Maybe some women really just do prefer raising kittens.
We’re in a baby recession, according to this report from KPMG, with 2023 delivering the lowest number of babies since 2006.
Cost-of-living pressures are the sole supposed reason for this, given that there was a little bounceback after pandemic lockdowns amid all that stimulus money.
Yet the overall trend is down, from over two children per woman in 2008 to 1.6 last year.
KPMG urban economist Terry Rawnsley says cost-of-living pressures are having a particularly strong impact: “We haven’t seen such a sharp drop in births in Australia since the period of economic stagflation in the 1970s, which coincided with the initial widespread adoption of the contraceptive pill.”
Ah. Coincidence.
The decline may be 100% a matter of financial feasibility, or perhaps choice contributes just a little bit.
The problem is more dire in Japan, a nation notoriously lukewarm about immigration whose birth rate is down to a record low 1.2.
And in Japan, choice certainly comes into it.
Which is terrible news for the kind of man who thinks women can only be happy when the choice whether to produce children is taken away from them.
Thanks to Donald Trump’s choice of running mate’s choice of words, there’s been a lot of delightful talk in the past week or two about childless cat ladies, and their antimatter counterpart:
I feel bad for all the catless child ladies out there
— Stone Cold Jane Austen (@AbbyHiggs) July 24, 2024
What exactly it is about women who have not personally parturiated that freaks out some men so much is a deeper and darker matter than this column can plumb.
We’ll stick to the simpler questions such as: Why do we need more humans, again?
The global population has quadrupled in a century, thanks to slashed child mortality, thanks in turn to things such as vaccines and antibiotics, and improved living conditions.
Other things such as women’s rights, education, economic independence and access to the pill have mercifully put a brake on that rate of increase, yet the population is still tentatively projected to swell to 9.7 billion in a decade and a half and 10.4 billion around 2080.
The thought that our crowded planet will have to house another two billion-plus humans before millennium’s end sends shudders down the Back Page’s papery spine.
You think real estate is crazy now? There won’t be a tussock without a townhouse on it. Find the traffic a bit much? Think of Beijing’s 12-day traffic jam every day of the week.
Climate change a bit of a problem with our present population? Well, yikes.
The Back Page does understand that the way our economies work, young people are needed to pay for old people, who, thanks again to medicine and public health, just keep getting older. But that’s a bit grim of a reason to engender life and keep us hurtling towards 10 billion.
Instead of searching for ways to incentivise women to have more children, our finest economic minds might please devote themselves to imagining an economy that didn’t depend on ever-increasing growth.
The easiest solution could be – and look, just hear me out – could be to take everything public health has diligently spent a century figuring out about how to prolong life, and throw the campaign train into reverse: advise everyone to smoke more, drink more and do all the things we now know not to do, to take the pressure off the expensive end of life.
It’s a Modest Proposal that Swift (the other one) would be proud of.
Send story tips and pictures of your cats to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
