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UPDATE: Saturday, June 12, 2010      The Japan Times Weekly    2008年6月28日号 (バックナンバー)
 
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DEPOPULATION
Solutions to depopulation smack of tyranny

By ALEXANDER JACOBY

Sometimes the solution is worse than the problem. In my last column, I asked whether a low birthrate and aging population would necessarily constitute a crisis for Japan. But even if a falling birthrate is a problem, a larger question remains. Does a liberal democracy have the right to interfere in something as private as the choice of whether to have children?

Today, state efforts to control reproduction are associated with communist nations that have deliberately attempted to curb their birthrate through legal sanctions. China pursues a one-child policy for most of its citizens, enforced by tactics ranging from financial penalties for those who bear a second child to forced abortion and sterilization. Notoriously, given a preference for sons over daughters in Chinese culture, this policy has also led to the termination of pregnancies by mothers expecting a girl. In recent years, Vietnam has followed a similar, though less Draconian policy, seeking to restrict mothers to two children.

Yet conversely, many aggressive, totalitarian and imperialist regimes have encouraged a high birth-rate. Japan is a case in point: The prewar militarist regime banned abortion and contraception, and offered financial incentives for women to bear more children. In the same era, the Nazis established "marriage loans" designed to facilitate marriage and encourage women to bear children; a quarter of the loan was canceled with the birth of each child.

One instructive case is that of post-revolutionary Iran. In the '80s, at the time of the Iran-Iraq War, the country's Islamist leadership encouraged reproduction. The stated aims of Iran's clerical ruler, the Ayatollah Khomeini, were to breed "soldiers for Islam," and to "create an Islamic generation" to replace older generations thought to have been corrupted by secular ideas and Westernization.

Significantly, it was a less militant Iranian government that in the '90s, instituted a successful family planning policy that reduced Iran's fertility rate below replacement levels. Unlike Catholicism, Islam does not prohibit contraception, and Iran's international isolation, coupled with its limited resources of food, made it prudent to encourage a lower birthrate. This was achieved not through coercive policies as in China but through education in family planning: Today, Iran is the only nation in the world where men and women are required to attend classes about contraception before marrying. As a result, a population forecast in the 1980s to reach 100 million early in this century instead stands around the 70 million mark. Yet last year, hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speculated that Iranians could again be encouraged to bear children, hoping that a more populous Iran will be more effective in challenging the West.

Before World War II, even liberal democracies were not immune to such thinking. British doctor G.F. McCleary published The Menace of British Depopulation in 1937, in which he unashamedly advocated a higher British birthrate as a means of ensuring that overseas dominions — Canada, Australia and South Africa — would continue to be peopled by Britons. "It was vain to expect that such attractive lands would remain indefinitely without population," he commented. "If they were not occupied by people of British stock they would sooner or later be occupied by other people." McCleary commented approvingly on the Nazi pro-natalist policies outlined here.

Such ideas have not vanished. In the context of today's multicultural, multiracial Europe, neoconservative writers such as Mark Steyn and Bruce Bawer have argued that the low birthrate of white Europeans, coupled with a high fertility rate among Muslim immigrants, will lead to the gradual Islamization of Europe by sheer force of numbers. The striking feature of this argument is its pessimism: It rests on the assumption, influenced by political scientist Samuel Huntington's thesis of the clash of civilizations, that Muslim immigrants are not assimilable. These writers have not yet suggested that Western governments should actively attempt to restrict the Muslim birthrate, but they may yet do so: That would be typical of what remains when liberal solutions have been discounted.

The association with tyranny or imperialism of policies designed to control reproduction is one reason why Japan's response to its low birthrate has been tentative. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did in fact suggest extending extra financial benefits to couples with more than two children. But this proposal was more controversial than it might otherwise have been since it echoed the pro-natalist policies of the prewar militarists.

There is of course a difference between regulating reproduction coercively, as does China, and, implementing policies likely to encourage or discourage childbearing. But a liberal democracy, in any case, should be wary of seeking to regulate individual reproductive choices for the sake of avoiding problems in the future. It is, rather, the function of government in a liberal society to find ways of dealing with problems as and when they arise.

The Japan Times Weekly: June 28, 2008
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