• 4 million babies will be born in the U.S. in 2012
• China will add 16 million babies to their population this year
• A baby girl born in the U.S. today can expect to live to the age of 81.3–until 2093!
• A baby girl in the U.S. will grow up (on average) to have two babies of her own (2.09 to be precise)
• A Nigerian girl born this year will give birth to an average of 4.82 children
• A U.S. baby girl born in 2012 will have a 23% chance her marriage will end in divorce
• A U.S. baby girl born in  2012 will have a 41% chance that she will not marry
• There is a good chance this girl will be named Sophie!

Starting from the bottom up, details and reactions:

• Laura Wattenberg,author of The Baby Name Wizard, projects that this will be the most popular baby girl name this year.
• On marriage, that’s higher than I thought. Not too long ago Time did an article on marriage, and while many aren’t marrying these days, as I recall they reported most did.
• Divorce: that seems a better stat that the common percentage thrown around for some time now -50% or one out of two.
• Work to be done in Nigeria: Clearly better access to birth control!
• About 2 babies per woman: Continued increases in population mean more women, and more women giving birth even at this low rate compared to most countries still means population explosion!
• More people living longer will “continue to make a major contribution to world population expansion over the next half century, regardless of whatever progress might be made reducing fertility says Dave Foreman, author of Man Swarm.
• China–16 million-and that is still with a one child policy–wow.
• Foreman would say 4 million more babies this year is too many: At 310 million right now, unless we don’t do something right now, the U.S. population will “double in the next hundred years to above 600 million to even more than 800 million!”

Numbers like that make me pause.  Ok, I will no longer be here, but is this the direction I want the world to be going when I do leave it? I think not.

Time did a nice visual to lay out these numbers and more (like Brazil–a Brazilian girl born in 2012 has 25% chance of marrying before age 18; in the U.S. it is now the age of 30 if she has a college education), but even so, like I have felt since traveling to Brazil and Argentina, when it comes to population, I am left feeling, well, disturbed, and motivated to action.

Place to start: Check out the Rewilding Website Population Page, Optimum Population Trust, and get your socks knocked off with Foreman’s Man Swarm.

Who else is concerned about how we are going to pull off stabilizing the world’s population?

First, on population. Now I know conceptually we have hit 7 billion and I live in a big city so on a regular daily basis I am exposed to the reality that there are a lot of people on the planet.  But being on the international road the population reality hit me harder. There are A LOT of people on the planet and I see the need for population stabilization efforts more than ever before.

Reading conservationist Dave  Foreman’s Man Swarm helped smack me in the face that stabilization has to occur.

Fact: “Man’s population grew more in the last 40 years than the previous 3 million.”

Another: Not only does overpopulation harm ultimately harm humans, but is the “main driver of extinction of sundry kinds of wildlife, the wrecking and taming of wildlands and wildwaters.”

I have this question: How many people can “sustainably use, exploit, degrade, or destroy the biosphere without risking collapse for human beings, human civilization,” and wildlife, lands and waters?

Different experts have different answers, but one thing for sure, if the population continues to grow exponentially, we’re going to get there even faster (if we aren’t there already).  Fewer people need come into the world.  Being childfree does need to be promoted as a powerful way to contribute to stabilization.

Another thing that smacked me on the road–the world is needs to get off plastic bags. When at home, I don’t use plastic grocery bags, keep use of produce bags to a minimum, reuse and reuse them until it is time to recycle them, and then I do that.

But in shopping for food in Rio and Buenos Aires, all they have are plastic bags.  Your produce has to go into plastic bags to weigh the items, those plastic bags go into larger plastic bags at check out, where they put only a few items in each bag, so you end up leaving with lots of semi full plastic bags containing more plastic bags!

The mound of bags collected by the end of our time in each place was ridiculous. I felt like I should spend some time in plastic purgatory! And do they recycle them at all? Ugh–not. Even in the U.S. only about 1 to 2% get recycled. The rest sit in a landfill–forever…

Ok enough rant on people and plastic explosion…

This international trip was unlike others I have made. I have come home motivated to join those who are taking action toward global population stabilization, and the destructive effects of disposable plastic bags.

Travel can do wonderful things for the mind, body and soul.  And it can also inspire action to help the big problems we see on the road.

What kinds of things have you been exposed to on the road that really stuck with you? Moved you to some kind of action?

While there I saw in the Wall Street Journal some stats on what people think about us reaching the 7 billion person mark. Check it out:

In its sentiment tracker section, it had a “computational analysis of the conversation on social networks” about hitting 7 billion. Based on the analysis of 1,700 posts on twitter and facebook between October 31 and November 4, it listed 4 response categories: Worry, Optimism, Jokes, and Astonishment.

In what section were the most responses?  Pleased to say the “Worry” category. And one of the highlighted comment areas gave me optimistic pause, “It’s time to stop having kids.”

When it comes to trying to ensure a population that can live with the earth’s finite resources, do we need to curb consumption? Yes.  Work to have better access to birth control and family planning globally? Yes.  Some experts seem to think if we do either of these things, it will solve the problem. To date, I land with World Population Balance–To become sustainable with Earth’s resources, these things are important, but ”large declines in human numbers” will also be necessary.

I also saw a not so unrelated article to what was in the WSJ. In the November 4 edition of USA Today, Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today had a short column titled, “Adoption Month is time to think of kids.”   In a time when we need to reduce the number of births, doing more to promote adoption is a great thing.  Neuharth touts his positive experience with adoption, but still paints it as an option if you can’t have your own biological child.

In Adoption Month I sure would like to see more in the media promoting adoption, not as the last option but as the first option when you are a wanna be parent.  I hear there are problems with the adoption process, but also read that these problems are often myths. I am no expert in this area, but it seems that if there are problems with the adoption process, now is the time to get about fixing them, not just for the kids’, adoptive parents’ sake, but the world’s sake.

In what category would you have put yourself in the Sentiment Tracker analysis-Worry, Optimism, Joke, or Astonishment? What would your comment have been, if yours was one of the 1,700?

What are your thoughts on how to change mindsets on adoption?

Cover-New York Magazine

Take the time to read this troubling article in the New York Times Magazine, “Parents of a Certain Age: Is There Anything Wrong with Being 53 and Pregnant?” by Lisa Miller.  She lays out with detailed evidence why she thinks the answer is no. 

I think the better question is, Why is the “baby-having drive” of some people at midlife so strong?  Part of the answer is related to a quote early in the article; 54 year old John says to 47 year old Ann: “You have the body of a young girl. You need a baby.” First, a few numbers…

According to Miller, the number of first time moms at midlife is not only rising but “booming.” In 2008 the number of first time mothers ages 45 and over was double what it was in 1997.  

Women end up “circumstantially infertile”  for any number of reasons, including not having found the right co-parent in their more fertile years, or they weren’t ready given their careers. So like Ann in the article, they reach midlife and finally they are ready. But now their body is not.   

This does not mean, however, they can’t have the experience of parenthood. Many midlife couples adopt; according to Miller, nearly 25% of adopted children have adoptive parents 45 and older.

But many more at later ages, want to have their “own” child. They are intent on carrying a child, and will put their bodies through a lot to do it. IVF with donor eggs are virtually always how pregnancy is going to happen if it is going to happen. Thanks to medical technology, it is even possible for women who have already gone through menopause to do intense hormone therapy to be able to carry a child.  

Why are so many women so intent on having to carry their “own” baby? A most powerful component: being under the spell of our youth-crazed culture.  If you are able to get pregnant it means you are fertile, and if you are fertile, you are still young, still virile. Even if it is not the woman’s egg (because it is too old) but a younger women’s donor egg, if she can carry and deliver a child, it must mean she is not aging, but still youthful, still part of that youth revered set.

It is a certain kind of denial–not a “denial of decrepitude,” necessarily, as many people in midlife and later these days are far from decrepid. But it is a denial of the fact that they are aging. Their body is the first to remind them, but the booming botox and beyond, and fertility treatment industries can fool them into believing it is just not so.

What would happen if we revered the aging process–would so many women have to go the mat to have to carry “their” own child?  What would middle aged people do if they had wanted to become parents but for one reason or another had not had them?  My guess is that women would not feel they have to fool their body into being younger again so they could carry a child.

If we revered the aging process, I’d like to believe that those in midlife would wisely face the reality that their “organic deadline” had passed (even for guys–older men have higher chances of having biological children with problems), and wisely ask themselves how they could get the experience of parenthood another way.  Maybe more would adopt children at all ages, not just infants.  And if that was difficult, they would use their energies to improve the adoption system to make this easier. Maybe more would find ways to be involved with infants, children, and young people in a myriad of ways to support them in growing up.  

If we revered the aging process, at midlife I bet we’d see far fewer women fighting biology and more plugging in to how they can use their parental needs and energies with the children who are already here. They would wisely find ways to get their needs met in ways that help the larger context of the world. They would not need avenues like midlife pregnancy to support the illusion of youth.  

What do you think? When you read Miller’s piece, what strikes you most?

“Economic and social pressures are loosening the filial obligations that have long bound Chinese society.” A growing number of Chinese men and women are deciding they don’t want kids. While parenthood is being seen more as a choice, it is still very frowned upon and is definitely not an “accepted” choice.

And more couples who do think they want kids are delaying having them. Why? Seems mostly it has to do with economic concerns. There is a high cost of living that trickles down to high costs associated with raising kids, even for couples with very good incomes. Other couples have concerns about bringing their child into a country that has had its share of problems, from housing bubbles to food safety issues. As a Chinese man in his 30s named Chu puts it, “You don’t know what kind of country the kid is going to grow up in”…”Only when you have lots of money will everything be alright.”

The population control law has also created a unique situation in which more men will not have any children. Why—because they won’t be able to find a female partner to hook up with. The one child law, and the “cultural preference” for boys (don’t get me started on that) has left the country with “alarming gender imbalance” –there are 118 men for every 100 women. With this kind of situation, when it comes to marriage, more women can afford to have high expectations and say they don’t want to compromise.

With the effects of the population control laws and people’s growing choice to have fewer or no children, some demographers have concerns about the country’s population turning negative in the coming decades.

To this I scratch my head. The country has 1.3 billion people. Would it be so bad if this number reduced? Some population experts say that reducing births is exactly what has to happen if we are ever to even come remotely close to living on a planet with a sustainable population.

Some believe the population control laws should be relaxed. I say work on eliminating the social and cultural prejudice of not having kids instead.  This needs to happen, not just in China, but in every country. It would help not just population problems, but work toward a world that truly has full reproductive freedom.  And if you do want the one child, the prejudice that boys are the preferred choice needs to stop!

Thoughts on the situation in China?

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