Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Baby booms and busts are generally related to distinct, long-lasting changes in national fortunes. During periods of growth and employment, more babies are born; during recessions, the birthrate and fertility rate (how many babies each woman has in her lifetime) decline. During the Depression, for example, the fertility rate dropped precipitously. With unemployment around 25 percent and no sign of a recovery in sight, many families simply decided not to have children, or to postpone their family plans until the economy turned around.
"It was a very deep trough," says John Haaga, director of domestic programs at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit demographic research institute. "The birthrate dipped below the replacement rate (2.1 children per family) for the first time ever."
That shift in the birthrate struck demographers and policymakers at the time as a sign of serious trouble. The idea that all cultures follow the same cycles of growth and decline had already entered the culture, largely through German historian Oswald Spengler and his 1918 book "The Decline of the West." And according to Haaga, many social scientists saw a drop in fertility as proof of America's imminent collapse into obsolescence. Fewer babies meant fewer soldiers, fewer scientists, fewer businessmen -- and a more feeble nation.
After World War II, demographers and economists predicted that the slump would continue, but the economy rebounded and Americans began to give birth more often and at younger ages. In 1946, for example, more than 1 million babies were born to women between the ages of 20 and 24, an increase of nearly 30 percent from the previous year, which dwarfed growth in other age categories. In total, from 1946-1964, Americans gave birth to more than 76 million babies -- the biggest baby boom in American history.
At first, the reason for the massive increase seemed obvious: Returning GIs were acting on their deferred hunger for love, sex and family. But as the boom extended into the '50s, it was interpreted as something more significant. If a slipping birthrate pointed to a declining civilization, then, according to Spengler's logic -- which had become conventional wisdom by the '50s -- a baby boom must herald a rise to power.
In the minds of politicians, the press and the public, the boom became yet another symbol of America's ever-expanding influence. And when historians like Arthur Schlesinger wrapped the boom into the larger story of America's rise to superpower status, few journalists or scholars questioned -- or could resist -- the good news.
Haaga and other demographers, like Ron Rindfuss at the University of North Carolina, believe that the post-World-War II baby boom and the attendant fascination created a false cause-and-effect expectation: Every significant societal event, the public came to believe, would be reflected in the number of babies born. The form and length of the event hardly mattered. Earthquakes, blackouts, snowstorms and even strikes by professional athletes have all been accorded the same attention as extended wars, recessions and periods of extreme economic growth.
The idea of birthrates tracking history isn't entirely without merit. Along with the Depression's baby bust, and the boom after World War II, a few other examples can be used to prove that fertile Americans are not oblivious the their surrounding circumstances. One study, for example, conducted by Rindfuss in the '70s, found that Southern white families limited their childbearing after 1954, when the Supreme Court outlawed segregation. It was, he says, a matter of fear for their childrens' future. Whites felt threatened by the prospect of a newly integrated South, Rindfuss argued, so they reduced the size of their families in order to minimize the perceived damage.
More recently, Catherine Cohan, a sociologist at Penn State, completed a study showing the population effects of Hurricane Hugo. The 1989 storm ripped through many areas of the East Coast but Cohan focused exclusively on South Carolina, and found that that birthrates increased in the areas of the state that were most damaged by Hugo's crushing wrath. The families who experienced the greatest degree of tragedy and displacement made friends and family more of a priority, Cohan reasoned in her report, and as a result, they had more children.
But these baby boom and bust examples stand out in the historical landscape like a set of septuplets in the hospital nursery. They are anomalies, freaks of sociological nature, say demographers. And more importantly, they are localized, not national in scope. While it may be true that a handful of events have led to localized changes in birthrates, there is no evidence that these traumas prompted national epidemics of conception.
Nonetheless, the public has taken a rarity and made it commonplace; Americans, aided and abetted by the media, have taken a small-scale event and projected it on the nation. The truth of the matter, say experts, is that long-term cultural shifts caused by things like war or immigration lead to changes in the birthrate. Most other events do not.
"I don't know of a single documented case of a blackout or something like 9/11 leading to a baby boom," says Rindfuss. "It's something we can all relate to, but if you look at fertility trends for the past 25 years, there's been very little fluctuation. We're at about 2.1 [children per family] right now; the low was 1.7 or 1.8. If we were trading stocks, we'd say that the numbers are in a very narrow band."
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