World map of mean ideal number of children for women (of reproductive age: 15-49).
Source: DHS Program (map it yourself)
See also my region specific posts on fertility preferences in:
This map fills in the spots elsewhere.
South America: Constricting the sample to surveys performed in the 2010s, it seems the region is converging to low 2.0’s levels, with Brazil reaching 2.3 as early as 1996 (TFR is now at less than 1.7, with whites entering outright natural decrease). Ergo for Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia as of 2010s surveys. So they can now be expected to follow in Brazil’s footsteps.
Mexico: 3.0… but its survey dates from 1987, so will surely be lower now.
Central America: Clusters around 3.0. The last demographic reservoir of migrants to the US, but it will be coming to an end in the next 2 decades, just as Mexico had exhausted its reserves by the 2010s. At which point the Hispanic population percentage in the US can be expected to reach saturation point.
Ukraine: Has an ideal fertility rate of 2.0 in 2007, which is broadly in line with East-Central Europe and Mediterranean during that period, and slightly lower than contemporaneous Russia. Nothing surprising here. I wonder if there have been any surveys of ideal fertility in the Ukraine since.
Turkey: Still a pretty vigorous 2.8 as of 2013.
Egypt: 3.0 as of 2014, unchanging since 1988 (when 2.9).
Central Asia: Only countries with 2010s surveys are Kyrgyzstan (3.9) and Tajikistan (3.4). Kyrgyzstan is virtually unchanged from 1997, when it was at 3.7. So no cause to expect a demographic transition there anytime soon.
Indonesia: 2.6 children in 2017, having declined monotonously from 3.2 children 1987.
India: Now at just 2.2 children in 2015-16 (down from 2.9 in 1992-93), i.e. in line with the Med and East-Central Europe in 2000s, but at a much lower development. I suspect Indian TFR will crash to one of the very lowest rates in the world by mid-century.
Bangladesh is at exactly the same level, with 2.2 children seen as ideal.
Pakistan is not subject to these trends: Currently at 3.9 ideal children as of 2017-18, unchanged from 4.1 in 1990-91.
Afghanistan: Ideal children at 5.6 in 2015.
Yemen: 4.3 by 2013, down from 5.4 in 1991-2.
SE Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar all in mid-2.0s, like the more fertile developed countries (e.g. Anglos, French, Scandis).
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Why such a difference between AF Pak and India you think?
I know that BD women have 3-4 in India vs 2 in Bangla due to kill the Kafir mentality.
Would that explain it?
These surveys tend to correlate with quality of life. If life is comparatively hard, short and/or at a subsistence level, then more children are needed; if life is easy then children become a life-style choice rather than a necessity.
The billions of people permanently lifted out of subsistence during the last 70 years is probably the greatest achievement in human history – and yet it goes largely unremarked.
Afg and Pak are rife with Saudi madrassas preaching Wahabbiism. That could be it. This is also why Iran and Turkey are low despite being Islamic.
It seems utterly incredible to me that Yemen is home to about 28 million people or so.
Would it it be accurate to label it the most populous hellscape country on Earth? I mean, without oil, and without any appreciable arable belt, like the Nile. Arable land: 3%.
Who is feeding them, (I suppose it must be the UN) and why do they think it is a good idea?
The Turkish numbers have to be adjusted by the very high Kurdish fertility rate and Med European levels of fertility of the Sunni Turkish-speaking core. Kurdish fertility rates are approximately double the Sunni Turkish-speaking core. Syrian refugee fertility are even higher still. I know this is fertility rather than fertility preferences but it helps frame the preference numbers.
Free enterprise is feeding them, you Communist motherfucker.
What “free enterprise”? Do you know anything about Yemen, you ignorant dipshit? YOU are the motherfucker. Cold War anticommunist troglodytes like you need to croak already, you’re a useless drain on the planet’s resources.
What in heavens name are “BD women”? Women who smoke bidis?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beedi
Bangladeshi? That would I suppose make sense.
Muslim women in the UK, whether Bangla or Pakistani, have lots of kids, more than 3. Every headsarf has a pushchair and two by her side.
The differences in fertilitry preferences are lower in Turkey. They range from around 2.2-2.5 in Western Turkey (except Istanbul, where they are at 2.8, thanks to internal migration) to 3.0-3.4 in the Kurdish areas.
Quite interesting and yet another reason why I look forward to your columns, Anatoly.
I’ll just note that scientifically, it makes little sense for a survey or study to treat women aged up through age 49 as still being of “childbearing age.” The incidence of miscarriage and fatal or severely crippling birth defects are astronomical in the latter part of that range, and quite high in the earlier part of that age range too.
At maternal age 40, the miscarriage rate is already 40%, and at age 45 it is a terrible 80%. Then the babies who survive are more likely to suffer from Down Syndrome or worse. From the Mayo Clinic:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pregnancy-loss-miscarriage/symptoms-causes/syc-20354298
Not to be unkind, but it doesn’t matter much how many children a woman over the age of 45 wants or says she wants to have. It’s never going to happen in meaningful numbers, and those few who are still menstruating AND actually get pregnant at such an advanced age are likely to bring terrible sadness on themselves.
Would like to see a focus on the number of children preferred by women under the age of, say, 42.
Mexico fertility rate is 1.9 , Chile,Uruguay and Costa Rica are also below replacement rate , Argentina and Peru will fall below replacement in a few years
If only the muzz scum had been nuked decades ago when people still had the balls for that sort of drastic solution and before the islamoturdsters were in any position to fight back, imagine the coming global headaches that could have been prevented.
OT
At least Russia is sending the right people to jail.
https://dailystormer.su/russia-sentences-antifa-group-to-prison-as-terrorists-amnesty-international-jews-loose-their-tops/
Argentina is already below replacement level. Their TFR developed like this:
2013 2.34
2014 2.35
2015 2.32
2016 2.18
2017 2.10
2018 2.03
Actually, I do want to make a correction: Yemen does have oil and gas.
Still, it seems like a pretty dysfunctional country:
-poorest and most water-scarce country in the Arab world.
-groundwater is the main source of water in the country but the water tables have dropped severely leaving Yemen without a viable source of water. For example, in Sana’a, the water table was 30 metres (98 feet) below surface in the 1970s but had dropped to 1200 meters below surface by 2012.
-Half of agricultural water in Yemen is used to grow khat
(and so on…)
Though, it is probably fair to say that some of that dysfunction is made worse by its neighbors.
Actually between 2015 and 2019, nearly 5 million over the age of 45 gave birth according to the UN. This is more than double the number in the early 1990’s.
You’d really make my day if you said that Mexicans IN THE USA have a TFR under 2.0.
Incidentally, this list of 2016 TFR in Mexican states (excluding California 😉 seems to show that the poorer, far more Indian people in southern Mexico are increasing their numbers while the rest of the states are declining.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexican_states_by_fertility_rate
True, but that is not very significant worldwide, as the whole world has something like 150 million births per year.
And we need to know how many of those babies suffer from severe defects. It will be a high proportion.
As an issue separate from the feasibility of giving birth at such an age, which was my point, I will add that it is generally irresponsible to conceive children at that maternal age. I wonder whether those very old mothers are disproportionately concentrated in misfit feminist cultures like the USA and Europe, I.e. professional women deliberately waiting till then to seriously try to conceive.
Somewhat OT, but check out this depressing simulation of worldwide births and deaths by location:
https://worldbirthsanddeaths.com/
PS Missed the edit window: thank you for the statistic on births to women over 45, which was admittedly more than I expected.
hispanics in the USA have been below replacement rate since 2018 , https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_13-508.pdf
More Islam, more stupidity. More stupidity, more children.
I wonder if a Taliban victory in Afghanistan could boost these numbers upwards (not that a Talian victory would actually be anything to celebrate about, of course!). After all, I seem to have read that Afghan fertility significantly decreased since 2001 (which is when the Taliban was overthrown by the US/NATO and the Afghan Northern Alliance).
Seems like total depopulation is the only solution
But women are living so much longer now, that giving birth at 45 is not irresponsible on that account. Obviously, you don’t want to be having your first child at 45, but some women choose to do without birth control in their forties and just see what happens. I’m not going to say I think that’s unethical.
Here is a question I have pondered:
Would it be better to leave it to chance, and then abort if the child will have a birth defect, leaving open the possibility of healthy life, or better to simply use birth control and preclude the possibility of healthy life altogether?
We have chosen the latter course. Abortion for eugenic reasons was not something I would want on my conscience, and we weren’t prepared to risk the possibility of resources being diverted from the children we have to a particularly needy child.
Hey, Andrew Yang withdrew. He didn’t have any real funding support or voter interest after all.
https://twitter.com/moscowniteguide/status/1227109300696424449
There is also the Silicon Valley cope of ‘freezing your eggs’ and maybe having kids when you’re 50 or 60 or something when you’ve gotten fired and retired. Even in backwater Sweden we had a very serious TV news report on this not long ago, so it seems to be getting globohomo approval for wider usage.
What does this have to do with fertility trends?
Nonsense. East European countries have lower fertility and higher GDP than Central American countries and are still sources of migrants, even if they are also becoming destinations for migrants from poorer countries.
Migration is not driven by fertility, but by differences in standards of living, so central americans will keep moving to the US like puerto ricans still do despite a low fertility 0f 1.3
Immigration is not driven by fertility but it is affected by it.
Migrants tend to be young people. Fewer young people: fewer emigrants.
This is also one of those areas where fertility is more of a measure of the state of a country than the causal effect for something. Lower fertility means the country is in an arrested state where nothing substantial will ever happen.
Although you referred to the measely 20,000 increase of immigrants from Puerto Rico ca. 2005-2015, like most people you’re failing to take in to context how small that figure is compared to the 470,000 Puerto Ricans who arrived from 1950-1960, at a time when America’s population was almost half of what it is today. Puerto Rican migration to this country has slowed to near-zero levels.
http://lcw.lehman.edu/lehman/depts/latinampuertorican/latinoweb/PuertoRico/decadesfiles/image002.gif
Poland has also experienced a slight jump in emigration (mostly to Western Europe) but it doesn’t hold a candle to the tens of millions of people who migrated from Poland to the USA in the 18th/19th centuries when Poland was still fertile.
Even in the current era, Poland produced more migrants from 1980-1990 than from 1990-2005.
http://focus-migration.hwwi.de/typo3_upload/groups/3/focus_Migration_Publikationen/Laenderprofile/bilder/Country-profiles/cp-03-poland/grafic2_gr.gif
So it seems like Poland is producing a lot of immigrants, due to selective amnesia, but they really aren’t producing jack shit.
You bring up a pretty interesting question indirectly: how many children could a woman have if she started early and froze some of her eggs?
Perhaps, this would be a technique to set the Moor and the Bantu running out of Europe, without resorting to artificial wombs.
I feel like that’s probably a more expensive operation than artificial wombs, to be honest.
Video is funny but it reflects the reaction to having Putin’s portrait in the elevator more than it does to having Putin as president.
How so? Do you mean birth complications? I must admit that I’m uncertain of the statistics, when it comes to implanted eggs. All I’ve heard is the bizarre success stories, and I also wonder if some of the risks might be mitigated by using younger sperm.
Or the cost of the whole operation?
BTW, cost is only an indirect factor. You cannot force a technological curve by throwing money at it. So, at present, you are forced to compare the technology we have to the one that we don’t have.
Overall cost – which is quite significant in the scheme of things, because it means that there’s a lot quite complexity and room for failure in it. If all babies had to be test-tube babies, for example, there wouldn’t be a lot of reproduction.
Artificial wombs circumvent a lot of problems as it essentially circumvents the entire difficulty of pregnancy and allows for fairly precise monitoring of development, so it avoids a lot of potential birth complications. Since they can dual-purpose for preemptive birth and natal care, there’s a very high use to cost ratio for them.
Potentially at some point you can just clone eggs and sperm, producing humans more or less on an industrial scale as needed under government auspices, with assured loyalties to the state. The main issue of child care is also less of a cost problem for a state as opposed to individual families.
This is all pretty nightmarish to me, but by the logic of ever increasing industrialization, it is quite possible. Or variations of it, e.g. artificial wombs with sexbots, etc.
No doubt there are many potential advantages to artificial wombs.
Still, just as an intellectual exercise, it is interesting to think of how much room we have to move fertility on a technological level in situ, in women’s wombs. Like suppose you could make every birth into a birth of twins. (This might not even require any sort of implantation) What is the trade off in terms of risks vs. advantages? That’s already a big difference, without playing around with time.
Of course, it is something of a 1970s cliche, with many recorded failures, but scientific minds could also be used to bring suitable mates together. And at an early age, if supported by society.
Government using the technology of artificial wombs is indeed a nightmarish vision. They would probably probably have gay cloning vats.
Well, IQ will probably be lowered in that case. Twins have less resources for both of them to draw from.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1298831/
Child mortality will also increase, as the human body is generally no longer as well suited for multiple births. And the same resource constraints.
https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/twins-more-likely-to-die-before-first-birthday/
The most likely, in my opinion, healthy intervention without much pushback is essentially a form of chemical mind control or genetic intervention to produce individuals of the type you want, for example, pro-fertility individuals. Karlin certainly knows that I have some pretty unusual ideas on that, heh.
Its not like we have not already inflicted significant chemical mind alteration on ourselves as a species, through the civilization’s use of alcohol or caffeine.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/alcohol-caffeine-created-civilization
Here is the richest Russian woman in the world.
And her twin daughters she birthed when she was 54 years old – obviously with help from the best fertility science that can be bought (or is affordable for women with $10 billion).
https://www.instagram.com/p/BWF-YHgFcOU/
All you have to do is ban no-fault divorce and birth control pills, problem solved.
(Stupid nerds, I don’t even.)
Probably true, but childhood mortality is pretty low to start with.
Possibly a minor objection. If you are working with good genetic stock, you can still get an above average result, and more importantly propagate smart genes.
I once observed a set of young women who were identical twins and, as a hereditarian, was somewhat shocked by their differences. Firstly, I only realized they were identical when one mentioned that they were twins. Though neither was unattractive, they both looked different and seemed to have noticeably different personalities, different voices – as though it would be hard for one to imitate the other.
This made me wonder about why they were different. Was it womb resources? (on short acquaintance, both would be considered A-level mates) Or rather other random factors? (such as cellular processes of growth) If so, this randomness is an interesting thing, and the idea of a clone being a carbon copy, in a science fiction way, is probably overstated.
I had a thought along these lines. Secretly adulterated water supplies and foods are a fun theme in fiction. I guess the major drawback of that method is that you don’t want to increase everyone’s fertility, you want to do it eugenically. But perhaps, this would be less of a problem in homogeneous societies. If I were the Chinese government, and it seemed possible, I would seriously consider the idea.
Further on the evil front, it would probably be possible to make some women into breeders of females only – thus facilitating harems and polygamy.
This is just about surveys of “fertility preferences” – people can say to such survey “I will have 10 children, live to 120 years, and be Princess of India”. It will not necessary correlate with anything that will happen in real life.
I want to outbreed the Bantu billions. If you’ve seen the estimates, you know that this requires considering every possible advantage and what you propose is insufficient in itself. At the very least, welfare would need to be banned.
Besides which, you take a very culture-centric viewpoint. If you looked around, you’d realize our society is super-pozzed, and full of traitors and knaves. I’m not sure that it is desirable for all the blue-haired feminists to reproduce.
As they get older, their similarities will increase. The specific degree of identicality has a bit of variation as well. As per Wikipedia:
And male sperm determines the sex of the child, so you would actually be controlling the male sperm if one wished to promote a larger population of females. This is commonly done with cows already, I understand.
https://thehimalayantimes.com/nepal/new-technology-breed-female-calves/
I once knew twin cheerleaders. They were pretty identical, though to be fair, they also seemed to try really hard to be that way(and confuse others on which one was which by switching their ribbons and pretending to be the other, etc). Supposedly if you really knew them, you’d be able to tell which one was which – but it really actually quite easy, since one had a scar on her thigh the other didn’t have.
Neither one was particularly bright but I don’t think they really cared that much about it. They were quite athletic, though, and liked to be on the same teams.
They dated the same guy, which is kinda amusing. Lucky for him, I suppose.
In statistical sense (comparing to the mass of non-twin individuals) I imagine that such differences, even when notable, are generally small. Still, it is interesting to think about their possible consequences. For instance, maybe it is impossible to clone geniuses. You might even get the high IQ, but not the intellectual output or daring.
True. It might be possible in the womb, but the testes would probably be a better target. And conveniently, there are two. It might be possible to make one produce X-only sperm, while still keeping the other normal, or else, turning it into a Y-maker.
Very interesting – I was not aware of this process. But they apparently use some sort of machine, i.e. it is a process with external steps. Ideally, I think you would want to internalize the process to reduce costs, and philosophical scrutiny.
You might need a litter of Newtons or Shockleys, before you get one “good” one.
Yeah, that was kinda my point. There are super-cheap and super-effective means to raise fertility right now that don’t require any technological advances at all.
The fact that they’re not taken means that the people at the top don’t really care abour fertility.
(You don’t even need to change the narrative to do it – divorce and hormonal birth control disproportionately affect women in a very negative way, you could spin it as feminist progress.)
You wouldn’t want to raise fertility if you’d dealt with American plebs, and America ultimately decides what everyone else does.
PhD graduates have high fertility..
Only people who’ve never dealt with white trash venerate it. The pleb of the 50s kept his head down and worked hard.
Now, every idiot thinks he’s a psychics major, philosophy major and economic theorist all rolled into one.
White libs will fight for control of the white race before turning on their non white pets.
Not to mention extensive filtering for funny/negative reactions.
Awesome idea man. Think anyone will buy it?
Since everyone understands “feminism” to be an ideology centered on hating women, no.
Agree with @JohnPlywood’s points, and will add that there are obvious causes this would be true. If a poor country is becoming more crowded, there are fewer opportunities available, even as real estate becomes more scarce. If a poor country is stable, people won’t necessarily migrate. Even within the US, NY has about double the GDP per capita of Alabama and Mississippi, yet there’s not a massive pipeline of people migrating from those places to NY. In fact, you tend to encounter more people LEAVING those wealthier states to migrate to nominally poorer states in the Sunbelt.
Poor countries rely disproportionately on resource extraction industries — agriculture, mining, logging — which generally don’t have much use for surplus labor (or at least see declining productivity). They also tend to rely on foreign aid, which seldom scales up proportionately with population. So as poor countries become more crowded, unemployment increases and living standards decrease, particularly for younger people (as the older generation still has their sinecures handed out with foreign aid or FDI money). But if a poor country is stable, all but a small, highly ambitious slice will be inclined to sit back and enjoy their more culturally familiar, more ethnically homogenous, more laidback homelands.
For the most part, we haven’t entered into the era of competively-motivated breeding. Should be interesting, when we do.
Muslims prefer to have make children, there is an expectation for Muslim women to keep having children until they have one male, preferably two. First cousin marriages are also rife which greatly depress IQ and low IQ people generally have more children, quite a vicious cycle. On the plus side, it does lead to extremely high ethnocentrism which is why you will find Muslims find it so easy to organise angry mobs, be they in their homeland or in the West.
Glad to hear it! Let’s see an actual sustained pattern of such TFRs among them here. And let’s stop importing half a million (easily) or more annually to expand their numbers.
Not sure, if it is good news or not.
Probably means first of all that the average Hispanic is becoming more Indio, just like in Chile and Argentina, and Mexico, etc.
Second thing is that it probably won’t change the open borders regime. If there is any dip, it will probably be made up for with Africans or Muslims. Honestly, I would rather a full on union with Mexico than that – and I am not exactly Ron Unz, when it comes to Mexicans.
True.
And yes, to the extent that Mexican-Americans have lowered their fertility rate, the difference is already being made up for by a flood of “legal” Chinese, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Filipinos, Indiana, Africans, and Muslims, roughly in that order.
Indios tend to be a passive, politically disinterested people. They bring other problems(littering, lower IQ, sex crimes) but the biggest open borders shills are Med Hispanics. On the whole, Indios in the U.S. are probably less a problem than the Meds and mulatto Hispanics.
“But women are living so much longer now, that giving birth at 45 is not irresponsible on that account. Obviously, you don’t want to be having your first child at 45, but some women choose to do without birth control in their forties and just see what happens. I’m not going to say I think that’s unethical.”
Living so much longer doesn’t change the accumulation of negative mutations and egg depletion at such ages.
As well as a less robust body at said ages.
Living longer in our age due to medical technology isn’t necessarily the result of better genetics or slower aging.
Unless slower aging and reduced genetic load accumulation can be demonstrated in said women. By for example said women managing to look far younger than their age and demonstrated to have slower aging when their biopsy is sampled.
Why do you expect india’s tfr to be one if the lowest in the world?