by Paul Morland
Years of scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men’s white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids… these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life… I hate these grimy details as much as you do.13
No: the baby boomers were not going to create their own baby boom.
The Second Transition
What was being born–or indeed, ironically, what the baby boomers were giving birth to–was another unforeseen phase of modern demography. Quiet progress towards low fertility and low mortality, which had been achieved across much of the industrialised world in the 1920s and 1930s, was not the final word, but neither was the post-war baby boom. Instead of reverting to the interwar era, birth rates in many places undershot the level of two children per woman, representing a whole raft of social trends from later marriage to the very questioning by the LGBT movement of what it means to be a man or a woman. This can be described as the second demographic transformation.
With monarchies increasingly rare and arguably archaic, in the contemporary era political leaders are perhaps better exemplars of the age, and in this respect it is notable how many are women–in 2018, most notably the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, neither of whom has any children (despite Angela Merkel being known affectionately as Mutti (‘Mummy’)). Hillary Clinton, who came close to becoming the most powerful person in the world, has one daughter. And while it is true that combining political life at the highest level with child-rearing is difficult, it is notable that an earlier era of famous female politicians–Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher–each managed to have two children (although Margaret Thatcher, with characteristic efficiency, minimised the time over which they delayed her political career by having twins).
The turn-around in fertility and ending of the baby boom was soon noticed, for by now the gathering of statistics and statistical techniques had greatly improved. By the early 1970s the neo-Malthusian concerns of US President Richard Nixon about too large a population at home, expressed as late as 1969, appeared outdated.14 Other changes were taking place too, besides feminism. Society was undergoing a secularisation in which, for example, the share of Catholic women using methods of birth control not approved by the Church appears to have risen from less than one-third to more than two-thirds.15 By the early 1970s the fertility rate of Catholics and Protestants in the US had more or less converged as the era of the famously large Irish and Italian family came to an end.16 The average age of childbearing for a woman in America has risen from around twenty-six for several decades after the war to a little over twenty-eight. Abortion law was being relaxed and social acceptance of abortion was increasing. The unexpected rise in post-war fertility appears essentially to have been driven by economics. Its reversal was largely the product of technological progress (the arrival of the Pill), which mediated changing social attitudes and female educational attainment. These patterns became prevalent throughout the developed world; what marks the United States out from other parts of the developed world is that, for a long time at least, US fertility rates fell to, but not very much below, replacement levels, a fact that possibly reflects the persistence of religious belief and practice in the US more than Europe. This elevated level of fertility was a Protestant, not a Catholic, phenomenon. Irish and Italian Americans were no longer following the Church’s advice to avoid the use of contraception, and as a result they were no longer having larger families, so it was not the Catholics who were maintaining a high national birth rate; rather, the birth rate in the US was held back from complete collapse thanks to traditional attitudes towards family and the role of women that clung on in the Bible Belt. At the extreme end of this tendency is the Quiverfull movement, which urges women to ‘relinquish their wombs for God’, who should be left to determine the number of children they have, and which bases its pro-natalist teachings on biblical texts commanding man to be fruitful and multiply, condemning Onan (and by extension Onanism) and extolling the man with a ‘quiverfull of sons’.17 The Church has used the Bible’s condemnation of Onan as the basis both for condemning masturbation and the withdrawal method of prevention. While the Quiverfull group is small and unusual, it is a manifestation of the link between religiosity and fertility which can be seen among other religious sects with particularly high fertility, such as the Jewish Haredim in New York and their satellite communities, the Mormons concentrated in Utah, and the Amish of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Another factor boosting US fertility was the arrival of large numbers of people from Latin America, where largescale childbearing remained the norm. This migration began precisely as the general fertility rate began to fall in the US–that is, in the mid 1960s. Normally fertility rates of immigrant groups from high to low fertility countries fall within a generation or two, and this has certainly happened with Latinos in the US, but before they converge the immigrants boost the birth rate. Taking into account the Bible Belt and the arrival of Latinos, then, it is understandable that even at its lowest, the US fertility rate has not yet fallen below one and three-quarters children per woman. It is noteworthy that nine of the ten states with the lowest fertility rates are in the north-east, outside the Bible Belt and for the most part outside the areas of higher Latino immigration. The current relatively low figures for US fertility as a whole reflect both the continuing convergence of immigrant childbearing practices and local practices, and a decline in religious belief, reducing the size of those populations with religiously elevated birth rates.
The absence of an equivalent Bible Belt and–at first–lower levels of migration from the developing world meant that elsewhere in the West the collapse of childbearing was more dramatic. It was also, in most cases, starting from a lower base. Canada moved, from a fertility perspective, into the new paradigm of the second demographic transition more convincingly than the US, enjoying a fertility rate of over three children per woman already in 1945, and seeing that climb to almost four by the early 1960s; for the immediate post-war decades, the country consistently outbred Americans. Yet the 1960s was a decade of rapid social change in Canada, similar to what was happening south of the forty-ninth parallel but accentuated by the impact of the large number of Catholic French Canadians who underwent rapid secularisation. Their birth rate has fallen at the same time as their falling church attendance, once over 80% and now less than 10%. By 1970 the fertility rate of Canada was somewhat lower than that of the US, and since this point Canada has experienced a consistently low fertility rate, not much above one and a half children per woman in the early part of the twenty-first century, while Australia and New Zealand have been somewhat closer to replacement fertility and the American pattern.18
The developed countries of northern Europe, which for our purposes here includes France, had a post-war baby boom similar to that of the US although a little less pronounced. In the UK, as in the US, fertility rates fell from the mid 1960s. In the UK women were having around one and two-thirds children by the early years of the current century, although this has picked up slightly since then. The picture is similar in Scandinavia. In France, fertility also fell, then picked up a little, but has never gone much below two children per woman. Part of the pick-up in recent years has probably been due to the growth of immigrant communities with higher (but falling) birth rates, as with Latinos in the US; this seems likely but is partly conjecture, as the gathering of statistics on ethnic lines is difficult in France.
Part of the modest rise in fertility across some of the developed world since the last years of the twentieth century has also been due to what demographers call the ‘tempo effect’: this is when social attitudes change and women start to acquire an education and careers, and so delay childbearing. During this period, fertility appears low. However, to some extent what they are doi
ng is not having fewer children but having them later. A cohort’s fertility often picks up somewhat in its later years, partly but not fully compensating for not having conceived earlier. This may seem like a technicality–and of course it is–but it means that a recent modest rise in recorded fertility in a developed country does not necessarily signal a long-lasting or meaningful rise in the birth rate but simply the end to an upward drift in age of childbearing. The human tide is capable of deceiving rips and hidden surges.
The tempo effect and variations of fertility rates across Europe may appear like minor wrinkles on the face of a generally low-fertility and ageing Europe, but they are worth examining because they make a difference. Germany, for example, has one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe, and the most dramatic fall was in East Germany. The collapse of Communism, the end of the comfortable certainties and support for working women and the lure of moving to the West for the young meant that the number of births in the territory fell from 200,000 in 1989, the last year of the German Democratic Republic, to 80,000 five years later. But the problem is not confined to East Germany. Since the early 1990s Germany’s fertility rate has at least stopped falling, but has levelled out at around one and one-third children per woman, perhaps beginning to pick up to around one and a half. This will have potentially serious implications for the long term.
In southern Europe the story has been somewhat different, characterised by a generally higher starting point but in recent decades by a universally low level of fertility. It was not just in the suburbs of New York and Boston that Italian mammas with their large broods have long ago become a thing of the past; it is just as true of Milan and Rome. Southern European societies were less developed industrially than their northern neighbours before the Second World War, and so the post-war social transition has been more radical. Spain saw a post-war rise then fall in fertility, with a late but heavy drop in the 1980s, since when fertility has generally been even lower than Germany’s. In Italy, fertility rates barely rose after the war and have fallen to persistently low levels. ‘We are a dying country,’ said the Italian health minister in 2015 when it was revealed that at barely half a million, Italy had had fewer babies born in 2014 than in any year since the country’s unification more than a hundred and fifty years earlier (when, it should be noted, a larger crop of babies was produced from a population notably smaller than half its current size).19
As in the United States but a little later, Catholics in Europe were starting to have smaller families than Protestants.20 While delayed childbearing may give rise to some recoveries among those countries with the lowest fertility rates, such as Germany and Italy, the effect will be limited at best; completed fertility for recent cohorts, a definitive indicator albeit one measurable only in retrospect, shows 1.5 children per woman for Germany and 1.6 for Italy, somewhat above current total fertility rates but well short of replacement level.
It is noteworthy that at mid-century the highest fertility rates in Europe were Catholic countries (France, Spain and Italy) and the lowest predominantly Protestant (Sweden and the United Kingdom), but that since then the situation has been reversed, with the lowest fertility rates found among Catholic countries. The reason for this seems to lie in varying attitudes to women, marriage and birth. Births outside marriage in the UK and Scandinavia have become commonplace, but this has not been the case in Catholic southern Europe. While fertility rates within marriage do not vary markedly in various parts of Western Europe, fertility as a whole is supplemented by extra-marital birth in less traditional areas and not in countries such as Italy and Spain.21 The lowest fertility, it seems, is experienced in societies caught on the one hand between modernity, individualism and female emancipation, which are associated with a delay in or indefinite postponement of marriage, and on the other hand by the traditions which frown on birth outside marriage.
Compare Denmark with its near replacement fertility rate and 45% rate of childbirth out of marriage with Spain where until recently only 12% of births were outside of marriage, or Greece, where the tally was 4%, and bear in mind that in both Spain and Greece fertility rates are around half a child less than in Denmark.22 The experience of east Asia is similar to that of the Catholic countries of southern Europe and produces equally low fertility rates: indeed, it was as if, collectively, women had found themselves in the position of saying ‘We will have only so many babies within marriage; the rest we will either have outside marriage or, if you do not approve of that, we will not have them at all.’ Fertility rates, therefore, are especially low in countries where women are encouraged to get an education and a career but where birth outside marriage is frowned upon. They are much better in countries where attitudes to women in the workplace are more positive and provision is made to allow both female and male workers to combine careers with parenting.
It is often in countries such as Italy and Spain, where women are encouraged to get an education but attitudes in the workplace are less advanced, that fertility is lowest. When the Italian government launched a campaign to encourage women to have more children, and to have them earlier, there was an outburst of protest from women holding placards saying ‘Siamo in attesta’ or a play on ‘we are expecting’ and ‘we are waiting’, referring to their expectations of enhanced facilities for combining work and maternity, while a Facebook group complained: ‘The government wants us to have children–and fast. Lots of us don’t want to, and in fact, we are waiting. For nurseries, welfare, salaries, benefits.’23 The IMF has marked Italy down as one of the countries where least has been done to encourage women into work. Whereas once this might have been associated with higher fertility rates, now where women are given educational but not employment opportunities, or where it is made difficult for them to combine work and childbearing, they do not tend to bear children.
While the difference between various countries of the West can appear acute, the longer view reveals that their experiences conform to a pattern of resurgent then falling fertility in the post-war years. For example, there is around half a child difference in the fertility rates of say Germany and the Republic of Ireland, representing respectively the highest and lowest rates in the group, and whilst this difference will be material if sustained over the long term, these differences should nevertheless be seen within an overall picture of strong general movement into the last phase of the first demographic transition and, at least in some cases, beyond it.
Those countries in central Europe that became part of the West (specifically those that joined NATO and the EU) after the collapse of Communism have universally experienced falling and then very low fertility rates since 1945. The largest of these countries by population is Poland, where women were bearing nearly four children in the early 1950s but are today bearing fewer than one and a half. Again, these countries, from Bulgaria to Lithuania, are stuck in the middle ground of high female education levels and labour force participation but traditional notions of family and difficulties for women who try to combine careers with childbearing. Indeed, within Europe there is a very low fertility rate almost everywhere except the British Isles, Scandinavia, France and the Low Countries. Catholicism has no more spared Lithuania or Slovakia from this fate than it has saved Italy or Spain.
The Greying of the Whites
In January 2015 an unusual job advertisement appeared in the British press: the Queen, fast approaching her ninetieth year herself, was looking for someone to help her with sending the customary congratulations to those amongst her subjects in the UK who had reached the age of 100. ‘You will be responsible for dealing with the requests from the public to ensure all eligible recipients receive the Queen’s congratulatory card.’ When the Queen first ascended the throne in 1952, only 3,000 such greetings were sent, but by the time of the advertisement, this had more than tripled.
Those living to over 100 are still a rarity in every country. There are around 15,000 centenarians in the UK today, a number that has tripled in a decade. The UK population aged
over ninety also tripled between 1984 and 2014, reaching well over half a million by the latter date. Super old age was once an overwhelmingly female domain, but in the UK, whereas in the late 1980s there were four and a half women over ninety years old to every man, today that ratio is more like two and a half. More women are living to an exceptionally old age, but many more men are. And of course, the rise in the number of the very old is not limited to those entitled to receive Her Majesty’s congratulations. Relative to their populations, Germany and the United States are not far behind the UK and Spain, while Sweden, France and Italy are ahead of it.24
So while the fertility side of the story has had some surprises along the way, with an upward bump after the Second World War and then a sharp fall in the last fifty years across most of the West, the mortality side of the story has not, with people living longer and longer whether in Europe or North America. Indeed, much of the ageing in developed societies today is the result of the baby boom, with the large cohort born immediately after the Second World War now in their seventies. This should come as no surprise. Decisions about family size depend on a range of social, cultural, economic and religious factors, so are highly variable, but in every society most people want to live longer. The extension of life therefore becomes almost ubiquitous as a goal of individuals, governments and society. The provision of health care to extend life has become one of the most central, if not the most central, function of government in the eyes of many of its citizens, and lifestyle advice and choices centre on healthy living and ways in which to delay the onset of mortal disease. In developed societies, fewer and fewer people die of contagious diseases such as flu or cholera, and private and public health care succeeds in minimising or eliminating these threats to life. More and more of us, meanwhile, die of the diseases generally associated with age.