Battling Over Birth Policy

By Ezra Bowen

It is an ancient scold, with a new Jeremiah sounding the doom cry. Ben J. Wattenberg, a demographic analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, warns that the U.S. and other Western nations are not producing babies fast enough. Since 1957, writes Wattenberg in his new book The Birth Dearth (Pharos Books; $16.95), the average American woman's fertility rate has dropped from 3.77 children to 1.8 -- below the 2.1 size needed to maintain the present population level. Meanwhile, he argues, Communist-bloc nations are producing at a rate of 2.3 children per mother, while the Third World rate is rising so fast that within 50 years its population may be at least ten times that of the West.

The result, predicts Wattenberg, may be a massive shift in world military, economic and ideological power. The West may find it "difficult to promote and defend liberty . . .Western nations ((could)) no longer shape either the political agenda, the culture or the direction of the global community." Moreover, Wattenberg writes, the tide of Third World immigrants to the U.S., combined with the lower ratio of white births to domestic black and Hispanic births, may reduce the proportion of European-descended stock in this country from the present 80% to 60% by 2080. The upshot could be social "divisiveness and turmoil." All of which, he believes, raises the key question: "Over time, will Western values prevail?"

Wattenberg's book has stirred a storm among politicians, academics and other public policy mavens. Critics charge that he provides a rationale for Big Brotherish intrusion into the intensely personal realm of childbearing. Indeed, Wattenberg believes the Government should encourage births with cash bonuses of up to $2,000 annually for each child 16 and under, tax deductions for day-care costs and forgiveness of educational loans in the case of graduates with babies. Other analysts are concerned that Wattenberg's data could be used to justify a rollback of proabortion laws, a reduction in sex education programs and perhaps a tightening of immigration laws against non- Westerners. Finally, there is some feeling that the book carries overtones of racism.

Conservative politicians and ideologues are supporting Wattenberg's ideas. TV Evangelist Pat Robertson, a Republican presidential hopeful, argues that the U.S. could be "committing genetic suicide." He preaches that "depopulation of the West threatens the power of Western industrialized democracies." Republican Congressman Jack Kemp of New York, also a presidential contender, seconds Wattenberg's call for birth incentives, saying "People are not a drain on our resources; they are our greatest resource."

But specific challenges to Wattenberg's data have been raised. Some demographers question his projections, since he extrapolates from population trends with little apparent regard for such unpredictable factors as wars, epidemics, famines and baby booms. Many scholars point out that a nation's population size does not necessarily determine its military or economic power, as the histories of Britain and ancient Athens attest. As for ideological influence, theologians note that the West's predominant religion began with just 13 impoverished people.

More immediate, some scholars feel the presentation of data and the underlying philosophy are, in fact, racist. Michael Teitelbaum, who has taught demography at Princeton and Oxford, points out that "since the onset of mortality declines two centuries ago, there have been no shortages of humans, only perceived shortages of particular kinds of humans." And Peter Morrison, population research director for the Rand Corp., asserts that probirth programs for the largely white Western middle class "label a group as being inferior or superior. It's what prejudice is all about."

Wattenberg, 53, the father of four children, denies any racism or cultural bias. "I'm defending Western culture, not white culture," he claims. "I'm not anti-anything. What I am pushing is a value system that develops economic prosperity and political freedom." A former speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson and campaign adviser to Hubert Humphrey, Wattenberg describes himself as a centrist Democrat who supports liberal immigration policies. Nevertheless, his maverick views have won him a reputation as the conservatives' favorite liberal.

Wattenberg's thesis carries strong historical echoes. In the first decade of the century, when the nation was being flooded with European immigrants, President Theodore Roosevelt advocated a federal family policy. He declared that the one-child family "spells death, the end of all hope," and in his 1906 State of the Union report he advocated that taxes "be immensely heavier on the childless." Yet the nation not only absorbed the influx of immigrants, it thrived on their dynamism. And many present-day critics have little patience with born-again nativism. "The trouble with Wattenberg's argument," says Bruce Schearer, president of the Population Resource Center, "is that it is exclusionary rather than inclusionary" and thus inappropriate to America's pluralism. Equally inappropriate, says Faye Wattleton, president of Planned Parenthood, are the "shades of a superculture idea." She asks, "Why does Mr. Wattenberg believe that it is only the mouths of the upper class and presumably white upper class that can preach the gospel of democracy?"

Wattleton, along with syndicated Columnist Ellen Goodman and legions of other modern women, also objects to Wattenberg's tendency, as Goodman puts it, "to slip easily back into a traditional vernacular -- woman as exclusive child raiser." Schearer links this objection to the fundamental criticism of Wattenberg's espousal of Government birth incentives for the sake of international dominance. "There is something distasteful," he says, "about the concept that we should subvert personal aspirations in the democracy of America to the cause of maintaining our world-power status in the 21st century."

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington, with other bureaus