The Birthgap

  

First, the good news.

In a recent study titled "Women's empowerment and fertility: A review of the literature," Ushma D. Upadhyay and colleagues examined the relationship between women's empowerment and fertility. With women's empowerment becoming a focal point for development efforts worldwide, the researchers conducted a critical assessment of the existing evidence on this topic.

The review analyzed 60 studies, with the majority of them (n=35) conducted in South Asia and using household decision-making as a measure of empowerment (n=37). The results showed that the majority of the studies found when women are embowered they have fewer children with longer spacing between births, and lower rates of unintended pregnancy. 

The findings suggest that when women have more decision-making power in their households, it has a strong impact on the number of children born. This underscores the importance of empowering women and ensuring that they have access to the resources and support they need to make informed decisions about their bodies and futures. However, there was some variation in results, depending on the measure of empowerment used, sociopolitical or gender environment, or sub-population studied.

Now, the bad news.

What that study doesn't cover is the number of women who intended to have children... but didn't. 

Yes, women entering the workforce and having greater economic control leads to lower rates of unintended pregnancy....

... But it also leads to higher rates of unintended childlessness.

Unintended childlessness has as dire consequences for women as unwanted pregnancies. One study interviewed women who lost the chance to have children. They reported, "a sense of profound grief and loss as they came to terms with their permanent childlessness after always expecting they would become mothers; a sense of powerlessness in being unable to create the right circumstances to become mothers earlier; feeling devastated when they realized that time had run out to become a mother; a sense of being judged by others for not making the time in their lives earlier to have children; and the sense of being an outsider in the world of other mothers."

The example of South Korea should be a warning to those who welcome a decline in the size of the global human population.

In 2005, the South Korean government introduced the ‘Framework Act on Low Birth Rate in an Aging Society’ in an attempt to reverse the trend, and has so far invested $150 billion in pro-natal policies. All to no avail, as the Atlantic piece makes clear.

The existential threat to South Korea is more urgent than for most countries. With a total fertility rate of 0.78, South Korea’s current population of 51 million will likely decline to just 15 million by 2100.⁠ 

This is a global phenomenon. While many people are still obsessed with "overpopulation," in fact, the real demographics of the world have already plummeted to dangerous levels. This is what Stephen J Shaw calls the Birthgap.

"Worst case scenario: total societal collapse."

If not enough children are born, while life spans (but not "youth spans") continue to rise, fewer and fewer people will have to care for a burgeoning population of elders, many of whom will live the last decades of their life alone.

And die alone.

There's another aspect to this as well, which feminist Louis Perry brings up. Who IS having children, if "liberated" women aren't?

While South Korea's population falls year after year, the North Korean population of 26 million is expected to drop only slightly to 23 million. In other words, South Korea’s much poorer, much more authoritarian neighbor is currently half its population size — but, within the lifetimes of babies being born in Korea today, that balance will be upturned. 

Let this sink in.

More babies will born to the poverty-stricken, authoritarian families of a dictatorship than to liberated, free mothers in a democracy.

Do you see why this a problem? If it's still not clear, consider that within populations, the falling birthrate isn't evenly distributed either. Those who have rejected feminism, who don't believe in female empowerment, who adhere to traditional gender roles, still have birthrates comparable to the Nineteenth Century. But their babies have survival rates comparable to the Twenty-First Century infant mortality rates.

So, once again, we see that authoritarians will out-populate those who love freedom and equality.

I don't know about you, but I find this disturbing.

Fortunately, I think there's more to this story... something that nobody is talking about yet. A little theory I'm developing...

But I'll save that for another time. Meanwhile, you can watch the documentary on birthgap.org. Or watch the first part of the documentary on YouTube:

Citations:

birthgap.org

"Women’s empowerment and fertility: A review of the literature," Ushma D. Upadhyay, Jessica D. Gipson, Mellissa Withers, Shayna Lewis, Erica J. Ciaraldi, Ashley Fraser, Megan J. Huchko, and Ndola Prata. Social Science & Medicine (2022). 

"An Unacknowledged Loss: The Experience of Permanent Unintentional Childlessness for Women Who Delayed Childbearing." E. Koert. Educational and Counselling Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Jordan Peterson vlog. "The Epidemic That Dare Not Speak Its Name," Interview with Stephen J Shaw, EP 338.

“Why feminists should fear a declining birth rate: The example of South Korea is a warning shot,” Louise Perry. 24 March 2023.