We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition. ...

Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women's relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.

A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust.

Labels: adultery, class, culture, Europe, gender, homosexuality, men, premarital sex, race, religion, sex, women

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...In his work on European family life, UCLA demographer Patrick Heuveline finds that

in most [European] countries children born to cohabiting families are two to four times more likely to see their parents separate than are children in married households.

Even in Sweden, children are worse off when mom and dad cohabit. Demographers Sheela Kennedy and Elizabeth Thomson find in their recent study that children born to cohabiting parents are 75% more likely to see mom and dad break up, compared to children born to married parents.

So, in part because cohabitation does not offer the same rituals (a big ceremony), norms (commitment), and practices (fidelity) to partners, their family and friends, and their communities as does marriage, my bet is that cohabitation is not soon likely to deliver stability to kids in the way that marriage does–even in fair Sweden.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, Europe, Marriage, Sweden, unmarried parents, W. Bradford Wilcox

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Does India need a new independence struggle?

The fight this time would not be against British colonialism, but rather against the United Kingdom's approach to regulating reproductive medicine. At a time when India is considering a sort of match-making service for Western couples seeking to hire Indian surrogate mothers, the UK government has announced the abolition of two leading medical regulatory agencies.

Meanwhile, as these countries move farther down the road to free markets in reproductive medicine, France is debating all of its bioethics laws - and continuing to stand up for a different model - focused on social justice and protection of vulnerable women. There is an alternative simply to letting the market decide, the French Assembly insists. ...

Proponents of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Regulation Bill 2010, now before the Indian Parliament, employ a similar rhetorical twist. They say that the bill actually protects surrogate mothers - for example, by limiting the number of pregnancies they can undergo. But the law would make surrogacy contracts legally binding, requiring the mother to give up the baby even if she changes her mind.

Opponents say that the agencies making the arrangements will be the biggest winners - that the huge profits they reap will dwarf the fees paid by foreign couples to the women bearing their children. As NB Sarojini and Aastha Sharma wrote in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, "The Bill actively promotes medical tourism in India for reproductive purposes."

Labels: donor conception, economics, Europe, France, India, poverty, surrogate motherhood, United Kingdom

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ONE in three babies is now born out of wedlock in this country.

The percentage of babies born outside of marriage rose to 33.8pc nationwide in the third quarter of last year -- an increase of 2.3pc over the same period in 2005, new Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures reveal.

The figures also reveal striking variations between the number of babies born to unmarried parents in urban and rural locations.

City dwellers are far more likely to have a child outside of wedlock than their rural counterparts.

Labels: children, Europe, Ireland, out-of-wedlock births

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Germans have serious doubts about marriage, monogamy and life-long partnerships, according to a survey released on Thursday.

Some 53 percent believe most couples won’t stay faithful during their marriage or partnerships. And an overwhelming 80 percent think divorce is no big deal, according to GfK market research firm's survey of 2,028 men and women from throughout the country. ...

About a third of the roughly 375,000 German marriages that take place each year end in divorce, according to government statistics. But contrary to popular opinion, many of the failed marriages last quite a long time – on average they end after more 14 years.

Labels: adultery, divorce, Europe, Germany, Marriage, women

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Hungarian lawmakers approved a socially and fiscally conservative new constitution Monday that was blasted by rights groups and the political opposition for measures including a ban on gay marriage and protection of the life of a fetus from conception. ...

Same-sex couples may legally register their partnerships but marriage is restricted to heterosexual relationships.

Labels: abortion, domestic partnership, Europe, gay marriage, Hungary, Marriage

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A revolution is sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. No, not the one you've been hearing about in the media -- all the protests against dictatorship and oppression, in Egypt and Tunisia, and most violently, in Libya. The revolution I'm referring to certainly affects all those countries, profoundly, but its effects promise to outlast any change of regime, or even any new constitutions. Barely noticed by the West, many Muslim societies are experiencing a demographic transformation that is going to make them look far more European: more stable, more open to women's rights and above all, more secular. That change underlies all the current political upsurges. ...

But here's the problem. In just the last thirty years or so, those very Middle Eastern countries that used to teem with children and adolescents have gone through a startling demographic transformation. Since the mid-1970s, Algeria's fertility rate has collapsed from over 7 to 1.75, Tunisia's from 6 to 2.03, Morocco's from 6.5 to 2.21, Libya's from 7.5 to 2.96. Today, Algeria's rate is roughly equivalent to that of Denmark or Norway; Tunisia's is comparable to France. Counter-intuitively, that remark about "the closer to Rome" also holds good on the southern, Muslim, side of the Mediterranean. ...

Such a wrenching change cannot fail to have political implications. In a country with a Third World fertility rate, it is very unlikely that women will seek or be granted education: their designated career path as mothers is starkly clear. Meanwhile, adolescents and young men proliferate, and provide ample cannon fodder for armies or militias, to whom life is cheap. (Yemen's fertility rate is still over 5.0, Somalia's is 6.4). But then imagine a newer, more European society, in which men and women are intensely concerned about their nuclear families, and have invested their love and attention into just one or two offspring. As citizens become more educated, they are not prepared to accept the demagoguery and systematic corruption that has long passed for government in those regions. They see themselves as responsible members of a civil society, with aspirations that demand to be met: they feel they deserve full democratic participation. Of course the recent turmoil began in Tunisia, with its very low fertility rate and its intimate ties to France.

Sudden demographic change also seems to be closely linked to secularization, a point of potentially great significance in the Middle East. Smaller family sizes can result from a decline in religious ideologies, but falling fertility can itself drive such a decline, as has happened in modern Christian Europe.

Labels: demographics, Europe, Islam, Middle East, religion, Tunisia, women

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What is a mistress? Elizabeth Abbott, who has also published A History of Celibacy and held the post of Dean of Women at Trinity College, University of Toronto, offers this definition: “a woman voluntarily or forcibly engaged in a relatively long-term sexual relationship with a man who is usually married to another woman”. Given the persistence of this model across time and cultures, Abbott maintains that “mistressdom”, like celibacy, is therefore an essential means by which to consider sexual relationships outside marriage – “in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage”. Considering the media’s current obsession with love-rat footballers and cheating celebs, “mistressdom” might also be considered a safe bet for a publisher’s list, and Abbott duly provides us with a generally cheerful tumble through adultery down the ages. ...

...Bess’s critics, the author claims, held her up to “a standard of independence she did not possess”. Here is the paradox that stalks the book. Abbott is keen to portray her mistresses as feisty, autonomous characters who chose mistressdom as a means of negotiating with, and often defeating, the oppression of patriarchy, yet their very powerlessness in the face of that culture is invoked as an excuse which belies the premiss. She regrets Lady Caroline Lamb’s collusion in history, remembering her only as Byron’s mistress (as though anyone would bother to read Glenarvon otherwise), implying that all mistresses are at some level victims, yet claiming their problematic historical status as evidence of ingenious agency.

This contradiction is at its most uneasy in the chapter entitled “Sexual Unions and the Jewish Question”, where Abbott discusses Nazi men who committed the crime, as defined by the Third Reich, of Rassenschande, or race defilement through sex. Over 4,000 people, Jews and Gentiles, were convicted of Rassenschande in the 1930s, and as the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss recalled, women’s greater role in propagating “racial pollution” led to further measures of horror than even men endured. In the hell of the camps, Abbott observes that Bett-Politik, “bed politics”, might be a woman’s only recourse. ...

Abbott’s concluding chapters struggle awkwardly towards a coherent thesis – the boundary between coercion and volition is never satisfyingly addressed, while those between prostitute, concubine, mistress and wife are blurred to suit. Notwithstanding a section devoted to the transformation of marriage and mistressdom by the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Abbott opts in the end for victimhood over victory.

Labels: adultery, culture, economics, Europe, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, sexual assault, women

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Some are divorced and disenchanted with marriage; others are young couples ideologically opposed to marriage, but eager to lighten their tax burdens. Many are lovers not quite ready for old-fashioned matrimony.

Whatever their reasons, and they vary widely, French couples are increasingly shunning traditional marriages and opting instead for civil unions, to the point that there are now two civil unions for every three marriages.

When France created its system of civil unions in 1999, it was heralded as a revolution in gay rights, a relationship almost like marriage, but not quite. No one, though, anticipated how many couples would make use of the new law. Nor was it predicted that by 2009, the overwhelming majority of civil unions would be between straight couples. ...

...But the attractiveness of civil unions to heterosexual couples was evident from the start. In 2000, just one year after the passage of the law, more than 75 percent of civil unions were signed between heterosexual couples. That trend has only strengthened since then: of the 173,045 civil unions signed in 2009, 95 percent were between heterosexual couples. ...

France is not the only European nation to allow civil unions between straight couples, but in the few countries that do — Luxembourg, Andorra, the Netherlands — they are not as popular. In the Netherlands in 2009, for example, there was just one civil union for every eight marriages.

Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, civil unions, cohabitation, Europe, France, heterosexual couples, Marriage, religion

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You can't guarantee the longevity of a marriage, but what you can do is play the odds. Researchers have studied marriage success rates from nearly every conceivable angle, and what they've found is that everything from smoking habits to what state you live in can predict how likely it is that your union will survive. Here are 15 ways to gauge whether your marriage is for the long haul—or on the fast track to Splitsville.

1. If you're a married American, your marriage is between 40 and 50 percent likely to end in divorce.

After peaking at 50 percent in the 1980s, the national divorce rate has dropped steadily, but in the public's mind, that outdated "half of all marriages" figure still sticks—and scares. "Inflated divorce statistics create an ambivalence about marriage," says Tara Parker-Pope, author of For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage. "The bottom line is that modern marriages are getting more and more resilient. With each generation, we're getting a little better about picking mates. A different kind of marriage is emerging in this century."

(Source: David Popenoe, "The Future of Marriage in America," University of Virginia/National Marriage Project/The State of Our Unions, 2007)

2. If you live in a red state, you're 27 percent more likely to get divorced than if you live in a blue state.

Maybe that's because red-state couples traditionally marry younger—and the younger the partners, the riskier the marriage. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Oklahoma.

(Source: National Vital Statistics Report, 2003; cited in The Compassionate Community: Ten Values to Unite America, by Jonathan Miller and Al Gore) ...

14. If you're a female serial cohabiter—a woman who has lived with more than one partner before your first marriage—then you're 40 percent more likely to get divorced than women who have never done so.

Although "playing house" seems like good practice for married life, it can also make living together seem less permanent. "People feel like, 'If it doesn't work out, we can just step out of this,'" says lawyer Emily Doskow. Statistics show that marriages preceded by cohabitation have better chances of success when couples became officially engaged before moving in together.

(Source: Daniel T. Lichter, Zhenchao Qian, "Serial Cohabitation: Implications for Marriage, Divorce, and Public Policy," Brown University Population and Training Center, 2007)

15. If you're in a male same-sex marriage, it's 50 percent more likely to end in divorce than a heterosexual marriage. If you're in a female same-sex marriage, this figure soars to 167 percent.

A research team led by Stockholm University demography professor Gunnar Anderson based their calculations on legal partnerships in Norway and Sweden, where five out of every 1,000 new couples are same-sex.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Europe, gay marriage

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Benedict XVI is urging the bishops of Europe to work for the defense of the family and human life, and to fight against intolerance and discrimination of Christians.

The Pope sent a telegram, through his secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, to participants in a plenary assembly of the Council of European Bishops' Conferences.

The assembly began today in Zagreb, and will focus on the theme, "Demographics and the Family in Europe." It will end Sunday.

In the telegram, the Pontiff encouraged the prelates "to continue the important work undertaken and inspire in the Church communities the necessary commitment so that the faithful might be free from intolerance and discrimination and to promote the family and the defense of human life."

Labels: Catholic Church, Europe, Marriage, religion

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The European Union says the number of children born out of wedlock in the 27-nation bloc has doubled over the past two decades and now accounts for over one-third of the region's births.

Eurostat, the EU's statistical agency, said Thursday that 35.1 percent of births in 2008 occurred outside of marriage, up from 17.4 percent in 1990 and 25.1 percent in 1998.

Estonia holds the highest out-of-wedlock birth rate at 59 percent, and every EU nation except Denmark - whose rate remained flat at 46 percent - has experienced an increase.

Eurostat also said EU marriage rates have decreased from 6.3 marriages per 1,000 people in 1990 to 4.9 marriages per 1,000 in 2008. The only EU nations to see an increase in marriages were Denmark, Ireland, Poland, Finland and Sweden.

Labels: Europe, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births

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When you sit on the loo in Ed Houben's tiny bathroom, there's a postcard at eye level that says "Welcome to Maastricht". It's decorated with dozens of smiling tadpole-shaped creatures homing in on the words with cheerful intent. It's a little touch to make his visitors smile; after all, most of them are here for Ed's sperm.

Houben has been donating sperm for more than 10 years now, first at the local sperm bank and then, after reaching the clinic's legal limit, privately via the internet. Most of his donating is done in his neat, modest flat on an estate on the outskirts of the Dutch town. The T-shirt he's wearing, which declares "Anytime, anyplace, anywhere, anyway", is actually a bit misleading. "In the old days I would gladly travel, and my colleagues covered for me if I was late to work," he says. "But my job at Maastricht's tourism office has changed and I have to be around much more. Now I ask people to come to me."

And they do, from all over the world. Houben has biological offspring in Australia, Israel, Canada, Cyprus, Germany and Luxembourg, as well as at home in the Netherlands. His current tally of donor-conceived children stands at an eye-watering 62, with the 63rd on the way. It is by no means a world record – Houben once watched an episode of Oprah about a man who has fathered 200, a number he says he'll never catch. But he has been called Europe's most prolific sperm donor, and he's happy to accept the title until someone has the, well, balls to challenge him. ...

As it's illegal to sell your sperm in Europe, donation is a vocation rather than a career. Houben got the calling in 1999, after witnessing the trials and heartbreak of childless friends undergoing fertility treatment. Donor numbers were declining dramatically in the Netherlands (from 900 in 1990 to 200 in 2002) and those affected by the shortage, particularly lesbian couples, turned to the internet. With his state-sanctioned quota fulfilled, and much more to give, Houben started placing ads on the websites and online forums that were springing up. He scored with his very first attempt; the day we meet, that child is celebrating her seventh birthday. ...

And like many of the online donors, he is also an experienced practitioner in "natural insemination" – in other words, sex. Sperm donor forums bristle with terminology, but the most regularly used are AI and NI, and there is considerable debate in the community as to whether offering NI makes you a hero, an opportunist or a pervert. FSDW instantly bans any donors offering NI; Co-parentmatch says it recommends against donors who insist on NI only. But John says it remains an important option for those who want to hurry the process along "if they feel their fertility might be limited, or they want to keep the costs down".

Houben, who also offers NI, agrees. "From my own experience, statistically NI is faster," he says, and he has records to back up his claim. "I take off my hat to the guys who only do AI, but if people are coming all the way from Italy they don't want to be trying for three years." He only started offering NI when a couple specifically requested it – and he got a further shock when he discovered that the boyfriend expected to be present at the insemination. Fortunately his sense of duty prevailed.

Labels: culture, donor conception, Europe, Fathers, sex, United Kingdom

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Couples of different European nationalities will be able to choose which divorce laws will apply under a new deal struck between 14 countries on Friday. ...

Justice ministers meeting in Luxembourg "reached agreement on a decision authorising the first enhanced cooperation in the history of the EU," the bloc said in a statement.

"The proposal would allow (couples) to know in advance which law is applicable to their divorce.

"It would increase flexibility and autonomy by giving spouses a possibility to choose the applicable law to their divorce or legal separation and it would set clear rules for cases where no law has been chosen." ...

The European parliament has still to pass the deal, but from a group of eight countries originally two years ago, another six have since joined up.

The full list is: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain.

While countries including Britain chose to remain outside the group, they nevertheless gave the nod to the agreement.

Labels: divorce, Europe

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Germany reported last week that its birthrate has reached a historic low. That doesn’t bode well for Europe’s largest economy as it struggles to support a graying population. ...

I’d put the reasons into two categories. One has to do with the structure of German society. Many schools let out earlier than in other European countries. Mom or dad must be home to cook the main midday meal. Then follow the afternoon child activities. This set-up makes it very hard for a parent to work, forcing a choice between parenthood and a full-time job.

Another big structural hurdle: Daycare in Germany is limited. You should have heard the bitter complaints of the working women of East Germany when reunification caused many of their state-run daycare centers to close. At that time, daycare in West Germany was almost unheard of. This is another structural norm that forces a parent to choose between work and having a child.

But attitude also plays a role. The Germans themselves admit they could be more child-friendly. My best German friend tells of being shooed away as a child when she tried to play in the courtyard of her apartment building.

Labels: children, day care, demographics, economics, Europe, gender, Germany, natalism

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Ireland had the highest fertility rate of the 27 EU member states in 2007, followed by France and the UK. ...

New data released today by the Central Statistics Office also reveals that 44% of all first births in Ireland in 2007 took place outside marriage.

Up to 28% of second births were outside marriage and 22% of third births.

Labels: demographics, Europe, Ireland, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births

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A heterosexual Austrian couple have embarked on a court battle to have their relationship legally recognised as a "registered partnership" - a new form of civil union for same-sex couples.

Helga Ratzenboeck and Martin Seydl say they don't want a traditional marriage and insist that the law should be blind to gender and sexuality.

Meanwhile, the kind of pared-down marriage they want is proving a huge hit with straight couples in France, where 95% of couples taking up the pacte civil de solidarite (Pacs) in 2009 were heterosexual.

As the number of straight French couples opting for Pacs has grown, the number of marriages has shrunk, to the point that there are now two couples entering into a Pacs for every three getting married.

'A little bit equal'

In both Austria and France, some gay couples are fighting for the right to full marriage. Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Norway are currently the only European countries allowing same-sex marriages. ...

Austria is the eighth EU country to have introduced partnerships for same-sex couples. They are very similar, but not the same as marriage. The others are Britain, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary and Slovenia.

Austria's "registered partnerships" do not bring adoption rights or access to fertility treatment, but despite more than 70 differences, gay and lesbian groups tended to see their introduction on 1 January as significant progress for a conservative, Catholic country.

Some, like Kurt Krickler of Viennese gay rights group HOSI, were pleasantly surprised at how far the partnerships went. Particularly surprising, he says, is that that it offers non-Austrian partners a right to work in Austria, where fears about immigration run very high.

Supporters cite a number of reasons why registered partnerships are better than marriages. Dissolving a marriage can take up to six years, while for registered partnerships it takes three at most. The law also puts more emphasis on openness and honesty than on strict sexual fidelity.

Labels: adultery, Austria, civil unions, culture, discrimination law, divorce, Europe, France, gay marriage, heterosexual couples, Marriage

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Whenever demography is the subject a panicky headline usually follows. Generally these take the form of anxieties about overpopulation. “Are there just too many people in the world?” asks Johann Hari in the Independent. “The World’s population is still exploding,” confirms the Optimum Population Trust (patron David Attenborough). Though equally they could be about the opposite. “Is Europe Dying?” queries Catholic apologist George Weigel (before answering his own question: “The brute fact is that Europe is depopulating itself”). “Falling birth rate is killing Europe says Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks” is the Guardian’s offering. To these hysterical headlines let’s add another, especially for you secular folk: with birth rates of seven babies per women fundamentalists will take over the world. And here is the kicker: it’s all secularism’s fault.

Cover image by Martin RowsonThis grim prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books. If, like me, you skip the six dense chapters of politico-demographic analysis, in the very last line of the book you can find his answer: “The religious shall inherit the earth.” There is, of course, an “unless” and we’ll get to that later, but let’s just let the idea sink in first.

What Kaufmann is arguing is that the secularisation thesis, the assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a lessening of religious belief and a day when we are all rational humanists, is wrong – at one point Kaufmann approvingly quotes Rodney Stark and Roger Finke’s view that this is “a failed prophecy”. Further he is saying that there is something about our current form of liberal secularism that contains (here’s another headline) the seeds of its own destruction. Since the birth rate of individualistic secular people the world over is way below replacement level (2.1 in the West), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists is way above (between 5 and 7.5 depending on sect), then through the sheer force of demography religious fundamentalism is going to become a much bigger force in the world and gain considerable political muscle. Literalist religious conservatism is being reborn and we secular liberals are the midwives.

So there’s the challenge.

Labels: Amish/Mennonites, culture, demographics, Europe, Israel, Judaism, religion

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With more than one in five Japanese 65 or older, the government is encouraging citizens like Tsuneko Hariki of Kamikatsu to work well past traditional retirement age.

In Kamikatsu, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, officials have set up an agricultural cooperative whose members log on to computers daily to check the fluctuating prices of the produce that they grow. Then they go out and pick whatever is fetching the best price that day. Unusual, yes, but what’s truly surprising about this cooperative is the average age of its members: 70. In a country where lots of folks retire at 60, Kamikatsu’s residents are working well into their senior years—and they’re doing so not only to buoy retirement earnings but also to energize the local economy. With nearly half of the town’s residents 65 and older, the government realized that there simply wasn’t enough of a traditional workforce available to build or staff most typical industries.

Kamikatsu shows in microcosm what Japan and several other nations now face--and what others soon will. For decades, demographers and economists have watched the world’s fertility rate plunge as countries grew wealthier and more urban. These days, fertility rates in much of the industrialized world are far below replacement levels--that is, the number of kids that parents must have to replace themselves and adults who remain childless. Though the steepest declines happened first in wealthy countries like Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain, even many developing countries have seen their fertility rates head downward. ...

Seeking solutions, a few policy experts have begun looking more closely at the United States. After a big drop in the mid-1970s, America’s fertility rate bounced back and has remained relatively stable, near replacement level--a 30-year-plus pattern that astounds European observers. For a time, demographers explained the difference between the U.S. and other industrialized countries by observing that America’s population was more diverse, with more recent immigrants who had more children. But fertility levels among native-born white Americans also remain higher than among native-born Europeans, and the U.S.’s overall fertility outpaces that of other countries with a high percentage of foreign-born residents.

Demographers have also speculated that the higher fertility rate is a function of America’s being a more religious country, reasoning that those who engage in organized religious activity favor larger families. One survey found 46 percent of Americans attending religious services regularly, compared with just 4 percent of Japanese, 7 percent of Swedes, and 16 percent of Germans. Yet fertility rates have remained stable in the U.S. even as they have plummeted in religious fundamentalist countries like Iran and Jordan, as well as in developing countries like Mexico, where rates of religious attendance remain higher than in America.

Faced with these contradictions, some scholars are now positing the distinctive nature of the U.S. economy and its labor market as a principal reason why Americans are having so many kids. “In general, women (and couples) are deterred from having children when the economic cost--in the form of lower lifetime wages--is too high,” wrote economists Francesco Billari, José Antonio Ortega, and Hans-Peter Kohler in a 2006 study. “Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then reenter the labor force.”

Labels: demographics, economics, Europe, Italy, Japan, natalism

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Ever since the days of the British political economist Thomas Robert Malthus [1766-1834], demographic commentators have been faulted for excessive despondency, for being overly ready to find ubiquitous "population problems" in virtually every new demographic development. Be that as it may, serious or even disastrous population problems can still threaten real existing countries--even today. In fact, we are currently witnessing a demographic crisis of historic proportions right before our very eyes.

The crisis, however, is not ravaging an illiterate and impoverished Third World country. Instead, it is unfolding in a modern, highly-educated nation that sent the first cosmonaut into space: the Russian Federation. Russia is in the grip of startling and anomalous demographic tendencies, trends whose humanitarian and economic consequences are not only self-evidently adverse, but, quite arguably, dire.

Russia today is a society at peace. But judging by vital statistics alone, it looks like a country trapped in a prolonged and devastating war. Since the end of the Communist era, in late 1991, the country's birth rates have collapsed while its death rates have soared. Over the post-Communist era as a whole, Russia has reported three deaths for every two births. The year 2008 was a "good" one for modern Russia: it registered "only" five deaths for every four births.

Since the beginning of 1992, Russia has recorded nearly 13 million more deaths than births, and the country's population has dropped by about 7 million; only a net influx of migrants prevented an even steeper drop. The magnitude of Russia's ongoing population decline (to date) is overshadowed in our post-war epoch only by China's terrible population decline in the immediate wake of Mao's disastrous "Great Leap Forward." China's population decline abated, however, as soon as Beijing's fanatical policies were reversed. Russia's depopulation, on the other hand, shows no signs of a genuine turnaround.

One major component of the "demographic shock" that Russia has been experiencing was a sudden, radical reduction in fertility. In the late Soviet era--the Perestroika period--the Russian Federation's childbearing patterns held more or less at the levels required for long-term population replacement. By contrast, in the early years of the 21st Century, Russia's fertility rates have been almost 40 percent below the replacement level. Although the Kremlin unveiled an ambitious and expensive pro-natal population program several years ago, this seems to have elicited only a modest increase in births. According to official Russian reports, birth totals in the first four months of 2009 were up, albeit slightly, on a year-to-year basis--but death rates remained substantially higher than birth rates. ...

What distinguishes modern-day Russia's demography from the rest of Europe's is not its fertility trends, however, but rather its patterns of mortality and survival, which can be described as shocking--or even disastrous. In the post-war era, the modern world has been all but exploding with health. According to the UN's Population Division, for the planet as a whole, life expectancy at birth jumped by about twenty years between the early 1950s and the early 2000s. Russia has been an exception to this global rule: according to those same UN estimates, the country's life expectancy was actually two years lower in 2000-2005 than in the late 1950s. Though there has been some recovery since 2005, life expectancy for both males and females in the Russian Federation is lower now than it was four decades ago.

Labels: demographics, Europe, natalism, poverty, Russia

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