Jennifer Glass

You don’t hear much talk about a “population explosion” any more, and there is a good reason why. While some Third World Nations still suffer from extraordinarily high fertility rates, fertility has been falling in most of the nations of the world and nowhere more spectacularly than in the rich industrialized nations of the world. Rather than halting at what demographers call “replacement value,” fertility has fallen so much that several nations in Europe are projected to lose population over the next 20 years even though average life span continues to rise. The U.S. will escape a similar fate only by continuing high rates of immigration (in essence, taking youth from other countries). Traditionalists often think this situation must be the result of declining family values. But some of the worst fertility rates occur in countries with the fewest employed mothers and the lowest incidence of divorce (Japan, Spain, and Italy). Some of the best occur in the free-wheeling Nordic countries of Norway and Denmark. Why are babies so rare in the richest nations of the world? And what does this tell us about the nature of contemporary childhood, the costs of parenting, and the “family friendliness” of our economic and social institutions? Come and find out as we explore the changing political economy of reproduction.

Department of Sociology; Department of Behavioral and Community Health, College of Public Health