Families should restrict themselves to having a maximum of two children to stabilise the effect on the environment of Britain's rapidly growing population, a thinktank warns today.
According to the Optimum Population Trust, Britain's rising birth rate, currently growing at the highest rate for nearly 30 years, should be considered an environmental liability.
The author of the report, John Guillebaud, professor of family planning and reproductive health at University College, London, made the call after figures from the office of national statistics showed 669,531 babies were born in Britain last year, with the UK having the highest teenage pregnancy rate in western Europe.
But according to National Statistics;
In the 1960s there was a more sustained 'baby boom', with births rising to a peak of 1,014,700 in 1964. This was followed by a rapid decline in the numbers of births, reaching a low of 657,000 in 1977. The large numbers of women resulting from the 1960s 'baby boom' contributed to a rise in births in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Subsequently births fell to 669,000 in 2001 and 2002. Since then, with rising fertility rates, births have been rising again. In 2005 there were over 722,500 births in the UK, an increase of 6,600 on the previous year (1 per cent).
From the tone of the report's author you would expect a climbing fertility line. In fact it is fairly flat and there were fewer births in 2006 than in the previous two years.
Also teenage pregnancy is not the same as teenage birth. It is the latter that matters here. But the nuttiest thing is this. Telling women they can only have two children risks a backlash. If every woman produced two children the UK's fertility rate would rise.
Update; A reader has pointed out that the Professor was referring to births in England and Wales. Not the UK. I mistakenly compared the figure he quoted with that of the UK. In fact the fertility rate has risen from 1.8 in 2005 to 1.87 in 2006. The reason I thought the Professor was referring to the UK is his reference to the high UK teenage pregnancy rate. I am still unsure why he threw that in given pregnancy does not equal birth, UK does not equal England and Wales, and the biggest increase in fertility is among women in their 30s and 40s. Perhaps he was selectively quoted.
2 comments:
The professor was reacting to this release on births for England and Wales:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/frc0607.pdf
The ONS figures you’ve cited births are for the whole of the UK. Did you compare these with the England and Wales data, to conclude that births fell between 2005 and 2006?
The 2006 figures for the whole of the UK can be found in Population Trends 128, a document cited in the background notes at the end of the pdf release above, which I found via google (and a bit of digging around on the ONS site, title is Key demographic and health indicators, 1976 onwards):
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/ssdataset.asp?vlnk=9537&Pos=9&ColRank=1&Rank=272
Table 2.2 shows that births in the UK increased from 722,600 in 2005 to 748,500 in 2006 (an increase of 3.6 percent, and four times the increase of 0.9 percent between 2004 and 2005). The total fertility rate for the whole of the UK increased from 1.79 in 2005 to 1.85 in 2006. That’s quite a leap in such a short time. No matter what one thinks of the professor’s proposals, the figures have definitely gone up, and sharply.
Thank you. I see my mistake. I took the Professor to be talking about the UK because of his comment about the UK teenage pregnancy rate.
I am still not sure what the point of that comment was given most of the increase is from women in their 30s and 40s.
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