They buried the lede: deep in a NYT Magazine piece, “No Babies?”, about the declining fertility rates in European countries (which, no matter what, is always couched as mild-to-somewhat concerning, as opposed to declining/increasing fertility elsewhere?) is this nugget of demographic research:
The accepted demographic wisdom had been that as women enter the job market, a society’s fertility rate drops. That has been broadly true in the developed world, but more recently, and especially in Europe, the numbers don’t bear it out. In fact, something like the opposite has been the case. According to Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania, analysis of recent studies showed that “high fertility was associated with high female labor-force participation . . . and the lowest fertility levels in Europe since the mid-1990s are often found in countries with the lowest female labor-force participation.” In other words, working mothers are having more babies than stay-at-home moms.
In case the point wasn’t driven home:
A study released in February of this year by Letizia Mencarini, the demographer from the University of Turin, and three of her colleagues compared the situation of women in Italy and the Netherlands. They found that a greater percentage of Dutch women than Italian women are in the work force but that, at the same time, the fertility rate in the Netherlands is significantly higher (1.73 compared to 1.33). In both countries, people tend to have traditional views about gender roles, but Italian society is considerably more conservative in this regard, and this seems to be a decisive difference. The hypothesis the sociologists set out to test was borne out by the data: women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load. Put differently, Dutch fathers change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born. As Mencarini said, “It’s about how much the man participates in child care.” [emphasis mine]
Mind you, this revelation occurred on page 4 of a lengthy article. Had I written it, the salient facts would’ve probably appeared on page 1, pararaph 1.
Now, what you had to have read the previous several pages to discover is that another factor is age of the mother when the first child is born. When mothers are older upon the birth of the first child, they tend to have fewer children. So in addition to the fabulous state-enabled benefits to mothers in Scandinavian countries, the mothers there must, I infer, tend to be younger.
Get a load of what mothers and fathers in Norway receive:
The state guarantees about 54 weeks of maternity leave, as well as 6 weeks of paternity leave. With the birth of a child comes a government payment of about 4,000 euros. State-subsidized day care is standard. The cost of living is high, but then again it’s assumed that both parents will work; indeed, during maternity leave a woman is paid 80 percent of her salary.
Aren’t you just weeping with envy??
Now I’m a huge advocate of extended family to help with childcare. In our child-hating, er, child-unfriendly culture, there’s not a lot of support for the tykes or the moms and dads who raise them (Paid Family Leave Act for governmental employees, anybody?). So among ethnic Americans and/or immigrants, the extended family has always been a source of assistance for cultural, practical, and economic and other reasons. But I do recognize it’s not feasible for many people. We have a twice- and thrice-divorced population going on its second and third generation of split and step-families, for one.
And we’re a highly mobile people, for another. We don’t always live where our extended families live, and our occupations often take us away from the towns and cities of our birth.
Moreover, for the Italian women:
There is little state-financed child care, especially for new mothers, and most newlyweds still find homes close to one or both sets of parents, the assumption being that the extended family will help raise the children. But this no longer works as it once did. “As couples tend to delay childbearing,” Aassve says, “the age gap between generations is widening, and in many cases grandparents, who would be the ones relied upon for child care, themselves become the ones in need of care.”
So there is the familiar “sandwich generation” problem of slightly older mothers, which is to find oneself helping the oldest and youngest generations at the same time, often while working for pay outside the home. No wonder we’re all stressed and stretched to the utmost. Now add the U.S.’s poor social welfare safety net, a weak economy/job loss, and perhaps a catastrophic illness, single parenthood, and you have a recipe for disaster. No one is supported or given the resources to bounce back from bad luck.
I’ve railed against rugged individualism before: the U.S. right now is Darwinistic to a fault. It’s appalling.
And we’re given specious/incomplete advice by Linda Hirshman: “marry up,” “go into a field that pays well (not the humanities, god forbid!), “have a good career but marry ‘down’ so your man can do more at home.”
The problem is cast in individualistic terms as are the solutions. Seldom are social or policy solutions posed. If they are, the political will under the Bush administration is lacking. It’s shameful.
Since I’ve gone ahead and injected politics into this (how could anyone not?), the NYT Magazine article goes on to say:
In Scandinavia, thanks in part to state support, the more children a family has, the wealthier it is likely to be, whereas in southern Europe having children is a financial sinkhole, which drags a family toward poverty. Such an analysis flies in the face of social conservatives, who argue that simply encouraging people to have more babies will raise the population and add fuel to the economic engine.
The article poses research gathered from northern European countries against the southern European ones, and finds that less gender equity in the southern European countries is what contributes, against all socially conservative rhetoric to the contrary, to declining birth rates. I’ll say that again: the more sexism is ingrained in a country’s culture, customs, and policies, the more likely birth rates are declining below a 2.0 “replacement rate.”
Now mercifully the authors of the article expanded their perspective to include a cross-cultural analysis, so we aren’t simply filled with jealousy at how good the Scandinavians have it (which is what we’ve all known for some time). Apparently, in South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and elsewhere, this is true as well.
What’s so interesting about the article is that the U.S., for all its lack of a social net for families, nevertheless has a healthy birthrate that’s the envy of much of Europe. The reason is apparently the flexibility of our society. To have birthrates at the “replacement” level, it appears your society must be one that’s either good with social programs OR flexible, permitting a women the option, for example, of leaving the paid workforce for 3-5 years and then possibly returning.
Now all of the slant of my examination of the article has been with an eye to allowing people to have as many children as they please in a world that welcomes and eases the special work-life burdens parents experience. But I have to admit, one of my first thoughts upon reading about declining birth rates (anywhere in the world) is a small feeling of relief, because it seems more likely that a smaller population will ease the environmental strains we put on this planet.
And I was glad to see this addressed by the article’s author, Russell Shorto, also. He points out that even as overpopulation is unsustainable, so is “the upside down pyramid” where a tiny number of young workers support a much larger group of elderly retirees. There’s some discussion of whether immigration can be an adequate supplement to the birth rate, but it’s really discussed in negative terms only: anti-immigrant sentiment, overtly racist nativist policies and politicians.
Which is too bad, because ultimately it seems that natalism and nativism can’t be disentangled. Racism is too strong, the sentiments behind the Nazi Mother’s Cross too difficult to erase:
For $100 or so you can buy online a Third Reich “Mother’s Cross” (officially, a Cross of Honor of the German Mother). The medals were struck, beginning in 1938, in bronze for women who had four children, in silver for mothers of six and in gold for women who gave birth to eight. They were given out annually on Hitler’s mother’s birthday to heroines of the cause of fertility, which the Führer referred to as “the battlefield of women.” Natalism — the state-sponsored policy to increase the birthrate — has a rather tainted pedigree. Nevertheless, in the age of “lowest-low fertility,” it has made a comeback. If your population is falling, one logical, or seemingly logical, way to build it up again is to encourage people to have more babies. [emphasis mine]
Natalism is therefore the opposite of an enlightened immigration policy, as is nativism (xenophobic scapegoating of immigrants and efforts to close borders to new immigrants). Notice how, in the nations that offer natalist policies, opening one’s borders is never viewed as a good solution in spite of the economic sense it makes to flip the worker/retiree pyramid.
France has wonderful child- and family-friendly policies, but it’s also currently cursed with the leadership of a conservative who’s borrowed much of the xenophobic, anti-Semitic, racist platforms of Le Pen. I can’t help but think the pendulum swing is partly powered by this natalist/nativist connection.
In fact, it’s hard to resist the pressure to intermingle natalism with nativism. Right now in the U.S., we have neither governmental policies promoting natalism nor nativist (anti-immigrant) policies, but we do have racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Just look at how virulently some people oppose giving driver’s licenses to undocumented people.
So, here we are again, where a woman’s womb is the battleground for nation, patrimony/patriarchy, and a host of ideals that she may or may not benefit from nor hold to. And here, too, is a battleground that’s profoundly in need of feminist re-definition. Let’s take the woman out of natalism by creating father/mother/parent-friendly policies. Let’s also take the woman out of nativism–why shouldn’t enlightened immigration reform be a feminist act? Certainly immigration reform need not be an opportunity to enact racism and xenophobia; certainly we ought to uncouple women from “national purity” as the Nazi Mother’s Cross example illustrates.
Just for kicks I looked up the tenor of immigration policies in the Scandinavian countries with great family-friendly policies, and then in the Southern European countries where there are natalist policies:
Sweden: subject to the Schengen Agreement, which enables the free flow of people among member EU states; so far as I can tell the stated governmental policies are fairly enlightened and yet the difficulty of integration/assimilation of immigrants to Sweden is still high enough to cause the ruling Social Democratic party to take a restrictive stance toward immigration and asylum.
Norway: not a member of the EU, but a signer of the Schengen Agreement, Norway has a rather stringent immigration policy stressing “quality, not quantity.” Hmmm. It also was named the country with the highest standard of living in the world by the UN four times in a row. And yet: “Electoral support for the anti-immigration Progress Party confirmed xenophobic tendencies at this time [circa 1980]; after receiving only 3.7 percent of the parliamentary vote in 1985, the party received 12.3 and 13.0 percent of the vote in 1987 and 1989, respectively.” The bar to achieving citizenship is very high: “Norway-born children of two foreign parents must wait until age 18 to apply for citizenship.”
France: the most high profile debate over “the headscarf affair”–whether or not children in public schools in France can wear religious head garb. France has the largest Islamic population in Europe. “In November 2003, the National Assembly passed a law amending legislation on immigration and on the residence of foreigners on French territories. The new law provides stricter regulations to combat illegal immigration and to regulate the admission and stay of foreigners in France.” Because of its colonial history and attendant misadventures in Algeria, the Ivory Coast of Africa, and elsewhere, there’s especially heated debate over the various states of citizenship to sans papiers (undocumenteds), with several gradations in-between.
Italy: “Italy’s immigration picture changed further with the victory in 2001 of Silvio Berlusconi, conservative media magnate and now prime minister for the second time since 1994. Berlusconi’s cabinet, which includes members from the far-right Northern League (which has made its opposition to immigration into a central electoral plank) and the former neo-fascist National Alliance, has been seeking ways to curtail immigration into Italy and to deploy a range of enforcement and control mechanisms. In August 2002, the government passed legislation to regulate immigration, and in September of that same year adopted a decree to provide for the regularization of undocumented immigrants already in the country.” Interesting that this is in combination with a local natalist program (featured in the first 3 pages of the NYT Magazine article) to boost birth rates among Italian women.
Greece: “Immigration is the cause of population increase and demographic renewal in Greece in the period between the 1991 and 2001 censuses. The average number of children per woman in Greece has fallen to 1.3, against a European average of 1.5, and well below the average of 2.1 required for the reproduction of a population. Of the immigrant population, on the other hand, 16.7 percent are in the 0-14 age bracket, 79.8 percent in the 15-64 age bracket, and only 3.5 percent in the over-65 age bracket.” What’s interesting about Greece is that immigrants have indisputably boosted the Greek economy (”they play a… complementary economic role” rather than competing directly with Greek citizens), and yet there’s still tremendous xenophobia and racism in how Greeks regard immigrants to that nation. In this case, the authors of the article suggest that perhaps it’s the *lack* of a coherent immigration policy that citizens find bothersome
I’m not done chewing on this subject, but the article has been a good opportunity to re-frame the “Mommy Wars” in a new light. And to challenge the premise of the “No Babies?” article–it isn’t that there are “no babies,” it’s that there are “too many of their babies and not enough of ours.”
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