Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: ‘Can we afford it?’
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. “We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do.”
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata’s situation is becoming a global norm.
I look at long term trends where the global population peaks in a few decades then heads down all too quickly, and find it important to act to stabilize that at a level a bit below here we are now
It will collapse because we don’t regulate intake. Look at population collapse for rabbits as an example. We’re overconsuming and need to regulate now.
The problem is we’re over-consuming now, over-populating now, but will feel the effects of lower birth rates in 50+ years. There’s extremely delayed feedback on population trends, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
Even conservatives sometime start from a point of truth. The problem is their solution is to turn back rights for women, opportunities for women. Technically correct, if you have no morals or empathy.
For the rest of us concerned about this possibility, society needs to change a lot to remove obstacles from people who do choose to have children. And this would take a couple generations to take effect so we need to start now, to stabilize the dropping population in 50-100 years