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Posted on 10/03/2002 2:11:53 PM PDT by Polycarp
TORONTO, October 2, 2002 (LSN.ca) - A prominent economics reporter with the Globe and Mail is one of the few Canadian opinion-makers to have said anything at all about the failure of Canadians to have children, historically a key sign of a doomed culture.
"Canadian couples are not having enough kids even to replace themselves -- and have not for more than three decades now." "So long as we Canadians don't replace ourselves, we put ourselves on a path that's almost impossible to alter," Little writes. In addition, he challenges the conventional wisdom (shared by all the federal political parties) that immigrants will somehow fill the gap: "More immigration won't change the underlying pattern," Little concludes.
To read the full column see:
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/TGAM/20020930/RAMAZ/
Headlines/headdex/headdexColumnists_temp/4/4/15/
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By BRUCE LITTLE
Monday, September 30, 2002 – Page B3
Canada's declining fertility rate hit the headlines last week, and not for the last time. We'll all be hearing more about this in the years to come.
Canadian couples are not having enough kids even to replace themselves -- and have not for more than three decades now. But the latest decline highlights an even more dramatic trend -- a growing fertility gap between Canada and the United States. The reasons for the gap reveal some fundamental differences between the two countries in social attitudes, economic conditions and government policies.
The fertility rate is an estimate of the average number of children women will have during their child-bearing years. During the peak years of the baby boom in the late 1950s, the fertility rate soared to 3.9 in Canada and almost that high in the United States.
By the early 1970s, though, it had fallen below 2.1 in both countries. That's a crucial threshold because it represents the population replacement rate. Allowing for premature deaths, it means each couple leaves at least two kids behind to replace themselves.
The rate kept falling for another few years in both Canada and the United States, but since then, we've gone in different directions. While the U.S. rate drifted back up toward 2.1, Canada's rate kept falling to a record low last year of 1.49.
Not only is that a big gap, but it exists even though American and Canadian women, when asked, both say they want to have 2.2 kids.
American women almost meet their goal; Canadian women do not, by a wide margin.
Why the big difference? A recent study by Alain Bélanger and Geneviève Ouellet of Statistics Canada came up with some fascinating reasons.
The first -- and most obvious -- place to look is at what Statscan calls ethno-racial differences. The fertility rate of Hispanic women in the United States is about three, while that of black women is still slightly above the U.S. average, although it has declined sharply since 1990. But even the rate for non-Hispanic white women, although it's the lowest in the United States at 1.85, is well above that for Canadian women. All told, such differences explain only about 40 per cent of the Canada-U.S. gap.
So it's necessary to look elsewhere. One trend leaped out of the data that Mr. Bélanger and Ms. Ouellet studied: "Canadian women postpone child bearing more than American women, and this trend intensified between 1990 and 1997."
American teenage girls are twice as likely as Canadian teenagers to have a baby. Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the number of births per 1,000 women is about 110 in the United States, but only 60 in Canada. Two decades ago, the figures for both countries were similar.
Birth control explains part of these differences. A greater proportion of American women use some form of contraception than Canadian women, but Canadian women use methods -- like the pill and sterilization -- that are more effective.
These methods are both less expensive and more accessible in Canada than the United States, because medicare makes it cheaper to get the medical attention required and because family planning services are more prevalent in Canada, especially for high-school students.
Canadians also marry later than Americans, partly because of a growing trend here toward common-law marriages, in which the fertility rate is typically lower than it is for formally married couples.
Other factors with only an indirect connection to fertility may be at work here as well, the Statscan analysts say in their study, reported in the agency's annual report on the demographic situation in Canada.
Canada is a more secular society than the United States, for example. About 34 per cent of American women of child-bearing age practice their religion on a weekly basis, almost double the 18-per-cent proportion for Canadian women. More religion tends to go with higher fertility. Greater religious observance tends to go along with higher marriage rates and lower divorce rates.
The job market may also be a factor, if Canada's younger women and their mates delayed having kids because of greater job insecurity. Youth unemployment rates were similar in both countries in the early 1980s, but have since been consistently higher in Canada. The differences were substantial in the 1990s, when the jobless rate in Canada for those in their early 20s was half to two-thirds higher than the comparable U.S. rate.
The result was lower income for young adults and less of the confidence in the future that is usually needed to take on the responsibilities of parenthood.
These big differences in fertility are the main reason that Canada's population is now growing more slowly than that of the United States -- about 0.9 per cent annually here and 1.2 per cent there -- and why Canada will age faster than the United States over the coming decades.
There's probably not much we can do about that. It's hard to imagine governments coming up with programs to reverse the decline in fertility, and more immigration won't change the underlying pattern.
So long as we Canadians don't replace ourselves, we put ourselves on a path that's almost impossible to alter. blittle@globeandmail.ca
For example, did you know that Russia is running out of Russians? That country has a death rate which is twice as high as its birth rate. This means they are literally shrinking by a few thousand people a day. While that is startling enough, it was revealed in a 2001 ABCnews.com article that “about 70 percent of all pregnancies since 1994 ended in abortion. Partly because of the lasting health effects an abortion can have on a woman’s body, one in five Russian couples is infertile.”
(The article I refer to was, I am convinced, a momentary slip by a liberal newsource in reporting the facts about one of the many ways abortion hurts women.)
Yup. When a culture stops having enough kids to replace the present generation, it's like a giant "NO CONFIDENCE" vote.
Fewer igli per square kilometer? :o)
Yes.
And nature abhors a vacuum.
Expect serious trouble for Russia over the next several decades from an expansionist China which sees wide open depopulated spaces to its northeast ready and waiting for colonization.
You seem to have forgotten the most significant factor.
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