How should a society think about the number of its children?
Birth rates differ widely between countries and in many places have moved a long way within a single lifetime. What do the traditions say a family, and a country, owes to the generation to come?
The picture
What the numbers show, read from the Data library each time the page opens.
How to read the chart above, and the words it uses.
How to read the data
The figure is the average number of children a woman would have over her life at that year’s birth rates. A little above two keeps a population steady without migration; lower means it will shrink in time, higher that it will grow.
Key terms
Fertility rate
Births per woman over a lifetime, at the rates of one year.
Replacement level
The rate that keeps a population the same size without migration.
Population ageing
A rising share of older people, which follows from low fertility and longer life.
Who has a stake
Each interest, then readings from the Catholic library and the Classics library that bear on it, oldest first. Choose a group to read.
Raising children they can feed, house and educate; time, work and health; and the freedom to decide in conscience how many to have, including those who have fewer, or more, than they had hoped.
Being born into a family able to care for them, schooling and prospects, and later the weight of supporting those who are older.
Care, income and company in later life, which depend on family and on the working-age generation.
A workforce, public budgets for pensions, schools and health, and communities of mixed ages; and, where numbers rise, pressure on housing and land.
For discussion
What do parents owe the generation that follows, and what does society owe parents in return?
How should the interests of older people and of those yet to be born be weighed, when both depend on the same families?
Where the number of children is a matter of conscience, what may a society fairly do to ease the choice, and what should it leave alone?
