Is Europe's fertility crisis is overstated?

It is, according to an article in the Economist, which pokes holes in some of the more alarmist reactions to Europe's declining fertility rates.

Received opinion holds, in the phrase of Auguste Comte, a 19th-century social scientist, that “demography is destiny” and that Europe is doomed by its death-spiral population numbers. American observers from Walter Laqueur, an academic, to Mark Steyn, a conservative polemicist, argue that Europe is fast becoming a barren, ageing, enfeebled place. Vast numbers of old people, they reckon, will be looked after, or neglected, by too few economically active adults, supplemented by restless crowds of migrants. The combination of low fertility, longer life and mass immigration will put intolerable pressure on public health, pensions and social services, leading (probably) to upheaval.

There are several possible objections to that gloomy forecast. One is that a growing population is not, of itself, necessarily a good thing, nor a falling one unambiguously bad. Another is that there is no short-term correlation between population change and wealth: Japan and South Korea have even lower fertility than Europe. But there is a simpler objection: the picture of relentless decline is wrong, or, to be accurate, half wrong. Europe is not in decline. Rather, as Jitka Rychtarikova of the Charles University in Prague argues, it no longer makes sense to talk about Europe as a single demographic unit at all. There are two Europes.

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A baby-Bjorn the childfree can get into (plus other childfree news)

Couldn't resist posting this terrifying gag tee. Wearing this may be the closest any childfree person wants to get to sporting a baby Bjorn. BabyGadget blogger Jenna suggests, "it can be a cruel joke (your single, childless friend) or a cheesy pregnancy announcement (just in time for father's day!)."
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Some childfree activists in Wake County, North Carolina apparently don't want their taxes going towards public education. This strikes me as a bad idea. The whole idea behind taxes is they go towards the common good. If everyone could opt to only pay for the services they used, society would be a mess. While I may not have kids myself, I don't want to live in a society where other people's kids aren't fully educated. Therefore I'm happy to pay up.

News & Observer writer (and parent) Ruth Sheehan agrees:

Funny, I view every dollar spent on education as a deposit in a bank account for all of us to draw on in the future.

With a solid education, I expect that my kids will never need to seek public assistance.

That they will never have a run-in with the law.

That they will never spend a night in jail.

Yet someday they will own a home and pay their share for services -- many of which they will never benefit from directly.

At a time when growth problems are at almost biblical proportions, with the schools overflowing and the water running dry, that doesn't seem a bad bargain.

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Writer Sarah Churchwell never had kids because she never found the right man:

I can't imagine anything worse than still being tied to some of the men I've had relationships with - for me, or for any child unfortunate enough to have resulted from those doomed affairs.

I am a far better and far happier person today, having just turned 37, than I was five or ten years ago.

I may perhaps have been more fertile then, but I was definitely more of a fruitcake, as are so many people in their 20s (even if they don't realise it at the time).

The sad truth is that I was pretty needy - but not, thankfully, needy enough to marry the men I dated then, or bear their children.

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Ah, dining out. Such a treat! So relaxing! Unless you have kids. This Detroit News article (originally from Parenting Magazine) on five steps to make dining out with junior less of a nightmare is a delicious reminder of why it's so wonderful not to have kids.

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Gov. to middle-class women: Have more kids!

An article in an alternative British Columbian newspaper highlights the ways in which the rhetoric changes when government policy is applied to helping, or stopping, reproduction.

Contradictory messages about women's fertility are breeding like rabbits this week. In largely-Catholic Brazil, the government is subsidizing birth control pills so poor women can afford the contraceptive, despite a recent visit by Pope Benedict XVI, who mainly used his time to condemn abortion, contraception and sex outside marriage. In China, officials are rounding up rural, pregnant women and conducting forced abortions to enforce the mandatory one child policy.

In Canada, on the other hand, I'm the problem. Thirty-something. Childless. And a threat to Canada's future economic well being. The nation's fertility rate has plummeted to 1.53 children per woman, and Maclean's has published the latest cry of alarm ...

You don't have to read much between the lines to discern the big class bias behind all of this hand wringing. Stats actually show that young, unmarried, uneducated, non-professional women are doing just fine in the baby department. The elitist worry seems to be that the "right" kind of woman is forgoing kids. Read: middle class and up.

The article goes on to talk about how the government discussion over fertility rates is way, way different from that of real women who have to make the decision.

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And this is no surprise. WebMD reports that people who have kids spend less time dedicated to exercise. What did surprise me is that men's exercise levels dropped more than women's, post-baby:

Men's activity levels declined more than women's as they became parents, Hull also found. That could be because they were more active than women at the start of the two-year study, he says.

"Men who stayed childless lost about 50 minutes a week in activity [from study start to end]," he says. "Men who became parents lost 4.5 hours a week. Women who stayed childless lost about 20 minutes a week. Women who became parents lost an hour and 20 minutes a week."

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Lastly, Catholic World News reports that Ireland is the latest European country to report a precipitous decline in households sporting tots:

"The big story recorded by the latest Census isn't so much the decline of the traditional family, as the enormous rise in households without children," argues the Iona Institute's David Quinn.

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