Standing in Magdeburg’s maternity clinic, Hubertus Schulz contemplated his empty delivery suite. In one corner, a fluffy stork with a red beak adorned a baby-less incubator.
”I’d like to have a bit more to do, to be honest,” Dr Schulz, the clinic’s chief doctor, said. ”I’ve been working here for 25 years. We used to be full of babies. Now this is rarely the case.”
During communist times, the clinic in the East German city of Magdeburg used to deliver around 2 500 babies a year. The number has fallen to 880. Together with Chemnitz, also in the former East Germany, Magdeburg has the lowest birthrate of any European city. For every 1 000 inhabitants, just over seven babies are born a year. What had gone wrong?
”The problem is that some people have become less tolerant of children. They see them as loud, stressful and a bit of a pain,” Schulz said. ”They’d rather have a cat or a dog.”
The economic consequences for Magdeburg, the regional capital of the rundown German state of Saxony-Anhalt, are not hard to spot. The clinic is on the edge of a once-desirable communist housing estate built in the early 1980s. These days it is a depressing spectacle: boarded-up flats, abandoned schools, graffiti everywhere.
Since 1990 a third of the city’s inhabitants have left. A fifth of those who have stayed don’t have a job. ”This problem doesn’t just affect Magdeburg or Germany. It affects the whole of western Europe,” said Lutz Trümper, Magdeburg’s mayor. ”In Germany the phenomenon of shrinking families has been going on for the past 30 years. We have the additional factor here that many people left to find work in West Germany. Having children just doesn’t seem to fit with modern lifestyles.”
The mayor has a point. In the tumultuous years after World War II, Europe’s birthrate went up, peaking in the mid-60s. Since then the trend has been relentlessly downward. According to the latest EU statistics, Germany has the lowest birthrate in the EU, with 8,5 births per 1 000 inhabitants.
Fewer than 700 000 babies were born in Germany last year — the lowest figure since 1945. Other nations at the bottom of the table include Spain (10,6 per 1 000 inhabitants), Italy (9,7), and Poland (9,3). Across 21st-century Europe more people are dying than are being born.
But the picture is confused. Birth rates are significantly higher in Ireland (15,2) and France (12,7), where large families are encouraged with tax benefits and allowances. Denmark (12) and Sweden (11,2) have generous state provision and higher birthrates. But there is no clear evidence that official attempts to encourage couples to have children actually work. In Britain the birthrate is comparatively high (12), despite few state subsidies. By contrast, childless Germany spends 3,1% of its GDP on families and children — well above the 2,1% EU average.
One country in Europe, meanwhile, has a birthrate of 15,08 per 1 000 inhabitants — the figure needed to maintain a stable population. It is Albania, but even here there has been a drop of 65% in the birthrate since 1960.
The alarming statistics have ensured that Europe’s birthrate has become a matter of urgent political concern. In Germany, the tabloid Bild recently predicted that Germans would die out entirely by 2300. In Austria, the magazine Profil joked that Austrians (9,7) would soon deserve their own enclosure in Vienna’s zoo — next to the pandas.
Politicians have offered their own solutions. But most accept that there are limits to what the state can do when it comes to the intimate decision of whether to have a child. The biggest problem facing women across Europe is how to reconcile motherhood with a career. Intriguingly, though, birthrates tend to be higher in countries where the number of working women is high, studies have shown. Iceland has the highest birthrate in western Europe, with two children per woman on average. It also has the highest number of working women: 90%. Germany has fewer women in work and fewer babies.
”I’d love to have children but to do so now would kill off my career,” Steffi Warnke, a 32-year-old PhD student at Berlin’s Free University, said. ”I’ve invested a lot of time in studying. The problem is that the moment you can apply for academic jobs — when you are 30-35 — is also the time to have babies. It’s hard to do both.”
In Spain, sociologists have blamed the low birthrate on hostile economic conditions, and the reluctance of businesses to accommodate working mothers with job-sharing or flexi-time. The precarious outlook forces women to postpone childbirth — or give up the idea entirely.
”It’s all about economics,” Paloma Sanchez, a 45-year-old worker in Madrid with no children, said. It took her 10 years to land her first permanent job. ”You need to have economic stability and security, and by the time you have it you become lazy. Maybe if my husband had a higher salary I would have considered it.”
”No, it’s impossible for me, at this stage in my life,” said Nadio Gaggiolo (30) who runs a bed and breakfast in Rome. ”It would be too tough. I am a career woman with very little time and I would want to be economically secure before starting a family.”
Sabine Samuel (35) a translator in Paris with three children, said that incentives in France were not decisive when it came to deciding whether to have a large family. ”I don’t believe people have more children because they get more money. I think it’s because French women feel they can have children and still go back to work almost straightaway because childcare is available and cheap,” she said.
Whatever the explanation, experts agree that Europe is shrinking, with forecasts of a reduction of seven million people, or 1,5% of the population, by 2050. Globally birthrates are higher in poor countries than rich ones. The past half-century shows that whenever countries achieve prosperity their birthrates fall. But does this matter?
”From the point of view of the global environment this is good news. The only way for Europe to maintain its population is through immigration,” Carl Djerassi, emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, and the man who co-invented the pill, told The Guardian.
Was the pill responsible for the fall in birthrates? ”This is the conclusion that many people in Europe have come to. But it’s absolute and total bullshit,” he said. ”The falling birthrate is due to social not technological reasons.”
Djerassi concedes, however, that the world is dividing into ”geriatric” and ”paediatric” societies.
In Europe the number of over-50s outweighs the number of under-15s, with the over-85s the fastest-growing demographic group. In Africa, and other developing countries, it’s the other way round. The traditional demographic pyramid — in which young people outnumber old people, and which lasted for tens of thousands of years — has been replaced in Europe by a giant mushroom.
Some experts believe that in the medium to long term Europe is facing nothing less than a demographic disaster. In his latest book, Minimum, the German publisher Frank Schirrmacher — father of one — argues that sinking birthrates are making Germany’s generous pensions system unsustainable and are destabilising society.
But Barbara Dippelhofer, a professor of sociology at Magdeburg’s university, takes a more sanguine view. ”If you look at birthrates historically then things are not so terrible. After all in Bismarck’s time, back in 1871, there were 41-million people living in an area much bigger than modern Germany.”
But she added: ”The problem is that the prognosis is bad. There will be a lot of people missing from the workforce. In 15 years’ time we will have a skills shortage.” Many industrialists agree.
Either way, Europe’s politicians have now woken up to the fact that there are too few children out there. Germany’s family minister, Ursula von der Leyen — famously a mother of seven — has proposed radical measures to encourage reluctant German couples to breed. They include tax breaks of â,¬3 000 a year for working couples, more nursery places and a controversial state-funded welfare scheme that requires men to take two months off work for families to get full funding.
This has not gone down well with many men in her own conservative Christian Democrat party, who have reacted badly to the idea of men changing nappies. Other countries such as Italy have introduced a â,¬1 000 baby bonus. On Tuesday, however, Schulz was sceptical that such measures would work. A lot of Germans were too selfish to breed, he said. ”I think there is a certain amount of egotism. It isn’t really people’s fault. It is just the fault of society.” – Guardian Unlimited Â