Fertility Rate at Risk

            Back in the 90s I spent a week in Beijing on business and another with my wife as tourists. We have great memories of that trip and many images still fresh in our minds, like the endless rows of bicycles lined up on city sidewalks, the army of women with long brooms keeping the streets clean, and the ubiquitous vendors aggressively hawking food and merchandise of all kinds. But one sight in particular got my wife’s attention: mothers strolling in the city parks with only one child, almost always a boy. This was the period of China’s strictly enforced One-Child policy, one of whose nefarious consequences was the abortion—and sometimes infanticide—of millions of girl babies.

            The One-Child policy, meant to keep China’s exploding population in check, proved to be a huge mistake. It has since been reversed, but because of the preference for boy babies exacerbated by the policy, its effect is now starkly evident. There are an estimated 333 million more men in China than women of child-bearing age. Worse, because of China’s rapid economic development, many of these women are entering the workforce and becoming career women rather than mothers. As a result, weddings in China have gone down for five consecutive years and there have been fewer births than in previous years—two million fewer in last year alone. China is now looking at the growth of an aging population no longer balanced by a corresponding birth rate. The government fears that in the long run there won’t be enough workers to sustain China’s economic growth. And this poses a threat to China’s dream of becoming the world’s greatest economic power.

            China is not the only country facing this problem. It is worse in Germany, for example, and much worse in Japan. But the United States is not far behind. It takes 2.1 births per woman for the population to replace itself. However, the fertility rate in this country last year was 1.76. If it weren’t for immigration, the population of the United States would be in decline.

            The widespread practice of abortion is not helping. Last year Planned Parenthood alone performed 332,757 of them. It is an ironic coincidence that our booming economy produced over 300,00 new jobs last month, many of which are likely to remain unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled workers to fill them. There are many thousands of Central American migrants who would love to have a shot at those jobs, if only we would let them in. But then that’s another problem that needs to be dealt with.