Fertility and the foundations of society
What does the dwindling fertility rate mean for our shared future?
Fertility is a vexed subject. It’s not just deeply personal and awkwardly biological, it also raises contentious and intensely social questions, like whether we’re having enough babies or too many for the common good. When private and public interests intersect like this, it’s tempting to hurry on by and talk about something safer instead. But the topic received renewed attention when, earlier this year, Stats NZ released statistics showing that the fertility rate continues to nose-dive. In 2020, the total fertility rate hit a new low of 1.61 live births per woman, down from the peak of 4.31 in 1961 and well below the rate needed to maintain our population. What does this mean for our future?
There are plenty of theories about what’s causing our lack of baby-making, from tight underwear to the millennial “sex recession” to social and economic pressures. Nor is this theorising new—in 1674, The Women’s Petition Against Coffee complained that “excessive use of that drying, enfeebling liquor” was making men “as unfruitful as those deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought.” The Petition is probably satirical, but New Zealand’s dwindling fertility is very real. My focus, though, is on consequences rather than causes of the change, and on one under-discussed consequence in particular.
I used to say that having children was the biggest blessing and the biggest challenge you would ever experience. I was wrong. Not entirely wrong—for most of us, children do both those things like nothing else—but wrong in thinking that the blessing and the challenge were two separate and opposing experiences. Instead, I came to realise, the challenge is the blessing, and this is what I want to focus on, and what we stand to lose. To put it another way, a lot of the discussion about the consequences of cratering fertility rates focuses on social and economic dimensions—taxes and transfers, catering to an ageing workforce, the spreading rash of retirement villages—in a way that’s, well, rather sterile. Instead, I’m interested in what dwindling numbers of children are doing to our opportunities for character development, for the formation of the moral substrate that underlies all those other issues and makes society itself possible.
Raising children is an exercise in growing your own character, albeit often in a whatever-doesn’t-kill-you-only-makes-you-stronger kind of way. Having children means you’re constantly called to put someone else’s needs before your own—to get up when you finally sat down at the end of a long day, to use hard-won and finite purchasing power on their needs and interests rather than yours, to stay calm when food, paint, toys and all manner of other things are hitting the fan. If you let it, this long, slow grind first reveals to you how selfish you really are, then gradually strips that away from you, layer by aching layer, as you learn to sacrifice. Eventually, hopefully, miraculously, your desires are retrained so that you learn to embrace this self-abegnation, to delight at least some of the time in putting someone else first.
This learned capacity to sacrifice is the foundation of a healthy society, one that has a future as something more than an assortment of individuals and identity groups who happen to occupy the same place at the same time by some accident of history. The late Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the UK, argued that, “A free society is a moral achievement,” dependent on bonds of trust. Trust is given—or withheld—in proportion to our belief that those around us have some concept of “we” rather than “I,” that when necessary they will put our common interests ahead of their private and personal ones. Morality and trust, and therefore society, depend on every person’s ability to be other-centred rather than self-centred. There are many ways we can acquire this ability, and family life is one of the most important. As Sacks said, “Morality is the love between husband and wife, parent and child – uncommanded because it is assumed to be natural – extended outward to the world.”
Developing the capacity for sacrificial love is also good for us personally. For example, Harvard professor Arthur Brooks argues that sacrifice can make us happier. Among other things, it develops our capacity for self-efficacy, that is, “confidence in one’s ability to control one’s own behavior,” which research shows “strongly predicts well-being in many areas of life.” This is the case so long as sacrifices are made for positive reasons (to benefit others), not for “avoidance” reasons (to sidestep negative consequences). And stepping outside the efficacious yet somewhat austere realm of social science, philosophy, theology, and lived experience all confirm that being able to delay or even forgo your own gratification makes you a better human being, to your own benefit and that of those around you.
Of course, having children is not the only way to learn to sacrifice, but it is an important one. Other family relationships or kin networks, commitments made to friends, even devotion to causes and ideals, can all inspire us to incredible acts of self-denial. Nor does having children automatically mean that we learn to sacrifice; it’s perfectly possible to produce litters of offspring and yet remain self-centred, to be neglectful, even, in a tragic handful of cases, abusive. But I suspect that this is very much the exception rather than the rule. There’s something visceral about our relationship to our children, not to mention the frequency of our contact with them, that has the potential to shape and mould us perhaps like nothing else. And as the number of children in a family multiplies, so your level of control decreases and your opportunities for character development increase.
So the consequences of a dwindling fertility rate are not merely numerical, like the concern that caregiving youth will be outnumbered by the infirm elderly. They are moral and formational, with the entire foundation of a cohesive society at stake. In his book, Morality, Rabbi Sacks presented evidence and arguments that we are becoming an increasingly short-sighted, narrow-minded, atomised and individualistic culture. With fewer children in our lives to shape us—with that strange mixture of vulnerability, joy, sorrow, hope, and heart-stopping love that they induce—expect to see our society continue its headlong rush down this path.
A (slightly) revised and abridged version of this article was published by Stuff on 5 June 2021 titled “Foundations of society at stake as birth rate nose-dives”.