Thanks ladies. Color me schooled. In a good way.
The main predictor of the birth rate is the infant and childhood mortality rate. RFKjr is working hard on this project.
The primate of Georgia* is offering to personally baptize any third or higher child born to a member of his church (about 80% of the population.
*When I hear the phrase “Primate of Georgia”, I picture a gorilla sitting under a peach tree.
I recall years ago a funny incident where the office a Primate of the religious-leader variety got a letter from a research center for primates of the hairy-and-knuckle-walking sort asking about any results they’d be willing to share. They took it in good humor, commenting that while the Primate walks upright he does like the occasional banana.
And you can get a pretty large family this way: one couple in California has 21 kids–maybe a couple born to the mother and 19 from surrogates.
Yikes! I’ve heard of cat hoarders, but 21 human children is a new one to me. The parents must be well-off to afford that (and their McMansion probably wasn’t all that cheap). Surrogacy costs >$100k a pop when it’s all said and done.
Related to the topic (though not X-treme surrogacy), I recall getting some pushback on this comment of mine:
Maybe attitudes varied, but The Simpsons circa 1991 captured the zeitgeist as far as I was concerned:
But surrogacy doesn’t necessarily increase the birth rate. Just as many babies are popping out; they’re just being handed to different parents to raise.
Now if what developed was a cadre of full time “professional” baby gestators who mostly stayed pregnant throughout their fertile years pumping out infants for pay as fast as they could, then we’d be moving the needle.
Net of the probable societal outcome that many better-off women would choose to order a baby, not gestate their own. Once it became both socially normal and reasonably affordable.
These two effects would not offset each other 100%, but they will net against each other.
IVF and surrogacy allows a woman to conceive a child biologically hers but have someone else carry it. The child need not be genetically related to the surrogate at all, even if that is one of many options.
The one case of surrogacy that i know well was an increase in the birth rate. A woman who was unable to bear children herself hired a woman who had completed a couple of successful pregnancies and felt she had enough kids, but was willing to bear another for a sympathetic cause and whatever compensation she was offered.
And yes, it’s very expensive. I asked my friend (the egg-mother who is raising the child) if she would do it again, and she said she didn’t really have another 200k lying around, and would be happy to raise one child.
(I’m pretty sure that’s the price she cited. And also, that’s probably the high end. She was only willing to work with agencies that took a lot of precautions: with the health of the womb-mother, with the legal issues, and some other stuff.)
The egg extraction process is expensive, grueling, and probably has some long-term health risks. My guess is that women who can conceive and carry a baby on their own would not be tempted. Perhaps some future technological advanced will change the situation, but that’s where we are today.
For sure surrogacy can create infants that would not otherwise exist because the egg-mom (great word; thank you!) for whatever reason can’t carry a fetus to term. Likewise IVF, and heck while we’re at it, sperm donors.
There is a subset of couples who can’t make a baby the old fashioned way. So technology and commerce to the rescue!
But IMO statistically speaking that cadre is rather small. To raise the societal birth rate by the numbers needed, it would take a lot more than all the “wants a baby; can’t make a baby” couples getting involved.
It includes couples of gay men as well as women who can’t carry their own baby. But yes, it’s smaller than the cohort of “women who waited to start having babies until their eggs got old”, which is one of the most common infertility problems among my friends.
I suppose my point is that the reason for our inadequate birth rate isn’t individual infertility. That’s a drop in the bucket of all the reasons and all the quantities of babies not born that we / society wish were being born.
So while magically fixing infertility would be darn nice for the individuals / couples involved, it would barely move the needle versus the total baby shortfall our societies have.
I think that improving infertility treatments, and access to them, is part of the solution. I agree that we’ll still need a large dollop of “adjust to a declining population”.
An interesting question comes up. For expository simplicity I’ll focus only on the female side, but similar considerations apply to the male side in an obvious way.
Some unlucky women are infertile their whole life. But every woman becomes infertile eventually. And, as you’ve mentioned, often the “old egg” problem rears its head earlier than the woman expected / wanted. And of course we’ve pointed out many times upthread that individual and hence total fertility is being squeezed between the biological age cutoff at the top end and the increasingly common social habit to start having kids later and later on the bottom end. Fewer years → fewer babies.
The question: What if we magically extended female fertility so nearly all women could bear reliably healthy children well into their 50s? So 50 is the new 30?
Would we get a late-blooming baby boom lasting for generations to come? Or would folks quickly find another set of reasons to delay parenthood until healthy fertility was still touch and go? So society would still be caught between the social desire for late starting and the now-revised biological fertility cut-off?
This may indeed do the trick partly. For a lot of people in their 30s today, they’re still treading water financially desperately in a bad economy and can’t or won’t have kids for that reason. By their 50s, some career women would finally have climbed the ladder somewhat and be making better money and have more money in savings. They also may have felt the clock ticking, or the absence of a family, long enough to have babies.
IMHO, we would se a modest increase in fecundicity, both from women who delayed having kids until they get established financially and then had kids, and also from an increase in “surprise” pregnancies, many of which would be carried to term.
I don’t think we’d see a huge increase, because I don’t think many of the peope who delay childrearing to get financially established WANT a huge pack of children. But I think a lot of them want 1-3 kids. And today, some of them achive that with medical help, but some don’t. I have friends in both categories.
I thought this was relevant:
On average, Italian women are now having just 1.18 babies, the lowest level ever recorded. That’s under the EU average fertility rate of 1.38 and far below the 2.1 needed to sustain the population.
There’s no way in hell those people who have procured 21 infants (that we know of) via surrogacy are looking for a big happy family, there should be limits. I wonder if they all have valid birth certificates, I suspect there may be some child trafficking going on.
I’d sooner believe we have some garden variety crazy going on.
The only difference is these folks can afford to hoard children while the usual animal hoarders can only afford cats. It’s still just crazy at work.
You might be right about more sinister ideas.
That article does not go into a lot of statistical detail, but quotes some women as saying they would appreciate more sponsored services like free kindergarten. Raising a kid, possibly on one’s own, while juggling a career and other responsibilities is not going to be easy even in the best case.
In some societies, there is an imperative to have children as a hedge against the future. Where and when there was a high infant mortality rate, that was an additional factor, together with a lack of easily available birth control.
For most countries, none of those factors apply. The “nuclear family” is a thing of the past. The elderly have their own resources, or the State is there as a backstop. This, along with social and financial pressures and, for many, a reluctance to take responsibility for a child in what they see as a dysfunctional society, adds up to a decline in birth rates around the world.
I have two young grandchildren, and when I read of all the problems faced by today’s youth, I genuinely worry about how they will cope, even though they are supported by two parents.