Declining Birthrate Is No Cause for Celebration

 

Declining Birth Rates Are No Cause for Celebration

By Ocean Postman

Stats SA has reported a decline in South Africa’s fertility rate from 2,78 children per woman to 2,21 in the Mid-Year Population Estimates report, 2025. They confirm that this decline is part of a trend that began in 2020 that has seen the average number of children a woman would have in her life declining over the past five years.  

One might view this as a positive outcome, credited to a concerted effort by the government to ensure greater access in the provision of contraceptives. Evidence of the government’s commitments on paper to expanding contraceptive access includes its adoption of the Family Planning 2020 Initiative, a multinational effort to expand access to reproductive related healthcare. The state’s “rights-based” approach to healthcare policy related to reproductive care is, on its face, promising. It would certainly be a great stride forward in the aim towards women’s rights if this were the case.

Climate change looms large

This would be a far more optimistic outlook than what is likely closer to the truth. A United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) survey, which included South Africa as one of the surveyed populations,  has found that the global decline in birth rates is more accurately attributed to younger people’s anxieties and uncertainties around the future, specifically their own economic prospects as well as the reality of climate change affecting the type of future they envision their potential offspring would be able to lead. The climate crisis is no longer impending, but already upon us, with recent United Nations reports warning that we are rapidly reaching the “point of no return” where global warming will reach an insurmountable juncture.

Unemployment, poverty and financial precarity

The realities of unemployment for women have only been worsened by government decision making. The instituting of policies of austerity has negatively impacted key sectors such as healthcare and education. The consequence of this can be directly seen when one draws a correlation between education and outcomes, as although the average South African woman achieves greater success academically than the South African man and is more educated, this has not correlated with higher levels of employment for women. In the UNFP survey, 53% of South African respondents reported that the barrier to having more children than they desired is financial limitations.

The question arises whether constitutionally guaranteed freedoms can be realised without deeply radical changes that would ensure real material economic freedom. As the UNFP report stated “Reproductive agency requires not just the ability to say yes or no, not just the right to be free of coercion; it requires a full range of conditions that enable people to exercise true choice.”

The impacts of historic inequality in healthcare provision and access to quality healthcare cannot be ignored. The historically disadvantaged are on the frontlines when it comes to declining quality in public healthcare, which are only exacerbated by the aforementioned adoption of austerity measures, pushed most fervently by the National Treasury. With these continued cuts, reproductive healthcare stands at risk of falling to the sidelines. Already, access to lifesaving ARV treatments and related care for those living with HIV/AIDS faced a costly blow when USAID funding was cut as a result of strongman policies under Donald Trump in the United States.  With austerity only deepening, this puts ordinary South Africans in a quandary. 

Avoiding a Population Anxiety Panic 

The discourse around population decline has become highly polarised in the United States of America, with the traditional and more extreme right wing forces within conservatives movements fear mongering around declining populations. These anxieties are not always based in fact, but on warped perceptions of demographic change fueled by popular narratives.  Whilst South Africa’s reproductive discourse is at current far less politicized, this does not mean there is not a danger of this issue entering the mainstream as it has in the United States, with detrimental setbacks.

With this in mind, it is of utmost importance that we steer clear of language that attributes responsibility for the decline in birth rate to women exclusively. From young teenage girls being told to “open your books and close your legs" by a health minister in attempt to push abstinence (an approach to pregnancy prevention that has been proven ineffective), to women facing ridicule when they are allegedly harassed by members of the judicial body, the very body entrusted to convict sexual offenders- women and girls are too often framed as single-handedly responsible for all their own victimization in non-conseual situations. This is why we should proceed with caution in discussions around demographic shifts and to whom we assign responsibility, as ultimately the ability to start a family involves parties of all genders.

Any proposed changes to healthcare such as the NHI must account for reproductive needs, and there must be widespread economic policy reform that creates an enabling environment- for example the proposal by many within civil society of a Universal Basic Income Grant (UBIG) that expands upon the existing SRD grant that could go a long way in terms of helping unemployed women free up time to work, to be able to afford assistance with child rearing, and so on. Such policy changes are needed- and so is the stark reminder served by the population decline statistic that our social freedoms are not mutually exclusive from our economic liberation.