Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you’ve heard from the media that the birth rate in developed countries is going down. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that “Deaths are projected to exceed births in 2031, two years earlier than previously projected.” Like all scary headlines, it’s been picked up but what does that mean? The panicky reports: Fewer hands taking care of the huge numbers of baby boomers! Slower growth of the economy! Social Security and Medicare broken! Fewer boys to fight the government’s wars!
Before Chat GPT and its friends, the list of potential worries included the prediction that fewer people means less innovation. The worriers argued that fewer thinkers meant fewer solutions for society’s problems. These days, with A.I. and robotics taking jobs and massive layoffs in almost all sectors, those arguments sound like nonsense.
With fewer consumers, however, say the concerned, capitalism itself will be contested.
To these pundits, the positive aspects of population decline are unimportant. But we have to wonder if there’s a maximum number of humans that Earth can support. If you are one of Elon Musk’s four or five child-bearers, you might see some of your kids booted off to Mars.
This so-called population news is aired mostly by media that measure themselves in advertising dollars, clicks and comments. It’s not news. The population question is media’s filling business as usual, but always boom or bust. It makes for interesting reading, especially for doom-scrollers. The hidden messages are often racist: More White people needed! Or anti-immigrant: The incoming team is beating our team!
For the level-headed rest of us, it’s time to figure out how the decline in birthrates will affect ordinary lives. The payoff could be less pressure on resources like water, land, food. And let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you’re a woman. Time is the resource you own—one lifetime.
From the moment we women figured out that making babies depends on us, we’ve sought control over our bodies and weighed the consequences of unbridled motherhood: Should we take a chance and risk our own health consequences, then probably give up 20 or more of the best years of our lives to create beings that may or may not be an asset to us, our communities, the planet? If the answer is yes, the population accountants put a check in the win column.
If a woman says no, she can pursue her dreams. The arts, politics, economy, environment. Or she’ll be free to help others survive. She may spend her young years learning to be a doctor or working in a soup kitchen. Or she’ll be enjoying herself, climbing mountains, building financial stability, taking care of the earth, finding a community of neighbors or like-minded people.
Reaching the age of, say 40 or 45, she might look around and measure herself against others that chose motherhood. Did she make the right choice? It depends a lot on whether she has been supported, either by a spouse, a community or government programs. Schools, where her kids have spent a good part of their lives, are key. Are future Americans going to tax themselves to pay for kids’ needs?
Fifty years ago, smart-ass professors started saying “the cause of the next wars will be access to water …” and we were in disbelief. Water? We just turn on the tap and there it is … The profs might as well have said “access to air” or “access to gravity.” We took water for granted. But, now, every community that’s facing incursion from data centers and industrial solar land take-overs is worried about water.
The fights in Ukraine, Israel, Venezuela and all the other conflicted places are fights for resources. Oil and land. Curbing the population can’t solve the war problem, sad to say. But let’s take the pressure off some resources and curb the human population so we don’t push the other species off the planet. Let’s take Israel as an example. From a population of 2 million in 1960, Israel is now at 9.55 million, a number that includes non-Jewish folks living in areas that Israel claims. That’s more than 4.5 times the 1960 population.
Population of Palestine has also grown — from about 2 million to 5.48 million. More than 2.5 times the 1960 population. Their median age is 20.3 years old, which helps explain why so many kids are in the casualties. And in the years since Israel’s founding, Palestine’s share of land, water and other resources, has been diminished by Israeli settlers. The same strategy of move in and then claim the land was effectively used by American settlers and all other colonial settlers against indigenous folks, by the way.
Here on Earth, media pundits continue to deliver pronouncements in stressful bites and of course it’s mostly opinion and mostly Us vs. Them: Liberals want to open the tap on immigration, which has always brought new population to our borders. Conservatives want American women to create babies. Politicians hold out carrots, say they’ll vote to pay for the births, support the kids, improve the schools.
What do you think?
Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.”
Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.
