Welcome Decline

The great American baby boom is over. The explosive population surge that added some 40 million citizens to the U.S. in the 15 years after V-J day has subsided and may well continue to decline. The trend, only now showing up with any certainty on demographers' charts, is unlikely to make headlines; yet it speaks meaningfully to the nation's spiritual and material wellbeing, today and for years to come.

In 1965 the number of births in the U.S. dropped to the lowest figure since 1951--3,767,000--while the birth rate receded to the prewar level of 1940. A quarter of a million fewer babies were born last year than in 1964; half a million fewer than in the alltime peak year of 1957. Births still exceeded deaths by a wide margin last year, and the overall population increase was only slightly checked. Total population is now 196,464,000.

The birth rate--yearly births per 1,000 population--began its decline in 1958, twelve years after its precipitate climb, then drifted slowly downward through '59, '60, and '61. In 1962 the curve dropped sharply and continued its steep dip through the first months of 1966. Preliminary figures for the first two months of this year show an even lower rate than for the same period in 1965. The fertility rate, which relates directly to the number of young people rather than to the population as a whole, has shown a slightly slower drop because the young, "fertile" segment of the population, mostly born in the '30s, is proportionally smaller than it was a few years ago. Yet this key index, too, was down to its lowest level in two decades.

The Poll. The pivotal factor in the decline, says Philip M. Hauser, director of the University of Chicago's Population Research Center, has been the decision of couples to forgo a third and fourth child, substituting, perhaps, a second car and color TV. Eighty percent of the birthrate drop from 1915 to 1933--the historic low year--was a result of a falling off in third and fourth births, he notes, while 80% of the increase thereafter was caused by a jump in third and fourth children.

"The number of children one has," declares Hauser, "has become the subject of fad and fashion. This is the same kind of pattern that enters into other kinds of consumer habits. The third and fourth child were a form of status during the post-World War II baby boom. Now fashion is swinging women to the view that it is desirable to have fewer children." Mass communications media, Anthropologist Margaret Mead points out, have made birth control "more socially and ethically acceptable," and it is no longer fashionable for the educated to have large families.

A recent Gallup poll affirmed that big families are losing vogue. In 1945, just I as the baby boom was getting under way, 49% of the people polled said the ideal family should have four or more children. Today the figure is down to 35%, about where it was when the question was first asked 30 years ago. Just as important, notes Gallup, Americans no longer associate a growing population with progress; indeed, more than two-thirds look upon it as a "serious problem."

The Pill. The effect of the birth-control pill intrigues and puzzles the experts. Certainly, declares the U.S. Public Health Service, pills did not initiate the downturn, since they were not introduced for general use until June 1960, and not used in large numbers until a year later. Nonetheless, nearly 4,000,000 women are now using the pill, and, points out Boston's Dr. John Rock, a pioneer in birth-control development, "they're not getting pregnant." Steven Polgar, research director of the Planned Parenthood Federation, confidently credits the pill with at least one-fourth of the drop since 1961. In selected poverty areas where the pill has been distributed wholesale by social workers, results have been as dramatic as Polgar suggests. At medical centers in New York's Spanish Harlem and Corpus Christi, Tex., births dropped 25% .

Polls show that a wide majority of the public, including Catholics, now favor public assistance for birth-control programs. Prodded by President Johnson and his aggressive Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Government has neatly reversed its previous hands-off attitude; in the last year alone, HEW has doubled its staff engaged in population work. The Office of Economic Opportunity, though still lagging behind HEW, also liberalized its birth-control guidelines recently; more than 30 state governments (v. 13 in 1964) are now actively engaged in giving birth-control aid.

Slight Miscalculation. Unless the birth rate slumps much farther than it has, the number of births will inevitably start up again within the next few years as children born in the boom reach marriageable age. Recent population projections for the end of the century have ranged all the way from 263 million to 388 million, but most experts are reluctant to be pinned down on long-term figures, pointing out that the most reliable study in the early '40s projected a population of 165 million for the year 2000--a figure exceeded more than a decade ago.

The current downturn, nonetheless, is consistent with history, reflecting a trend going all the way back to the founding of the Republic. With the exception of the post-World War II years, in fact, the American birth rate has always been on the way down, an anomaly explained by the heroic childbearing habits of the founding mothers, who averaged 8.3 children each. The '40s and the '50s, according to the demographers, were simply an upward jiggle on the downward line.

Is the lower birth rate beneficial? Yes, indeed, exclaims Anthropologist

Mead. "Any and every drop in the birth rate is desirable. We've got enough people in the world and in this country so that there is no danger we'll ever run out. We have lots of people, but what we need is high-caliber individuals contributing as individuals. We need quality; quantity takes care of itself." Dr. Rock believes that a high birth rate actually saps the country's defenses, arguing that the very quality of life would have suffered if the baby boom had continued for very long.

Robert Wolfson, an economist with the System Development Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif., says that it would almost certainly have lowered the standard of living. "In the short run," declares Wolfson, "a booming birth rate is good for business. But in the long run, we are consuming things we can't replace, like physical space. We've reached this point now."

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