New grandparents riding a baby surge
If predictions are true, many more grandparents will hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet. But not for long.
Key points
- Australia experienced a post-COVID-19 surge in newborns as fertility rates are at a three-year high.
- Global fertility rates are in decline as people have children later.
- Australia is in a fertility disaster.
We started paying attention to population figures back in the 1970s.
The 1973 Hollywood science fiction movie Soylent Green articulated the new unease. It told the story of New York in 2022 when the population had swollen to an 'unbelievable' 80 million. People lived on the streets and lined up for their rations of water and Soylent Green - a high-protein foodstuff allegedly made from plankton cultivated in the seas. (But is it, really?).
Since then, population debates have been wrapped up in politics, demographics, environmental issues, racism, and women’s rights.
It is an issue of confounding paradox where we fear a dystopian overpopulated Soylent Green world of wall-to-wall people - but global fertility rates are in decline as people have children later when human reproductive fitness seriously declines.
In Australia, there is a mini-baby boom. Fertility rates, which refer to the number of children born rather than the ability to have children, are at a three-year high.
Global population paradox
This month, humanity will add its eighth billion member.
Humans have quadrupled in number in less than a century.
Researchers say the speed of population growth has already plateaued and forecast a significant decline. The global fertility rate has been dropping since 1964. The average number of births per woman has decreased from five births to just under 2.5.
Since 1960, we have added billions at stable intervals, of about one every 12 to 14 years. The UN Population Division projects that those intervals will get longer after billion number eight, and humanity will hit its peak by the end of the century at just under 11 billion.
Extremely populated countries, China, and India, both 1.4 billion now, could shrink to 500 million and 1 billion, respectively.
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows the fertility rate rose to 1.7 babies a woman last year with 310,000 births after the nation reported a record-low birth rate of 1.59 in 2020.
Good news for older Australians wanting to be grandparents? Yes! But researchers say it is just a post-COVID-19 bounce and will not last.
Though women aged 30 to 34 continue to have the highest fertility rates, the number of mothers aged 35 to 39 has doubled, and the rate of women aged 40 to 44 having babies has nearly tripled in the past three decades.
Leading fertility expert John Aitken reported that we are amid a fertility disaster with more women in the workforce choosing to become mothers later in life, leaving them to rely on IVF. Additionally, there is a global drop in sperm counts.
“The average age of women in IVF clinics is 37, and occasionally, IVF is not successful - a crucial factor.
“It is an unsustainable population, and it is not surprising that the aged-care system is suffering as there are more elderly people,” Dr Aitken said.
That is the message from the Commonwealth Centre for Population and the Australian National University.
Their report explains the impacts of policies on fertility and blames the decline on modern life. Many individuals' preferences for the desired number of children are higher than the number of children that people eventually have, suggesting that there are barriers to having children.
Among the top five considerations of Australians in having children are:
- The cost of raising children
- The security of their or their partner’s job
- The cost of housing
- Having someone to love
- Age
The report concludes that supportive family policies are needed to stop a rapid decline in our fertility, given the new Australian norm to have both parents involved in paid work while raising the children.
The report suggests the following policies to support families and provide stability for childbearing and childrearing:
- Financial support: Increased government financial support to reduce the cost of having children.
- Parental leave: Reducing childrearing costs, including career opportunities and lost income. The report observes that the uptake of parental leave by fathers has been low.
- Childcare: Enhanced childbearing by increasing work-family compatibility.
- Assisted reproductive technology to counter the increasing proportion of women finding it difficult to get pregnant.
For further reading: ABS 1, ABS 2, ABS 3, ABS 4, Population.gov.au, BigThink, The Australian
