Kristen Gyles | Birth rate increase at what cost?

We can learn a lot from China’s infamous one-child policy. It was certainly well-intentioned, but as some say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Coming out of the Great Chinese Famine in the early 1960s, China’s economy suffered greatly and population control seemed like the best route for a government that constantly had more mouths to feed than meals. In 1980, the Chinese government implemented what the world now calls the one-child policy. The one-child policy was intended to reduce the country’s birth rate, which would eventually reduce the size of the overgrowing population. The policy was enforced for three and a half decades until 2016 when it seems the government realised they had made a grave mistake.

Strictly from the standpoint of numbers, the one-child policy may not have been a bad idea, but it turned out to have horrible social consequences.

Imagine being an only-child surrounded by only-children. You don’t know what it is like to have siblings and now your parents’ greatest hopes and dreams all rest on you. You are under immense pressure to get an education, get a well-paying job, live an upstanding life, get married and have children. Except that, since you live in a country with so many other only-children, the pool from which to choose a life partner has dwindled. Furthermore, as an only-child, you have the sole responsibility of supporting your ageing parents and grandparents.

EVENTUAL ERASURE

After long enough, if you do manage to bring into the world another only-child like yourself, that child would have no aunts, no uncles, no cousins and they would never have nieces or nephews. The consequence would be the eventual erasure of ‘family’ as we know it. Many family-run businesses would eventually collapse, and overall national development would suffer as there would be fewer young people to challenge outdated systems and drive innovation. As the workforce shrinks, the country’s economic output would also decrease.

These are some of the issues that the Chinese government had to grapple with over the 35 years of the one-child policy. In 2016, rather than finally relinquishing its attempted chokehold on population size, the government decided to adjust the policy to allow each household two children. Then, in 2021, after a few years of realising this just wasn’t drastic enough to correct what had become a rapidly declining birthrate, the government started allowing three children per household. Now, the Chinese government is being advised to scrap the policy altogether and leave its citizens to have fun making as many babies as they want.

Sometimes artificial manipulations to nature’s most solemn and sacred processes and institutions are just not a good idea. Why do humans think they can ‘fix’ everything? When the birth rate isn’t too high, it is definitely too low, and the almighty human certainly thinks he can make it just right.

The Jamaican birthrate has been falling for some time and is now below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, as is the case in many countries. Naturally, some have been saying we ought to ‘act now’, ‘move swiftly’ or ‘devise an urgent plan’ to address the decreasing birthrate. What plan though? What exactly can or should the government do to solve this ‘problem’ of decreased births?

Let’s start by establishing that paying women to have children is a horrible idea. Some governments have gone this route but are likely to pay dearly through eventual social decline. One of US President Donald Trump’s priorities has been to encourage the acceptance of traditional family values by Americans. A part of this thrust is to get American women to embrace motherhood and to start having more children. One strategy that came under consideration was the payment of a US$5,000 baby bonus to new mothers after delivery. So, the idea seems to be that a one-time US$5,000 payment will make women forget about all the reasons that made them less than enthusiastic about childbirth in the first place.

WON’T BE EASY

Trying to induce interest in child rearing is like trying to get any Jamaican scammer to leave their lucrative life of fraud to get up at 5 a.m. each day for a job at the nearby call centre. That certainly won’t be easy. But achievability aside, only people who want to have children should be having children. It doesn’t matter whether the birth rate is declining or not. If a US$5,000 cheque is going to make the difference between whether you decide to have a child or not to have a child, should you really be having a child?

What happens when the child arrives? Will the extra five grand hug the child, kiss the child and wipe the child’s tears? Will the money suddenly cultivate the patience, tolerance and understanding in either the mother or father, necessary to raise the child with emotional maturity and stability? Will that money provide a loving home for the child? Do we not care about these things any more? Birth rate policies and incentives may solve the issue of numbers, but they do not solve the issue of societal decay. Increasing the number of children born to parents who do not want them, and who are unwilling to do the leg work of actually raising them is a recipe for disaster.

And yes, there is a caveat. Some women want to have children they just don’t want to have them under their current circumstances which may include poverty, singleness or ill-health. We can and should try to fix those circumstances. However, there is a thin line between supporting struggling women who want kids and coercing women who don’t want kids into having kids.

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com