World Governments Push Women to Have Babies

Does a declining population necessarily correspond with decreased economic clout? Governments around the world are encouraging women to have more babies in order to boost falling birthrates and ensure that the aging populations will have a robust younger generation to support them economically. Lately, the governments of Taiwan and Korea are pushing childbearing, but many other societies have their own More Baby Movements as well. When I read such stories, I wonder if these initiatives make real economic sense, or whether they are sociologically and environmentally harmful knee-jerk reactions to declining populations.

My own reaction is that childbirth campaigns are sexist and matrimaniacal.  Sexist, because these campaigns place undue and disproportionate pressure on women, who still bear not only the largest burden when it comes to childbearing, but childrearing as well. Matrimaniacal, because some of the campaigns focus on encouraging people to marry, as if children are an inherent byproduct of marriage and as if marriage is meant mainly for producing children.

So when I read that Taiwan's Interior Ministry, to increase the country's low birth rate, is organizing yearly matchmaking events for the staff of "every agency under its control" and also seeking a slogan that will "make everybody want to have children," my instinctive reaction was, "Eeek."

Having lived in Taiwan, I remember it as a country of gorgeous rocky and sandy beaches, with river valleys running through high green hills, the coastline peppered with occasional cities that are currently, shall we say, a tad congested -- but which do fuel the country's powerful economic engines. Yet I'm not sure a large, young population is necessary to maintain this growth. Does it really make sense to produce more twenty-somethings to work eighty-something hour work weeks, or could sheer manpower be replaced by more efficient social and governmental policies?

In South Korea, where workers also put in fiendishly long hours, once a month the Ministry of Health turns off its lights in the evening to encourage employees to go home and make babies. Sure, mental health breaks are all well and good, but there's a risk that the same bosses who tell their female employees, "You're my responsibility now," when they send them home to get laid, will later refuse to take them back when they've had the babies, as described in the comments in this BBC article.

Instead of giving couples financial rewards to have children (in Taiwan and Korea and Japan, and likely other places too), a better plan might be to put those resources toward education and child care initiatives, services that are not as discriminatory toward single and childless people and that are helpful to women,  as opposed to burdening them with the pressure to procreate.

Photo credit: Jock [Vester] & David [Whiting]. LC-DIG-ppmsca-18415-00004