To Save Humanity: Men Take Care of Babies

There has been conservative hand-wringing for quite some time now about the "demographic crisis" of falling European birthrates, some arguing that concurrent Muslim immigration is going to cause the downfall of Western Civilization. Often these critiques blame (white) European women for their selfishness, exhorting them to pop the babies out.

But in a NYTimes article, awesomely titled "No Babies," Russell Shorto (also an awesome name) finds that gender relations, more so than selfish, decadent European women, are a reason for low fertility.

“In all of these countries [mostly southern European with emphasis on traditional gender roles]," Billari said, “it’s very difficult to combine work and family. And that is partly because, within couples, we have evidence that in these countries the gender relationships are very asymmetric.”

Counter to intuition, that working ladies have less babies, the article points to a study since the mid-1990s, lowest fertility levels in Europe are in countries with lowest female labor-force participation.

To explain, the author compares the Netherlands and Italy, the former with less traditional views about gender roles than the latter. Geert is much more likely to change some diapers than Guiseppe, so Geert's wife is more likely to want to have more babies: "It's about how much the man participates in child care."

The article finds this true across regions, not just in Europe:

By this logic, the worst sort of system is one that partly buys into the modern world— expanding educational and employment opportunities for women — but keeps its traditional mind-set. This would seem to define the demographic crisis that Italy, Spain and Greece find themselves in — and, perhaps, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of the world. Indeed, demographers have been surprised to find rapid fertility changes in the third world, as more and more women work and modern birth-control methods become standard options. “The earlier distinct fertility regimes, ‘developed’ and ‘developing,’ are increasingly disappearing in global comparisons of fertility levels,” according to Edward Jow-Ching Tu, a sociologist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. According to the United Nations, the birthrate in 25 developing countries — including Cuba, Costa Rica, Iran, Sri Lanka and China — now stands at or below the replacement level. In some cases — notably China — the drop is explained by a concentrated effort at containing the population. In the rest, something else is happening. The lesson of southern Europe is perhaps operative: embrace the modern only partway and you put your society — women in particular — in a vise. Something has to give, and that turns out to be the future.

Interesting to hear Iran put on this list, as Iran is held up as a "best practices" example within the UNFPA of how to be culturally sensitive and achieve major results in reducing population growth.

In Syria and many other "developing" countries, fertility rate is very highly inversely correlated to a women's education status and workforce participation (fertility goes down when education or working goes up). This "embracing the modern" (not a fan of that expression, but letting slide) is one of the best ways to reduce fertility in high-fertility countries, but this article suggests a tipping point of beneficiality. If these workforce changes are not supplemented by cultural changes with regards to gender roles, fertility rates will slip below replacement, and humanity will be doomed.

Thus addressing inequitable gender roles is a solution for both underpopulation and overpopulation. While women moving in traditional "male roles" of working outside the home is more and more acceptable in more places, often out of necessity, there is still widespread resistance to men moving into traditional "female roles" of child care or housework. Gender issues are often thought of as "women's issues" but this emphasizes, how realizing equality is not just about women's issues, but men's, and fighting the societal restraints upon men as well. This is a the companion to the liberation of women; the liberation of men.

Of course, whether negative population growth is inherently harmful is also up for debate. In an era where overpopulation is certainly a greater concern in most places than underpopulation, and in which we are just beginning to see the manifestations of our effect on the global climate, is less humans a bad thing? The article delves into this as well:

For there are those who argue that low birthrate in itself is not a problem at all. Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford scientist who warned us about the “population bomb” in the 1960s, is more certain than ever that the human race is catastrophically straining the planet. “It’s insane to consider low birthrate as a crisis,” he told me. “Basically every person I know in my section of the National Academy of Sciences thinks it’s wonderful that rich countries are starting to shrink their populations to sustainable levels. We have to do that because we’re wrecking our life-support systems.”