Are we systematically reducing fertility?

[clstrfbc]

I wonder what the long term significance decreasing fertility is.

Are we systematically destroying the section of the genepool with the highest fertility rates, and preserving the section with the lowest?

What would the long term effects of this fertility reduction be?

There is a clear trend that both live births, and the fertility ratios have been on a steady decline from 1970.

Source: CDC.gov Health United States 2004
year - crude birth rate - fertility rate per thousand population - per thousand live births.
1950 - 24.1 - 106.2
1960 - 23.7 - 118.0
1970 - 18.4 - 87.9
1980 - 15.9 - 68.4
1985 - 15.8 - 66.3
1990 - 16.7 - 70.9
1995 - 14.6 - 64.6
1998 - 14.3 - 64.3
1999 - 14.2 - 64.4
2000 - 14.4 - 65.9
2001 - 14.1 - 65.3
2002 - 13.9 - 64.8

Is there another cause of fertility decline?

 

[AFB]

Originally posted by: clstrfbc

Is there another cause of fertility decline?

Yes, there's no need to have many kids anymore. I don't think it's limited to the US, but more a trend of developed countries.

 

[judasmachine]

Is there not enough of us already? If we illegalize abortion, who is going to pay for the orphanages these kids have to live in? The fact still remains that Nature/God/Buddha/Whatever is simply stemming the tide of a virus like infection.

 

[Kibbo]

A low birth rate seems to be a natural side-effect of wealth. If you think about it, abortion reduces the birth rates primarily of the poor relative to the wealthy. I really don't want to take that thought any futher, I feel dirty.

 

[sandorski]

Are you suggesting there is a correlation between Abortion and Fertility? Unless there is evidence that women who have Abortions have issues with Fertility later on, I don't think there is much to this arguement.

OTOH, Kibbo makes a good point in that Wealthy Societies usually have lower Birth Rates due to other concerns taking precedence over having Children. There are other issues though, one being that some studies have shown that certain chemicals common in our homes act similar to naturally occuring Hormones. Many Soft Plastics are especially troublesome as they leech out chemicals that mimmick Estrogen and may have an impact on Male Fertility.

 

[Harvey]

clstrfbc -- What twist of logic brought you to that conclusion? Coincidence does not equal causation.

 

[clstrfbc]

i have been reading a lot of statistics on health reproduction and abortion lately. So I had ready access to the stats. But as most of you know, "statistics can prove anything, 70% of people know that".- Homer Simpson.

My logic flowed something like, if natural selection allows the strongest of the species to survive. Will competing causes of selection have an effect on the strength of the survivors gene pool?

Whereas for natural selection, the strongest, and most adapted survive. If we interfere with the process of natural selection, specifically relating to fertility, are we breeding in traits that will cause the human race to struggle to survive eventually.

Actually, there is a statistic that says something like 20% or abortions result in steriliity. Which might not sound like much until you figure that there is over a million a year. I'll double check it.

Yes, there's no need to have many kids anymore. I don't think it's limited to the US, but more a trend of developed countries.

I agree people aren't having as many kids, the stats clearly show that. Why not?

For example, in the 1800's the typical family size (not statistically) seemed to be about 6 kids. Families with 8 to 12 is common in historical litterature. Was the cost of children lower then? They still had to provide for them.

I think the number of children is more a function of social expectations then of economy.
Most people (me included) think that raising more than 2 children is impracticle. I'm sure I've said so before. Where did this idea come from, and why? What are some of the most prevalent reasons for limiting family size?

If you say that economy is the main cause, are we saying that we value money more than children? If they only preventing child 3 & 4 is money. Aren't we proving that we would rather have ##,000 a year of discretionary income rather than Susy (baby 3).

So in reality, we have all been infused with the concept that money is more valuable than family.

 

[Jhhnn]

Bah. What a load of manure.

People had more children 200 years ago because women didn't really have a choice, and because birth control wasn't invented. They also needed more births to successfully procreate- the % of children surviving to adulthood was much smaller due to malnutrition and diseases like pertussis, diptheria, typhus, typhoid, smallpox and measles... even croup was often fatal to infants.

Children were also more of an asset in agrarian society, and a necessity for anybody who lived long enough to become infirm, at all...

Ahh, yeh, the good old days, when your chances of making it to adulthood were less than 50%, and average life expectancy was 45 or so...

 

[Harvey]

Maybe it's like the rest of our labor problems. It's cheaper to import 'em than to make 'em, here. Whether or not we need more people, they keep come streaming over the border, legally or otherwise.

 

[clstrfbc]

So you contend that if they had a choice they wouldn't have had as many children? That's a load of manure.

Indirectly, and none to gracefully, you're trying to argue that they didn't have a need for birth control because of high mortality rates and shorter life expectancy.

Should we excpect that we will have to kill more 'useless' members of society, and further reduce the birth rates as medical science continues to advance?


You say children had more value then, even considered a necessity. Are you claiming supply & demand, or decreased value?
If children could be made more productive, we would have more of them?

What necesitates that we only maintain the population? Economically, our country has prospered under expanding populations since its inception. We've become more and more productive even at providing for this population. Why are we suddenly convinced that we should limit reproduction? It seems to be a pretty consistant concept. If the family is not a drain on society, why shouldn't they have more children?

Ahh, yesh, the good old days, when people knew their children, valued them, and raised them themselves.

 

[clstrfbc]

Interesting idea. I wonder.
Traditionaly we have used a lot of immigrant labor. I don't know immigration history that well though.

What was the earliest contraceptive. I am sure the rythm method was used long before 200 years ago. There were lots of contraceptives available. Most of them sound pretty snake-oil but apparently some were effective.History of Female Contraceptives

 

[ViRGE]

clsrtfbc, you may want to take a look at a thread called "Married couples who purposely don't want to have children" over in OT, it borders on some of the same material that you're talking about.

 

[CubicZirconia]

What necesitates that we only maintain the population? Economically, our country has prospered under expanding populations since its inception. We've become more and more productive even at providing for this population. Why are we suddenly convinced that we should limit reproduction?

We haven't been "suddenly convinced" of anything. Societies go through certain stages of fertility. Initially both birth and death rates will be very high. There is a strong demand for labor (think farms) and lack of medicine and technology results in a lot of people dying young. As technology develops and becomes available, death rates start to drop off. The same demand for labor exists, but the increase in medicinal technologies causes a relatively higher birth rate in comparison to the death rate. As a society industrializes, the demand for "child labor" (think farms again) drops off. People move into cities and children become an economic burden, not an economic boon. Parents realize that their families will be better off with two children as a opposed to ten. Over time fertility rates continue to drop and in some industrialized societies the birth rate falls below 2.1 and you see negative population growth.

None of this is meant to say that abortion hasn't been used to keep down birth rates. Infanticide and abortion have been common methods of birth control for centuries. However, I hardly believe that Roe vs. Wade has had anything to do with declining birth rates in the United States. It's all part of a much larger picture that frames up how a society develops over time.

Edit:

Birth Rate Rankings - Top 25

Look at the list. It's no coincidence that almost without exception all of the countries on it are underdeveloped on a world scale.

 

[cquark]

Originally posted by: clstrfbc
My logic flowed something like, if natural selection allows the strongest of the species to survive. Will competing causes of selection have an effect on the strength of the survivors gene pool?

Whereas for natural selection, the strongest, and most adapted survive. If we interfere with the process of natural selection, specifically relating to fertility, are we breeding in traits that will cause the human race to struggle to survive eventually.

The time scales you're talking about are far too small to produce significant selective differences. Racial differences are considered insignificant by most today and it took an order of magnitude longer than human civilization has existed to produce them.

Human culture changes too quickly today for natural selection to have much effect on us. The time span you discuss is only 8 generations, which isn't enough time for any noticeable genetic changes, yet human culture and technology have drastically changed family sizes as you point out.

In other words, don't worry about it. Even if we don't end up taking direct control of the matter through biotechnology, n the thousands of years it will take for natural selection to take what you're talking to into account, human culture and technology will have changed dozens to hundreds of time, redirecting selective pressure in other ways.

 

[cquark]

Originally posted by: clstrfbc
Is there another cause of fertility decline?

Yes, fertility is primarily determined by the level of female education and participation in the work force.

 

[imported_Condor]

Originally posted by: clstrfbc

I wonder what the long term significance decreasing fertility is.

Are we systematically destroying the section of the genepool with the highest fertility rates, and preserving the section with the lowest?

What would the long term effects of this fertility reduction be?

There is a clear trend that both live births, and the fertility ratios have been on a steady decline from 1970.

Source: CDC.gov Health United States 2004
year - crude birth rate - fertility rate per thousand population - per thousand live births.
1950 - 24.1 - 106.2
1960 - 23.7 - 118.0
1970 - 18.4 - 87.9
1980 - 15.9 - 68.4
1985 - 15.8 - 66.3
1990 - 16.7 - 70.9
1995 - 14.6 - 64.6
1998 - 14.3 - 64.3
1999 - 14.2 - 64.4
2000 - 14.4 - 65.9
2001 - 14.1 - 65.3
2002 - 13.9 - 64.8

Is there another cause of fertility decline?

Just having watched the state of Texas try to find the bodies of a woman and her son who were killed because she was pregnant by the killer makes me wonder just how much fertility has dropped. Perhaps the issue isn't with fertility. If the issue were fertility, why would abortion be such a hot button with liberal women? I think what they are seeing is simple contraception by people who want to control family size. (year - crude birth rate - fertility rate per thousand population - per thousand live births.) Birth rate is something that can be managed these days. I don't know, maybe living in a trailer park makes women more fertile?

 

[imported_Condor]

Originally posted by: sandorski
Are you suggesting there is a correlation between Abortion and Fertility? Unless there is evidence that women who have Abortions have issues with Fertility later on, I don't think there is much to this arguement.

OTOH, Kibbo makes a good point in that Wealthy Societies usually have lower Birth Rates due to other concerns taking precedence over having Children. There are other issues though, one being that some studies have shown that certain chemicals common in our homes act similar to naturally occuring Hormones. Many Soft Plastics are especially troublesome as they leech out chemicals that mimmick Estrogen and may have an impact on Male Fertility.

The Ukrainians said that they would live together before marriage and try to have a child. If the woman had had too many abortions to get pregnant, the man wouldn't marry her. They certainly believed there was a danger. Abortion was the principle means of birth control under the Soviet from what my staff told me. If anyone is interested and reads Ukrainian or Russian in Cyrillic, I could probably email for some links.

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

I've always wondered of the decrease in fertility rates is nature's own form of birth control? As population and/or competitive pressures increase on population, fertility rates and sperm count seems to drop in men. I wonder if anyone has ever done studies of fertility rates in animal populations of varying densities to test that theory out? If it manifested itself in that kind of study it could very well be inherent in us as well. With humans though there are mst likely additional influential factors to consider, such as the chemicals in the processed foods we eat, the chemicals we have in our environment, the ones we put in our bodies (cigarrettes, drugs legal and illegal etc).

Eh, just food for thought.

 

[imported_Condor]

For example, in the 1800's the typical family size (not statistically) seemed to be about 6 kids. Families with 8 to 12 are common in historical literature. Was the cost of children lower then? They still had to provide for them.

In the agrarian societies of the time, large families were required to farm. Large families were also supported on the farm. In our current economy, with foodstuffs all being inflated in cost by the huge corporations that purchase and market them, the cost is too great. Also, there were few means to educate children then and it wasn't expected that anyone went to any sort of a university. The first dictionary published in America was published in order to make a little education available to the public. Prior to that, most education came from reading the bible, both here and in Europe.

I think the number of children is more a function of social expectations then of economy.
Most people (me included) think that raising more than 2 children is impractical. I'm sure I've said so before. Where did this idea come from, and why? What are some of the most prevalent reasons for limiting family size?

If you say that economy is the main cause, are we saying that we value money more than children? If they only preventing child 3 & 4 is money. Aren't we proving that we would rather have ##,000 a year of discretionary income rather than Suzy (baby 3).

I think that educated people realize that most of the world?s woes are closely related to overpopulation and try to prevent that. I know that in the US, in the sixties, it was thought to be good to only have two children and those were just to replace the parents. Population was considered out of control back then. The hospital that my wife worked in up to 2001 delivered an average of fifteen babies per day and it was only one hospital in the US. It is not a matter of valuation of money more than children, but of having enough resources available that the children can expect a decent life when we bring them into the world. To phrase it the way you did is to purposefully engineer distortion of values. Your phrasing also leads me to suspect an ulterior agenda outside of the text of your posting. Just spit it out!

This statement is both sneaky and biased! I just can't discern your real objective. "So in reality, we have all been infused with the concept that money is more valuable than family.[/quote]"


Oh, and I fixed most of your grammar and spelling.

 

[Jhhnn]

Well, clstrfbc, whenever birth control methods became available, women wanted and used them.

I didn't mention any members of society being useless.

You disprove your own point by linking the female contraceptives thru history- My own reference was to effective contraceptives, not mere attempts at contraception.

Childbearing wasn't easy or safe, at all, thru much of human history. Women who had a mere 4-6 children, rather than a dozen, may well have been using some form of contraception. It's tough to know the truth, particularly given the taboo nature of the subject and the male dominated methods of recording history and medicine.

Yeh, the good old days, when Mom died of a broken heart when her infants died one after another, or surviving that, died in childbirth leaving the father alone to care for the surviving offspring... orphanages and child labor, how yummy...

Following your theory of economic growth thru big families, we could end up like Bangla Desh- lots of very big families, living in poverty because of lack of resources to even feed 'em... the result of exponential population growth.

 

[imported_Condor]

Originally posted by: clstrfbc
So you contend that if they had a choice they wouldn't have had as many children? That's a load of manure.

Indirectly, and none to gracefully, you're trying to argue that they didn't have a need for birth control because of high mortality rates and shorter life expectancy.

Should we excpect that we will have to kill more 'useless' members of society, and further reduce the birth rates as medical science continues to advance?


You say children had more value then, even considered a necessity. Are you claiming supply & demand, or decreased value?
If children could be made more productive, we would have more of them?

What necesitates that we only maintain the population? Economically, our country has prospered under expanding populations since its inception. We've become more and more productive even at providing for this population. Why are we suddenly convinced that we should limit reproduction? It seems to be a pretty consistant concept. If the family is not a drain on society, why shouldn't they have more children?

Ahh, yesh, the good old days, when people knew their children, valued them, and raised them themselves.

OK, I got it! You are a pro-lifer trying to sneak in the back door!

 

[imported_Condor]

Originally posted by: clstrfbc
Interesting idea. I wonder.
Traditionaly we have used a lot of immigrant labor. I don't know immigration history that well though.

What was the earliest contraceptive. I am sure the rythm method was used long before 200 years ago. There were lots of contraceptives available. Most of them sound pretty snake-oil but apparently some were effective.History of Female Contraceptives

We had a Morman with 10 kids in my last post. What a pain in the backside. He wanted the post to pay for everything and we were obligated to do so. He and the Ambassador were the only ones not in an apartment. He had a house with a pool that he had the taxpayer pay to fill up. Some of the kids were too young to be trusted around a pool. His wife was too busy to properly supervise them. That has pretty much been the case with most large family Mormons that I have known. If you can afford to give them the life they have a right to expect, have them. If you are a working slob with an education and a salary that won't buy a ten room house and a 2K per month grocery bill, then practice contraception and manage family size.

 

[Forsythe]

Originally posted by: clstrfbc

I wonder what the long term significance decreasing fertility is.

Are we systematically destroying the section of the genepool with the highest fertility rates, and preserving the section with the lowest?

What would the long term effects of this fertility reduction be?

There is a clear trend that both live births, and the fertility ratios have been on a steady decline from 1970.

Source: CDC.gov Health United States 2004
year - crude birth rate - fertility rate per thousand population - per thousand live births.
1950 - 24.1 - 106.2
1960 - 23.7 - 118.0
1970 - 18.4 - 87.9
1980 - 15.9 - 68.4
1985 - 15.8 - 66.3
1990 - 16.7 - 70.9
1995 - 14.6 - 64.6
1998 - 14.3 - 64.3
1999 - 14.2 - 64.4
2000 - 14.4 - 65.9
2001 - 14.1 - 65.3
2002 - 13.9 - 64.8

Is there another cause of fertility decline?

What causes fertility problems is pollution, plastic, medicin, sitting on your @ss all day, wearing tight boxers as it heats up your nuts, generally everything that comes from industry is bad.

 

[nageov3t]

it's a trend... the more developed a nation, the longer a person's "youth" is stretched out. in the US right now, anything under 21 is considered to be young-ish, especially if the person is still in college. as a result, people are starting families later (in their late 20's/early 30's, rather than at the age of 16), which subsequently leaves room for less children, especially if the mother is anxious to get back to her career.

that's my theory, anyways, and I don't see it as a bad trend.

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

This thread confuses me. Are we talking fertility, which is the ability of a person to initiate pregnancy - or birth rates, which is primarily based on a conscious decision process whether or not to have children?

On a side note, I read the other day that Hong Kong is considering offering incentives to couples to have children since the birth rate is so dismal here.