Everybody knows that the world’s population has increased dramatically since 1930 – population 2 billion – to today – population 7.7.  Most people also know that the fertility rate of women in most of Europe and parts of East Asia is lower than replacement level. Statistics which would suggest that over time the indigenous population – excluding immigration – will peak and then fall.  Japan’s population, at 128 million, has been falling by a few hundred thousand per year for the past 6 years.

Historically people bred for survival.  The institution of marriage, and a lack of birth control, meant that women had a lot of pregnancies.  Many pregnancies ended before their term, or resulted in stillbirths, or in high infant mortality.  Catherine of Aragon the first wife of King Henry VIII’s was cast aside for not bearing him a male heir in favour of Anne Boleyn.  Catherine actually bore him six children, including three sons, yet only Mary survived.

The natural philosophers of the 1700s, who morphed into the scientists of the 1800s, stopped believing in the four humours of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood, (knowledge of which formed the core of western medicine from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome) and brought scientific rigour and analytical statistics to providing a new understanding of why people got sick and died.  Basics of clean water and hygienic, clean equipment and spaces in surgery when conducting operations saved millions of people who would have otherwise died.

Healthy children needed to be fed…

This science-led health bonus of longevity ushered in a new crisis.  Children who would have died as infants survived and became mouths to feed, mouths which required more food.  Larger families also meant that land and other family assets had to be shared amongst more children (unless families followed the practice of primogeniture, where the eldest son inherited almost all and his siblings almost nothing).  Thus farms and estates were divided into such small parts that they became unviable within a few generations. For many Europeans the vast expanses of north and south America provided a solution to this crisis, the promise of a land of opportunity.  Migration allowed the population of the Americas to swell with the arrival of second, third and fourth sons.  More food become available in the home country as well.  This benefit came as a result of scientific advances in agriculture: better forms of mechanisation, fertilisers, irrigation and high yielding seeds.

Many of those who could not take the expensive and risky trip to the New World moved to the expanding cities where factory jobs replaced farm labour. Large families living on farms had the luxury of outdoor space.  Food could be plucked from trees or dug up from the ground.  In cities families were crammed into small spaces with no gardens.  The only way to get more food was to earn money to pay for it, steal it or to be given it.  And while the easy spread of disease in such conditions helped to curtail the size of the city population, it was not enough to prevent rapid expansion.  These cities of the late 1700s and the 1800s provided the literary backdrop to the great works of Victor Hugo (Les Miserables) and Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist).

…life in the city caused widespread misery

The stresses of city life changed things in the bedroom too.  The human need for sex – for pleasure – resulted in too many surviving children, which resulted in misery.  Too many children caused stress on family income. 

Children were sent out to work in factories at an early age and mothers did their best to either deny sex to their husbands rather than risk pregnancy.  Many women were forced into experimenting with herbal remedies or to seek clumsy abortions to abort an unwanted child.  Large numbers of women living in the confines of cities also resulted in levels of prostitution that would never have been seen in the country.

Condoms have been used for centuries.  Syphilis, a horrible sexually transmitted disease brought over by Europeans from Central America in the 1490s, (Europeans gave the Americas small pox, which was far more deadly) could be stopped from transferring through sexual contact by the use of condoms –usually made from sheep’s gut.  Typically the use of condoms was restricted to the upper and middle classes, but by the 1820s poorer people were using them as well. Made-to-measure, re-usable rubber condoms that just covered the glans became popular from the 1850s; these were later replaced by mass produced condoms of a uniform size dubbed “all in ones” which were sold in pharmacies.  While the use and sale of condoms had political and religious impacts, it was the Pill, which became widely available in the late 1960s, for married women, and in the early 1970s, for unmarried women that definitively ended the union of pleasure and procreation.

Condoms and the Pill allowed for the separation of pleasure from procreation…

Without condoms and the contraceptive pill the population is likely to have been significantly higher than it is today.  The pill also heralded a new sexual liberalisation for women, a social revolution that is still unfolding.   The separation of pleasure and procreation allowed for far greater promiscuity than previously.  Sex could be seen as a “recreation” without risk of pregnancy.  Young people in the 1970s could have sex without the need to commit to marriage and those in marriage could have affairs without the risk of getting caught out by a surprise baby.

On a more serious note, women were far more able to study at university and stay in the workforce for longer, bringing in the rise of the career woman and greater gender equality at work.  Many women delayed childbirth for so long that a new issue emerged – infertility.  Science stepped in once again, with in- vitro fertilisation.  The first successful birth through this method took place in 1978.  Surrogate mothers, test-tube babies and other developments have allowed women to have their own children well into their 40s and 50s. 

Neonatal medical improvements have also increased the survival rates of pre-term babies, shortening the overall time required to be in the mother’s womb. 

In the 1990s adoptions of children from former Soviet block countries also became popular, only to be supplanted by adoptions of children from China in the 2000s.  Procreation has become so divorced from the act of sex that these changes are now socially normal and acceptable.

Which also perhaps explains the widespread acceptance of homosexuality among people under 30.  If sex is for pleasure, and not children, and you can have children whether or not you can actually produce them biologically.  

What then is the difference between a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couples?  If a heterosexual marriage is no longer linked to having natural children, why should children be denied to homosexual couples?

In turn differing attitudes have implications for the western institution of marriage itself.  In the Christian West, marriage has become synonymous with a church wedding.  In fact, prior to the 1550s when the marriage ceremony was introduced in the Common Book of Prayer in England (the now famous words: “To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part”), marriages did not need to take place in a church or even need to be officiated by a church official.

Civil weddings now form the legal contract for marriage in most European countries today.  A church service may be seen as an add-on with a strong social rationale and sometimes a religious one.   Today, more couples live together and have children, without bothering to get married at all – not even entering a legally recognised civil partnership.  In Holland, there is a legal status of “samenlevingscontract” (“living-together-contract”) which co-habiting couples can apply for which give some legal protections, but is not technically a marriage.  The Dutch agreement sets out how the couple will share the costs of living together, pay rent, raise children and divide property if, and when, they separate.

…all of which has had far reaching implications on the concept of marriage

So if sex is for pleasure and not necessarily linked to procreation and if heterosexual couples live together without being married or without a legal civil partnerships, it can be seen that it makes very little logical sense to be against homosexual marriage.  The “yuk” factor is relatively transient.  When the first marriages of whites and blacks took place in the US there was also a feeling of outrage and disgust.  To many people, to this day, while interracial marriage seems undesirable, it is no longer deemed “unnatural”.

But where do the boundaries of marriage end?  Interracial marriage and now homosexual marriage have become acceptable, so why not other concepts?  In the Muslim world multiple wives, polygamy, is not only widespread but also legally binding.  Mormons were famously polygamous until 1890 when they abandoned the practice, which allowed for the admission of Utah as a State into the United States of America.  If Dutch style “samenlevingscontracten” were to be adopted outside Holland, they could be modified to incorporate a whole range of legal co-habitations, ranging from one male to many women to many males to many women and everything in between.

So, far, so very conventional: the advent of modern contraceptives and fertility treatments has resulted in the separation of pleasure and procreation.  This has led to the downfall of the concept of heterosexual marriage as the framework for the raising of children.  But there is another change in society that will have a further impact on the number of children being born into developed or Western societies: jobs.

For the first time in history more people live in cities than they do in the country.  One key consequence of this is that in a city there is no such thing as a free lunch: it is impossible to live off the land in a city. To get food you need money. If you have no money, you can't buy food.  Money can be earned, given – essentially a form of charity- or stolen.

Our jobs crisis will push back parenthood even later…

To earn money, you generally need a job. Modern technological changes have the possibility to make billions of people unemployed, in a similar way that happened in the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the 1700s-1800s.  At the time large scale unemployment and poverty to millions resulted. (see Page _).  Many service jobs can either be outsourced to cheaper places – such as India – or be accomplished by computers which use better voice recognition and artificial intelligence (see P_ ). Many manufacturing jobs are already being outsourced to low cost countries – even China is getting expensive – and the few jobs that return are likely to be done by new, low cost robots (see P_) or on or by 3D printers (see P_).  Even distribution jobs are at risk (see P _)

A lack of food and money has historically delayed the age at which people got married.  A delay in marriage reduced the number of children a couple would have.  A shortage of money also encouraged intergenerational marriages: a man who was 10-20 years older than his bride had accumulated sufficient wealth to be able to afford a wife and subsequent children.  With the ability to “bank” female fertility, same age couples may chose to delay having kids until their forties or fifties to ensure they have enough money to educate and provide for them, or we may see more older women marrying younger men, once the women have accumulated enough wealth to make it affordable to have kids.

Gay marriages, delayed marriages and delayed pregnancies all have one thing in common: a decline in the number of children per female of childbearing age.  Many advanced countries are already seeing the average number of children per female dropping from the 'replacement' level of 2.1 to a 1.2-1.3 % range.  These trends are likely to push the level of procreation down to an average lower than 1.0.  Populations are still likely to expand for decades as those that are alive today remain alive for a longer lifespan, and the present population have additional children of their own.  But at some point, in 3 -4 decades hence, we should expect a rapid decline of native populations as people start to die off.

…resulting in another crisis.

This new crisis has some historical precedents: the plagues of the Roman empire in the 300s and 500s or the plagues that struck Asia and Europe in the 1300s.  Between 30% and 50% of the population was wiped out during those periods, depending on the location.  Countries that adopt large scale immigration policies to counter the loss of their native population will see a radical change in the ethnic, religious and social make up of their lands.  Muslims immigrants will form the main immigrant population in Europe, and Hispanics and Asians in the US and Canada.  Countries that do not accept large-scale immigration will be transformed socially anyway, with a very large population aged over 60 and increased levels of robotics.

All of this turmoil thanks to the invention of the Pill and the condom.