Just how many babies do the Danes want, anyway?

Last updated on: April 10, 2015 at 9:22 am by Jane the Actuary

Just how many babies do the Danes want, anyway? 2015-04-10T09:22:16-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Yeah, I know, I do a lousy job of coming up with intriguing titles. Suggestions, anyone?

But here’s the news report du jour, from the New York Times, “Sex Education in Europe Turns to Urging More Births.”

Europe, and Scandinavia in particular, is known for low teen pregnancy rates achieved by means of sex ed classes that normalize premarital sex and drill contraceptive use, Brave New World-style. And this particular article, after a snippet of such a sex-ed class, goes on to say,

Recently, Sex and Society, a nonprofit group that provides much of Denmark’s sex education, adjusted its curriculum. The group no longer has a sole emphasis on how to prevent getting pregnant but now also talks about pregnancy in a more positive light.

It is all part of a not-so-subtle push in Europe to encourage people to have more babies. Denmark, like a number of European countries, is growing increasingly anxious about low birthrates.

The article continues by discussing worries in Europe about low birthrates, and profiling efforts at boosting fertility in countries with sub-replacement rates, including an ad campaign by a travel agency in Denmark, and concludes with a final quote from the Danes,

Christine Antorini, the Danish education minister, said in a statement that the government was now seeking “a stronger focus on a broad and positive approach to health and sexuality, where sexual health covers both joys and risks associated with sexual behavior.”

Now, ultimately, there’s not much content there — but it does hint at a bigger issue. American progressives are keen on re-creating the European approach to teen sex and sex ed here, and there’s a particular push towards inserting IUDs in teen girls routinely. The assumption is that, by and large, this’ll reduce the number of teen pregnancies, and the number of unplanned pregnancies in general, but won’t impact the overall fertility rate, as these girls, as well as the twenty-somethings who also fall unplannedly pregnant, will eventually have the same number of kids, just later in life when they’re able to financially support them. (Except, of course, for the stereotypical “welfare queens” with a brood of kids, whose fertility would presumably drop substantially in this idealized situation.)

But what if the reverse is true?

The Danes are fretting that they’ve convinced their kids not just to wait until adulthood before pregnancy and parenting, but have convinced them that kids are not worth the effort at any age. If Baby-Think-It-Over is hard work at age 16, after all, why would interrupted sleep be any more welcome at age 26? But have their lessons, instead, been so well-received because these teenagers see that the adults around them already think exactly that: that babies aren’t something they’re particularly interested in?

And, of course, the Danish birthrate, while low (1.73), is not rock-bottom. (See the CIA Factbook.) Germany’s worse, at 1.43 — in fact, I’d label them as the lowest birth rate of any developed country with a “Western”culture and a healthy economy.

Are high teen (and, generally speaking, unplanned) birthrates in wealthy countries simply a by-product of a high overall birthrate? And, if so, is that for Bad Reasons (that is, they’re propping up a birth rate that would otherwise “naturally” be lower) or Good Reasons (that is, they speak to the generally greater openness to children in a given society, which teens absorb as much as anyone else)?

There are a lot of issues to untangle in terms of birthrates. Yes, they are higher among various “undesirables” — Turks in Germany, Arabs in France, Mexicans in the U.S., and the poor on the front page of the Daily Mail, generally speaking. And we can come up with a pretty long list of reasons why parenting is made more difficult in a given society or easier in another. But – in countries were parenting is purely “voluntary,” where there’s no expectation socially, and contraception is plentiful, is the desire to have children (and that, in the plural) at all “natural”?

Or will these low birthrate countries learn that, even if they remedy the material costs of parenting, they still can’t get enough people to sign on, because it’s become viewed as a hobby that people just generally aren’t interested in pursuing?

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