Great Britain’s Office for National Statistics recently released a report about the continuing decline in birth rates in that country which highlighted some interesting statistics.
One in five women 40 or older, for example, have never had a child. That is twice as it was just 20 years ago. The average age for new mothers is now 29 years.
The average birth rate in Great Britain has fallen to 1.64 children — the lowest since the UK began tracking that statistic in 1924. That is, of course, far below the population replacement level. Like other European nations, Great Britain will have to rely on immigration to maintain its population or else see it eventually shrink.
Notice that this directly contradicts a common but fallacious argument about human populations that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Numerous commentators argue that since in non-human species increased food led to ever increasing population sizes until an inevitable crash that this too must happen to human beings.
And yet Great Britain is one of the richest human societies in the history of the world and its peacetime birth rate is below replacement level. In fact, throughout much of the world wealth and availability of food is inversely related to births — the wealthier a society is, the lower its birth rate tends to be.
Source:
More women staying childless. The BBC, June 28, 2002.
This is not just a U.K. problem; it seems to be the case in most European and North American countries. People are marrying later, or not at all, and those who do are often choosing not to have children in order to maintain a more affluent lifestyle than they’d have with children. Of course, marrying later in life also produces women who now would like to have children but can’t. If the situation doesn’t change our world is going to be a very different place in 20 years than the one we know now.
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