birthrate would need to be at around 2.1 per 10,000.
The main issue with the declining birthrate is with a shrinking population there is significantly less money to maintain government services which is beginning to cause massive problems. In a speech last month the former Prime Minister of France, François Bayrou, declared that the country could no longer continue to borrow more money and that social spending would have to be cut, even suggesting to raise the retirement age. Not necessarily because of ideological reasons, but because there are not enough young people in entering the workforce for the country to continue providing it’s social welfare benefits.
This problem will unfortunately only get worse unless we start to think of solutions, and the only real solution is to start having more children. Here is where the discourse gets tricky. Of course, some have suggested that this is all the women’s fault for having the choice of whether to have children or not. Women worldwide are overwhelmingly choosing not to have as many children as they did previously. This is due to a number of factors but it generally comes down to personal development and costs.
If you are a woman in her mid-20s to mid-30s and you have a child your career, income, social life and social prospects will suffer dramatically compared to your male counter parts. It is not exactly a promising engagement is it? Here is the choice for women, either have more children and save the human race from extinction despite your own goals and aspirations or have no children, a better personal life, and let the human race suffer the consequences. The issue is that the burden of having children will always fall more on the woman than on the man.
Despite the already mounting social costs of the lack of new births in society, until governments begin to make having children an attractive choice for women the birthrate will not improve. Some countries are engaging in trying to help mothers and families be able to better afford having multiple children, mainly through the use of tax breaks. This appears to only scratch the surface of the sheer effort it takes to raise a child. In any case, the lack of serious consideration and effort to solve this problem will only prove too little too late before governments make a decision on how to manage this problem.