TV as Birth Control: Defusing the Population Bomb
Earlier this year Stanford human geographer Martin Lewis asked his students a simple question: How did they think U.S. family sizes compared with those in India? Between Indian and American women, who had the most children? It was, they replied, a no-brainer. Of course Indian women had more—they estimated twice as many. Lewis tried the question out on his academic colleagues. They thought much the same.
But it’s not true. Indian women have more kids, it is true, but only marginally so: an average of 2.5 compared to 2.1. Within a generation, Indian women have halved the number of children they bear, and the numbers keep falling.
It’s not that the population problem has gone away in India—yet. India has a lot of young women of childbearing age. Even if they have only two or three children each, that will still continue to push up the population, already over a billion, for a while yet. India will probably overtake China to become the world’s most populous nation before 2030.
But India is defusing its population bomb. A fertility rate of 2.5 is only a smidgen above the long-term replacement level, which—allowing for girls who don’t reach adulthood and some alarming rates of aborting female fetuses—is around 2.3. The end is in sight.
Read more: http://www.utne.com/community/population-bomb-zm0z14uzwil.aspx#ixzz31dOssFGr
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