The West has been below replacement fertility once before. Then came the Baby Boom. Understanding that boom may help us deal with today’s bust.
In 1800, the average British woman had 4.97 children over the course of her life, about the same amount as the average woman living in Burkina Faso today. A century later, Britain’s fertility rate had slipped to 3.9 children per woman. And thirty years later, in 1935, it had plummeted to 1.79, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 – the number of children per woman needed to keep the population steady.
This trend occurred across Europe. By the 1920s, over half of Europeans lived in a country with a below-replacement fertility rate, including Sweden, Germany, and the Czech Republic. The US and Canada also saw steady declines in family sizes throughout the nineteenth century. In 1800, the average American woman had over seven children. By 1900, she had fewer than four, and, by 1930, fewer than three.
France’s fertility rate had begun slipping even earlier, to great alarm. In 1896, an organisation called the Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française was born. Created expressly to combat denatalité – essentially, de-population – it had attracted some 40,000 members by the 1920s with novelist Emile Zola an early recruit. The Alliance nationale was merely one of many organisations, local and national, established to resist France’s apparent progress towards what demographer and statistician Dr Jacques Bertillon despairingly called ‘the imminent disappearance of our country’.
French pronatalists frequently and vividly campaigned on the issue as a serious matter of national security. In 1914, the Alliance nationale published over a million posters showing two Frenchmen being bayoneted by five Germans. The poster bore a caption explaining that for every five German soldiers born, only two French soldiers were.
The French were not the only nation to chafe against a new reality of smaller family sizes and quieter maternity wards. The British government established the National Birth Rate Commission in 1912. In fascist Italy, the ‘Battle for Births’ was named one of Mussolini’s four key economic campaigns in 1922.