Britain’s declining birth

"Britain is sitting on an infertility time bomb,” states an article by Melanie Phillips in England’s Daily Mail, June 22, 2005. Headlined "Heading for extinction?” according to the article, "A leading fertility expert, Prof Bill Ledger has warned that within the next 10 years the number of couples experiencing problems conceiving children is expected to double.

"By 2015, he says, one in three couples may need fertility treatment. Low success rates from IVF (in vitro fertilization) mean soaring numbers will be left childless, with extra thousands going through this draining treatment at huge cost to the health service. He blames this looming crisis on modern lifestyle factors such as delays in starting a family, obesity, falling sperm counts and rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases.

"His warning compounds a deep and increasing anxiety about low fertility rates not just in Britain but across the whole of Europe and beyond. For many years, Britain and other European countries have experienced fertility rates at below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, the point at which a country’s population replaces itself over time.

"This raises the spectre not just of an imbalance between the generations, with too few younger people to care for the rising numbers of the elderly. More urgently, it suggests a kind of cultural death wish, in which our society’s fundamental instinct to reproduce itself may be disappearing. Certainly, Prof Ledger’s warning suggests a high rate of self-destructive behavior which is undermining our ability to reproduce…”

Perhaps the British government could take a leaf from the Bombay Parsi Puncha­yet initiatives to stem the fertility decline: incentives for a third child and a fertility clinic for those having problems conceiving.