The regional sentiment toward the family has shifted — from population planning to population expansion — as labor conditions continue to deteriorate, Nosy Tarsee learned from a demographic analyst.
For decades, Asian nations urged families to have fewer children, fearing that unchecked population growth would hinder economic development or fuel social instability.
Most policymakers now fear that the downshift has gotten out of hand as Vietnam’s total fertility rate has dropped below the level needed to keep the total population from shrinking.
The Philippines, which still has the youngest average population in the region, is reassessing its policies amid a steadily falling birth rate. The fertility rate has dropped sharply to 1.88 children per family, down from the once common norm of more than four.
Not long ago — even in urban areas — it was not unusual to find families with a dozen children, though such households now belong to generations past.
Among Asian nations with populations of 100 million or more, only Pakistan still has a fertility rate above 2.1, but births there have come down by nearly half since 1950, according to United Nations data.
Yet Asia’s two-child policy appears to have entrenched the notion that a small family is adequate and acceptable.
Sometimes the two-child policy involved a degree of compulsion, if not quite as much as the forced abortions that accompanied China’s one-child policy.
Vietnam’s National Assembly voted to amend the population ordinance, removing a baseline policy that limited families to two children.
The shift to a no-limit approach, Health Minister Dao Hong Lan said, would “prevent population decline below the replacement level, a trend that threatens Vietnam’s sustainable economic and social development, as well as its national security and defense in the long term.”
China, until recently the world’s most populous nation, abandoned the one-child policy it had upheld since 1979, allowing parents to have two children and, later, three or more amid growing anxiety about its aging population.
While never as high-profile or as brutally enforced as China’s directive, Vietnam and several other Asian governments implemented two-child policies in parallel that relied on a mix of persuasion and incentives to prod families to limit births.
Many nations overshot their goals.
In Vietnam, for example, the average woman had given birth 6.27 times by 1950, according to UN Population Division data. That number, known as the total fertility rate, has now fallen 70 percent to 1.88 births per woman.
The fertility rates of India and Indonesia, which have each pursued their own versions of the two-child policy, have similarly declined by more than 60 percent, with both now below the benchmark 2.1 level needed to maintain population stability.
More often, however, Vietnam, Indonesia and India relied on a somewhat softer mix of publicity campaigns, penalties, and incentives to nudge parents to limit their childbearing while offering them better access to contraceptives and family planning services.
It seems that the philosophy behind family planning has “outlived its use” as nations in the region now face the prospect of a shrinking workforce and a rapidly aging population.
The Bible remains a durable source of guidance for family life. In Genesis 1:28, God commands Adam and Eve: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.’”