Fertility, Family Planning and Income

Fertility is one of the main issues discussed when talking about the demography of the United States. The U.S. economy plays a rather large role in the rising and falling patterns of the country’s fertility rate. In many past occurrences of economic hardship in the country fertility levels had decreased. One of the main reasons for that being in times of financial struggle, men and women are less likely to want to have children. Being able to support a family is already a difficult task but when people are getting laid off from jobs, unemployment rates are increasing, and the economy is struggling many people can barely afford to buy necessities for themselves never mind for an entire family. An extended decrease in fertility levels could have hugely negative effects on the country’s demography. Lower fertility rates mean less babies being born which in turn decreases the younger age population while the aging population slowly increases. This is one of the main issues with low fertility because it does not evenly decrease the country’s population.

I have found a couple of articles from previous papers to support my thesis. The first article I found from WND Faith is titled “Birth rate poses looming economic cloud.” According to the article China’s one child policy has negatively affected the country’s economy and created a shortage of workers. The author of the article, Leslie Fain, states that “Now the forecast is out that the U.S. economy could come under stress in the future – because of a lack of babies.” The same things happening in other countries, such as China, could easily happen here in the U.S. if our fertility rates continue to decline over an extended period of time.

The second article I found was from the New York...

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...ensus of the Bureau. I could use the census data to further prove my thesis about the fertility rates of the country. I could also examine immigration records and look into the fertility rates of immigrants coming into the U.S. and how those numbers are affected by the economy and how they affect the demography of the country as well. If I were to conduct a survey I would choose a random sampling of people within childbearing ages (from 19-39 yrs old) and ask them certain questions.

For example: Are they single or married/divorced? What is their annual income? What is their partner’s annual income? Do they have any children and if yes how many? Are they considering having more children? Why or why not? I think that this type of survey would give me a little more of a personal view on certain people’s feelings on having children based on what their income is like.