Modernity and Falling Birthrates (birth control)

The “demographic transition” central to thinking on population is the belief that in premodern societies an equilibrium existed between high fertility and high mortality. As societies modernized, improved sanitation and nutrition brought the death rate down, thereby disrupting the equilibrium and causing the population to grow. Finally, in fully modern societies, the birthrate will gradually decline until it is once more in equilibrium with the death rate.

A number of discrepancies exist between this model and reality. First, controlled birthrates— and not simply uncontrolled death rates—curbed population growth long before the demographic transition. This was notably the case in western Europe, where late marriage and prolonged breast-feeding and other developments greatly restrained fertility from at least the fourteenth century on. Such practices, however, stemmed not from a desire to keep fertility and mortality in balance but, as Seccombe argues, rather from the limited resources for family formation. Children had to wait for their parents to retire before they could take over the farm, marry, and have children of their own. Understandably, the age of marriage fell whenever plague or conquest freed up land for settlement.

Second, Europe’s demographic transition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought not only lower death rates but also higher birthrates. This was particularly true in England, where rising fertility contributed over twice as much to population growth as falling mortality. Fertility also rose in the Netherlands, largely because couples were marrying younger. In both countries, then, larger families were a deliberate choice and not a result of overestimating how many children would survive to adulthood. Admittedly, growth elsewhere in Europe, notably France, was due almost entirely to falling death rates. It would be hard, however, to attribute lower French fertility to an earlier entry into modernity. France trailed England and the Netherlands on such yardsticks of modernization as expansion of the market economy, improvements in sanitation and nutrition, and migration to the cities. France was more modern only in a political and ideological sense.

Third, the twentieth century decline in birthrates throughout the Western world has shown no signs of bottoming out. After the World War II baby boom, fertility began to decrease around 1964, and by 1975 most of Europe and North America had fallen below the replacement threshold of 2.1 children per woman. Far from leveling off, the trend has continued. In the last decade of the twentieth century, fertility had dropped to 1.2 children per woman in Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Latvia. It had fallen below 1.0 in the eastern parts of Germany, Spain’s Basque country, and twenty-four of Italy’s ninety-five provinces. There is no reason to believe the decline has stopped and it will certainly not bottom out at 2.1.

New methods of birth control, especially ones that last several months or years, are causing birth rates to fall in industrialized countries. Here, Dr. Alejandro Zaffaroni attaches a contraceptive patch, which contains the same ingredients as the birth control pills developed by Johnson &Johnson.

Yet the demographic transition model is correct on one point: clearly, a premodern regime of high fertility has given way to a postmodern one of low fertility. What is less clear is the relationship between the decline in fertility and the preceding decline in mortality. It looks increasingly fortuitous and may simply reflect some kind of common cause, that is, the same modern culture that has cut death rates through better sanitation and medical care has also caused a shift in priorities away from procreation.

An alternative model attributes the decline in fertility to the emergence of a less coercive social environment. Women face less pressure from their husbands, relatives, and society to bear children. Improved educational and career opportunities have given them a broader range of life choices. Finally, easier access to contraception and abortion prevents unwanted pregnancies. Support for this model comes from the Muslim world, where surveys show that women bear more children than they actually want. On the other hand, birthrates rose in Sweden when that country expanded its system of daycare facilities while still maintaining easy access to family planning services and a strong commitment to gender equality at home and at work. This seems to indicate the existence of an unrealized fertility potential in Western countries.

The demographic transition is therefore not simply the end of a regime where more children are born than desired but also the beginning of one where fewer are born than desired.

Quebec makes an interesting case study because the birthrate plummeted from 3.67 children per woman in 1962 to 1.82 in 1972. It entered a second decline in the early 1980s, falling from 1.75 in 1979 to 1.40 in 1986. In the late 1980s, it rose modestly in response to increases in the family allowance, notably for the third child.This gain, however, had all but disappeared by the late 1990s.

Gauthier and Bujold link the decline of birthrates in the 1960s to the end of coercive factors in Quebec that made people have more children than they would if the choice had been entirely their own. Legalization of contraception and sterilization, combined with the introduction of free medical care, made it easier to postpone or terminate childbearing. The cultural environment also became markedly less natalist and profamily, notably with the waning influence of the Roman Catholic Church. In the diocese of Montreal, church attendance fell from 61 percent in 1961 to 30 percent in 1971. The weakening of religious constraints on life goals, together with the prosperity of the 1960s, facilitated a wider range of aspirations, most of which were unrelated to family formation. Finally, this freer and more open environment allowed people to construct new forms of solidarity and sociability. The family unit, which was transgenerational in nature, now had to compete with social settings constructed around the workplace or the school and encompassing people of roughly the same age with similar interests. People no longer had to choose social relationships that necessarily involved long-term reciprocal obligations of dependency and responsibility.

Gauthier and Bujold, however, paint a strikingly different picture for the fertility decline of the early 1980s. Birth control did not become more accessible or reliable. The proportion of women in college and in the labor force did not increase. Cultural values did not change as they had in the 1960s.The two authors, however, did find one major “marker” from this time period: youth unemployment and impoverishment of young families. With the onset of the 1982 recession, high unemployment hit young adults much harder than it did older age groups. The jobs of young adults were also lower paying and less secure (part-time work, short-term contracts, freelancing, etc.). The effects of the recession were particularly hard on young families, among whom the poverty rate rose from 23.1 percent in 1981 to 31.5 percent in 1982.

It may seem obvious that young adults, like all new entrants to the labor force, will bear the brunt of any economic recession. Yet this has been true only in recent times. In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, the burden of unemployment was spread more or less equally among all age groups (Table M.1).

The end of the 1982 recession did not mark a return to normal. Young adults remained overwhelmingly concentrated in service sector jobs that paid lower wages and provided less secure working conditions. When another downturn came in 1989, their earnings fell much more than those of older cohorts and, as with the 1982 recession, the ensuing years have only partially reversed the widening of the income gap. Everything being taken into account, average incomes since the 1970s have steadily risen for those forty-five to fifty-four years old and fallen for those twenty to twenty-four years old. Households of those in the twenty to twenty-four year age group earned 20 percent less in 1994 than they did in 1975. This phenomenon has been noted in other Western countries.

The weaker economic position of young adults can be ascribed to the spread since the 1940s of a number of labor practices. Foremost among these are seniority clauses in union contracts, notably LIFO (last in, first out) and LOFI (last out, first in). Another one is attrition, that is, a firm that is wishing to downsize will protect its existing employees by freezing all outside hiring and filling vacancies, as they come up, from a list of laid off personnel.The costs of downsizing are thereby externalized onto new entrants to the labor force. The results may be seen in the Quebec civil service; in 1999, less than 1.4 percent of its regular employees are under thirty years old, compared with 21.4 percent of all Quebec workers.

The 1989 recession saw the advent of another age-sensitive labor practice: two-tiered wage agreements. Under this kind of arrangement, employers and unions agree to maintain existing wage rates for anyone hired before a certain date while paying substantially less to anyone hired afterward. Although two-thirds of these agreements disappeared with the end of the recession, they are now once again on the rise, more than doubling in number from 1991 to 1997.

These new labor practices have helped convert the union movement into a vehicle for the aspirations of older workers. To some degree, the process feeds upon itself: because fewer young adults hold unionized jobs, they are less likely to influence decision making in the unions. Less than 15 percent of the membership of Quebec’s largest trade union is under thirty years of age. Older workers thus have the power to shift the costs of economic insecurity onto younger entrants to the labor force. Although a dichotomy between “insiders” and “outsiders” is not new to Quebec, the lines of inclusion and exclusion were traditionally drawn in terms of ethnicity, religion, and lineage. People saw their interests as lying in entities that were necessarily transgenerational in nature and that continually recycled resources from older to younger members.The rise of modernity has emancipated older adults from this system, thus allowing them to use their greater share of decision-making power for their own benefit. This situation does not seem to be isolated to Quebec.

In premodern societies, people sought to optimize not so much their own well-being as that of their present or prospective family. In general, resources tended to be transferred from older, more productive members to younger or still unborn ones. Because decision making was disproportionately vested in older family members, decisions on resource allocation tended to be suboptimal for the person making them. When faced with several alternatives that seemed equally beneficial, people would opt for the one that maximizes benefits for present and future children. For example, personal gain alone did not seem to motivate the Irish emigrants of the late nineteenth century:

Table M.1: Unemployment Rates in Quebec, 1931 and 1982, by Age Group

. . . it is not surprising that nine times as many people opted for emigration as remained permanently celibate in Ireland. Economic motives alone provide an insufficient explanation for the exodus. The Irish immigrants generally achieved enough economic success to marry and have families, but they generally filled menial, low-status jobs with long working hours and often faced a diminished life expectancy. The standard of living on the home farm did not necessarily compare unfavorably with the standard of living achieved in the destination countries. We propose that the chief difference was that emigration offered greater marital and reproductive prospects. (Strassmann and Clarke, p. 48)

The family has since declined as a factor in personal decisionmaking. It is perhaps no coincidence that this decline parallels the expansion of the market economy and, accordingly, the increase in freedom to leave economic relation ships that no longer serve one’s interest. This “market discipline” has the merit of terminating unproductive or inefficient relationships. Unfortunately, it also works against nonmarket entities, such as the family, that necessarily redistribute resources from more productive to less productive members.

In sum, it can be argued that the ultimate cause of the decline in birthrates has been the withering away of both coercive and noncoer-cive social supports for fertility. Traditional societies invest massively in family formation and reproduction, often to the detriment of adults. From the mid-nineteenth century on, these supports began to dissolve with the shift from a “vertical” lineage-based model of society to a “horizontal” age-class model. Today, resources are being redistributed in the opposite direction, away from young-age classes and toward older workers and retirees.