While everyone knows that good governments should promote health and safety, it’
While everyone knows that good governments should promote health and safety, it’s not obvious when and if governments should ever promote either increased or decreased fertility. In the case of mortality policy, it’s pretty obvious whether a policy will promote health and longevity. But whether a policy will increase or decrease fertility can be difficult to figure out when it generates both a substitution and an income effect.
Fertility has been both discouraged (with “anti-natalist” policies) and encouraged (with “pro-natalist” policies) by governments at different times and places. When governments make fertility the subject of policy, it’s usually in order to affect the rate of growth of the population or of the labour force. For example, Quebec promoted fertility between 1988 and 1997 with the aim of sustaining the francophone population and keeping francophone culture alive in North America.
As with all policies, we should consider whether the chosen tactic is really the best way of achieving our ultimate goal. If our ultimate goal is protecting francophone culture, or improving GDP per person, there are likely better ways of achieving this goal than trying to manipulate the fertility rate.
Many people believe that fertility is a deeply personal individual freedom that government has no business tampering with, but we are generally content to allow a government its incentives and advertising regarding fertility, so long as government does not coerce us, discriminate among us, or manipulate us.
The issue of coercion versus freedom to choose comes up in debates about whether or not abortion should be legal. The proposed right to life of a fetus/unborn child clashes with the proposed right of a pregnant person to abort a fetus/unborn child. The issue of which of these rights is valid and, if both are valid, how to balance them is an important one which cannot be addressed by Economics for the reasons discussed in Chapter 1. However, economists can point out that often governments are choosing one side of the debate or another not because of their values, but to achieve a target level of fertility in the population. For example, Romania (1965-1989) outlawed abortion to achieve a higher birth rate. Meanwhile, Singapore legalized abortion in 1969 for the express purpose of reducing births. In the most extreme cases, governments have forced people to have abortions or to undergo sterilization to achieve population growth reduction targets or to selectively eliminate unwanted people.
Indeed, fertility policy impacts particular income classes and cultural groups differently, either intentionally or unintentionally. Thus discrimination is another issue complicating fertility policy.
In 2021, human rights activists were warning that Uyghur people in Xinjiang, China were being sterilized against their will. In February of 2021, the Canadian Parliament unanimously upheld the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 260 , which officially recognizes co