Policy paper examines effects of delayed childbearing in Europe

by Scott J. Turner

Putting the brakes on the ever-increasing age of childbearing in Europe would greatly moderate the continent’s trend toward population aging and decline.

That’s according to a policy paper in the March 28 issue of Science co-authored by Brian O’Neill of the Watson Institute for International Studies.

O’Neill and two Austrian colleagues suggest that European governments could consider enacting policies that encourage women to bear children earlier in life as a way to confront trends toward an aging population and a decreasing population size.

The trio describes a shift in momentum toward decreasing populations across Europe and explains how the process of having children later in life reduces the overall number of births.

“What this paper implies is that a continued delay in childbearing, by keeping fertility low, could be an important driver of population change in the future,” said O’Neill. “Nations concerned about aging and population decline can consider policies that could affect that timing.”

European nations are coming to realize that an older population will present numerous challenges, O’Neill said. With fewer people contributing and more receiving, it will test social security and health systems, and could strain relations between those who give and those who get.

This age shift might “hinder productivity gains, and could affect global competitiveness and economic growth,” wrote the authors. It might also diminish how people get along, especially if increasing demand for labor leads to significant immigration from other cultures.

The authors describe policies enacted by the former East Germany in 1976 that increased fertility. These included much-improved child-care facilities, financial benefits, and government-supported housing if a woman became pregnant.

Policies designed to affect timing of births today would have to address prime reasons for continued delays in childbearing, said the authors. Those include inflexible higher-education systems, youth unemployment, housing markets, and especially career patterns built around “traditional male life-course models.”

A revamping of what Europeans consider the conventional sequence of life-course transitions can help solve conflicts between work and family, the authors wrote.

In addition, the benefits to a woman’s health may provide a further rationale, said O’Neill. Continued delay in childbearing has led to burgeoning numbers of infertility treatments and to increasing medical concerns about health risks for mother and child associated with late pregnancies.

Although policies affecting childbearing have sometimes been controversial, having children could “come to be considered a ‘social act’ rather than a purely private decision” as the challenges of population aging and decline begin to grow, the authors said.

On partial leave from Brown, O’Neill is at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna. His two co-authors, Wolfgang Lutz and Sergei Scherbov, are based at the IIASA and the Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences.