In the shopping malls of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, it is easy to find young couples gliding strollers across shiny tile floors. Rita Linda Dayrit, a grandmother and self-described lover of babies, always peeks inside. But to her dismay, the little faces staring back are often furry.
“Puppies in strollers,” Dayrit says. “Oh, my gosh. It breaks my heart.”
Ms. Dayrit is a former president of the Pro-Life Philippines Foundation. Unapologetically Catholic, she believes contraception is immoral and that large families are virtuous. These values were well represented in the Philippines as recently as the 1990s, when the average Filipina gave birth to four or more children. But the latest data puts the country’s birth rate at 1.7, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 – the number required to hold a country’s population steady.
Why We Wrote This
Wealthier nations in Asia have seen their average birth rates fall dramatically over time. Now, middle-income Asian countries are seeing the birth rate drop as well.
“It’s our middle class,” Ms. Dayrit says. “They are busy with careers, not having children and not getting married. Their values have changed.”
Across Southeast Asia, birth rates are dropping faster than many expected. The fact that even the Philippines might be facing a low-fertility future is an astonishing turn. In Asia, low birth rates are traditionally seen as a problem afflicting affluent, highly educated, and urbanized countries. Think Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, all three of which have birth rates among the lowest on Earth.
But now, the fertility slump is coming for middle-income nations, too, irrespective of culture or religion.
Two-thirds of the world’s population currently lives in nations where birth rates are below replacement. This is true of Muslim-majority Malaysia and Turkey, in Catholic-dominant Brazil and the Philippines, and in officially nonreligious China and Vietnam.
Particularly surprising is the case of Thailand, a Buddhist-majority country of about 70 million people. Neither poor nor rich, it is home to large numbers of white-collar workers and laborers alike. Thai officials are reeling from recent data putting the Southeast Asian country’s birth rate at 0.9 – even lower than that of Japan, considered a paragon of low fertility.
Thailand’s government is talking about a “demographic crisis,” with its national health department warning that “the sounds from the cradle are fading away.”
Tou Manomaiphibul, a factory manager in Bangkok, is emblematic of the Thais who have soured on the idea of raising a big family. Though without children for now, he and his wife plan to have no more than one. “We’ll give that one child the maximum amount of love and resources,” he says. For Mr. Tou, that means private schools in Bangkok, where tuition can easily exceed $5,000 a year even in the primary grades.
His generation of middle-class Thai millennials enjoys lifestyles far grander than that of their grandparents, who mostly grew up living on farms. Many younger Thais fear that multiple kids would leave them poorer and more exhausted – knocking them down the socio-economic ladder at a time when the future is uncertain and everything seems to be getting more and more expensive.
“To give a child a good life,” Mr. Tou says, “you must save a lot of money from the time they’re born.”
The factors driving down global birth rates are complex. (Smartphones are considered the culprit du jour.) But the trend almost always appears wherever women gain more access to education. College degrees lead to career-focused women, with many choosing to delay marriage and have only one child – or none at all.
According to a government-affiliated poll, nearly half of all childless Thai adults have no plans to raise kids in the future.
Stefan M Prager/IMAGO/Reuters
Sirada Krittayaruesiriwat, a bank employee in Bangkok with no children, says the stigma against child-free women is also starting to fade away. “I don’t catch any flak for my choice,” says Ms. Sirada, who has been married for more than 20 years. “My husband had notions about kids when we first got together. But I’m just not the type of person who loves children enough to take on such a big responsibility.” Ms. Sirada says she enjoys spending her money freely, sleeping late on weekends, and long gym sessions — all habits antithetical to raising a toddler.
Thailand’s fertility rate is similar to that of South Korea and Singapore. It’s only a little lower than China’s. Such low fertility portends an unrecognizable future in which, in just two generations, the country’s population could shrink by 50%. More than half of all citizens would be elderly (65 and up) and children (anyone 14 and under) would make up a mere 3% of the population.
“It’s quite alarming,” says Piyachart Phiromswad, an economist with the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.
Thailand is on track to become one of the first “developing countries to experience such an extreme change in the core structure of society,” Mr. Piyachart says. It isn’t rich enough to “throw money at young people and ask them to have babies,” he says, not that baby bonuses have delivered dramatic results in either Japan, South Korea, or in Scandinavia.
He advocates an “all hands on deck” approach in which citizens, accepting they’ll work beyond their mid-60s, focus on keeping fit and healthy. Officials, he says, should enact policies that help middle-aged people — not just younger folks — train for new careers.
Thailand appears to be a bellwether for other middle-income societies facing a dramatic demographic shift. But if it manages the situation gracefully, Mr. Piyachart says, it could offer a model to any country “where it’s obvious we can’t just rely on the government to fix this.”
That would include the Philippines. Looking around the planet, its birth rate of 1.7 children per woman is enviable to some — a number that leaders from Scandinavia to Singapore could only dream of. Yet Ms. Dayrit, the pro-life campaigner, feels more out of touch with the world around her.
Nursing homes were once rare in her country. The norm, she says, was for elderly people to remain at home until the end, cared for by five, six, or even nine children. She reckons there are more nursing facilities now because “if you only have two kids and they have different values — they’re struggling with work, they like to travel — then you will be put in one of these places.”
More upsetting still to Ms. Dayrit are the young couples choosing pets over children. She tells them that their pets won’t be there to help them as they grow old. “We need voices to tell society that the world was made by God to be populated by people, not dogs and cats,” she says.