It seems to me if we are having 2.5 children in the US. currently and the drop in marriages and the hold out of marriage do to careers and divorces and so on. And people not believing in marriage and living together, it seems to me that we may be in some trouble in the years to come. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Holy Family pray for us. What if anything can we do to stop this unholy trend? We must protect marriage and children!Thanks for the graph. What is startling is that 40 percent of the women having babies in 2011 are unwed mothers
Yes. Out of wedlock births help to ensure the continuation of poverty and the decline of family. And yet without those births, our total fertility rate would be even lower, ensuring a more quickly declining population. The trends are not good.
Orthodox Catholics are perhaps best suited to benefit from this situation. If they really focused on the family and had 3-6 kids and raised them well, the opportunity to be a significant global influence is there.
I think here in the US. we are being brought over this Communist lead sterilization ideas indirectly and mostly through the media and it’s shows. Most of these social ideas have trickled through from Europe where mass exterminations and genocide occurred. There mindset has been welcomed by many in the social media and by our intellects. Let’s keep up in prayers and support of children.
If you consider how many parents are married from a child’s birth to the completion of the child’s education, it is even worse. Single mothers who marry after the birth of their children and divorce later leave themselves and their children even worse off emotionally and financially than single mothers who refrain from marriage.
Fertility Levels and Trends as Assessed in the 2012 Revision of World Population Prospects, prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, presents a concise description of current fertility levels around the world, historical trends in the level and timing of fertility and projections of fertility to 2100, including the relative impact of fertility on population growth. The key findings of this report are:1. Total fertility worldwide is currently about 2.5 children per woman but this masks considerable diversity, with 12 countries or areas with total fertility above six children per women while 75 have below-replacement level fertility. The least developed countries have the highest total fertility at above 4.5 children per woman.
There’s plenty of open areas. Fly over the U.S. Fly over Kansas! It’s all open areas. The fact is that people tend to congregate in the higher population density cities–New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Not many people are migrating to Colby, Kansas, despite all the open areas.
I agree that there are plenty of open areas. I think our disagreement is that I don’t see open areas as blank pieces of land in need or even rightfully available for development. These open areas are inhabited by various plants and animals. Spreading to those areas means displacing or destroying the native life.
When you actually dig into the UN population division website and read the individual papers discussing methodology and assumptions you find that this assumption of a rebound in European fertility is almost pure speculation. It amounts to little more than “Well surely it can’t stay that low forever.” So far, UN demographers appear unwilling to seriously study the profound differences that cheap and socially respectable contraception have on a culture in the long term. The historical record of mature urban societies from the late 1800’s to the 1930’s (when contraceptives starting becoming respectable in industrialized countries) shows that second and third generation urbanites ALREADY had hit about 2.1 TFR as a norm well before modern contraception came along. Urban life inherently economically punishes larger families and pushes people towards a later start to marriage than rural life. In short, human populations tend to be designed towards stable population levels except during massive cultural disruptions (such as the industrial revolution)l. What widespread contraception does is to disrupt the natural self-regulating mechanisms and cause long term sub-replacement fertility.
As noted above, urban economics naturally tend towards smaller families. Good earnings require more education, leading to later marriage ages which significantly reduces family sizes all by itself. (Few people realize how much difficulty a 30 year old woman is likely to have trying to conceive her first child). Add in the fact that in agricultural life, a 10 year old child is already a productive family worker, while in urban life a child is economically a drain on family finances until he’s 18-22 years old (these days often longer!). The historical record shows that modern contraception isn’t necessary to hold stable native urban populations in the long run. Urban populations grow from people moving there from rural (stage 2) high growth areas, not native population growth.
Those low fertility areas are projected to show very little change, and the 2012 projections (data driven) are lower than those using the previous model:
Thanks for the numbers. It looks even worse than this mild account you’ve provided. Zero-population growth rates are next on a schedule of reductionary population growth tables. China is there, we’re one up from that. Shucks, Chuckie is that my imagination or did we fall for a lie or two in this great land of ours?
Your second paragraph isn’t exactly what I think the “world” needs. It needs to throw away all forms of contraception and sterilization and abortion. It needs to re-evaluate why government funded population control measures are tolerated in the first place. Biblically the only comparison to current population controlling measures by a government was the orders of Pharoah in Egypt to regulate the Jewish population by ordering the murder of the males born of the Jews by the mid-wives in that land. It happened. It is historical. It WAS governmental population control and it was a place of slavery and death. It was God’s right hand raised against that nation that freed the Israelites from that land of death through Moses His servant. It is a very good analogy and there is a seriously needed lesson in it for those who volunteer for governmentally regulated birth rates via legal access to contraception, sterilization and abortion. God said be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. It pleases God when men and women marry and allow God’s procreative actions to flow through their married life. Children are a blessing not a curse and those who reject the gift of fertility are cursing God for the gift of life.
You’re right that the 2012 update did correct the absurd assumption of return to 2.1 in the 2010 projection. That’s the problem having amateur hobbies, it’s hard to keep up to date.