Abortion Rate Declined in US Even as Birth Rate Dropped

This week the US Centers for Disease Control issued the latest installment in their abortion surveillance reports. The good news was that the abortion rate dropped in the US in this most recent period. NBC News summarizes the story:

U.S. abortions fell 5 percent during the Great Recession in the biggest one-year decrease in at least a decade, according to government figures released Wednesday. 

While many states have aggressively restricted access to abortion, most of those laws were adopted in the past two years and are not believed to have played a role in the decline. 

The reason for the decline wasn't clear, but some experts said it may be due to better use of birth control during tough economic times. Their theory is that some women believe they can't afford to get pregnant.

Keep in mind that the abortion rate declined even though the birth rate was declining, which is the indirect evidence that women are relying more on contraception to avoid getting pregnant in the first place.

The increased care with which women are avoiding conception in the face of economic uncertainty is similar to the story being told in Sub-Saharan Africa. Tom A. Moultrie, Takudzwa S. Sayi and Ian M. Timæus have a paper in the latest issue of Population Studies detailing the role that postponement of births has been playing in African fertility levels.

The shift from abortion to contraception has also played out recently in the Republic of Georgia, which for some time now has had the highest abortion rate in the world. The abortion rate in Georgia dropped by half between 2005 (when the results of a Reproductive Health Survey were released) and now. This appears to be due especially to a USAID-assisted program that brought contraceptives to Georgian women, so that they no longer had to rely on abortion as their main method of fertility control. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the birth rate has risen in Georgia as a result. It has been low for a long time and no one expects it to go up any time soon.

The Role of the Potato in Demographic History

Rafael Pereira recently pointed me to a newly published article by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian of NBER laying out the role of the potato in helping to promote population growth and urbanization in the 18th and 19th centuries. The article appears in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, but it isn't yet available for free online, whereas we do have access to an earlier working paper version. In chapters 2 and 11 my text, I note that scholars have believed for some time that the introduction of the potato from the new world to the old world was one of the elements that improved nutrition, thus helping to lower mortality and launch the demographic revolution. Nunn and Qian add to the story by putting a number on this contribution:

According to our most conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato accounts for approximately one-quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900.

Of course the most famous aspect of the potato was the fact that the Irish relied upon a specific variety so heavily that when a fungus hit the island, the crops were wiped out, leading to a famine. This seems like a classic Malthusian dilemma, but of course Malthus died a decade and a half before that happened. Might he have thought such a thing possible? It turns out that 6th Edition of his book on Population is available on-line and a quick consultation turns up the fact that he already knew, early in the 19th century, how important the potato was to population growth in Ireland, and he worried that this was going to lead to early marriages, high birth rates, and overpopulation:

The details of the population of Ireland are but little known. I shall only observe therefore, that the extended use of potatoes has allowed of a very rapid increase of it during the last century. But the cheapness of this nourishing root, and the small piece of ground which, under this kind of cultivation, will in average years produce the food for a family, joined to the ignorance and depressed state of the people, which have prompted them to follow their inclinations with no other prospect than an immediate bare subsistence, have encouraged marriage to such a degree, that the population is pushed much beyond the industry and present resources of the country; and the consequence naturally is, that the lower classes of people are in the most impoverished and miserable state. The checks to the population are of course chiefly of the positive kind, and arise from the diseases occasioned by squalid poverty, by damp and wretched cabins, by bad and insufficient clothing, and occasional want. To these positive checks have, of late years, been added the vice and misery of intestine commotion, of civil war, and of martial law [Part II, Chapter X, paragraph 38].

Inserting Population Into the Development Agenda

Thanks to an email from SOMEDE (Sociedad Mexicana de Demografía), I have been alerted to a new effort by the UNFPA and others to rethink the world development goals, including an emphasis on population. At the moment the demographic components of the Millennium Development Goals emphasize improving health. No one can argue with the importance of that, but we must also carefully consider the broad consequences of continued, and geographically uneven, population growth. Without that in the equation, all other efforts will have weaker outcomes.

If you go to this website: http://www.worldwewant2015.org/population, you will find the following setup comments:

This space is dedicated to the global thematic consultation on population dynamics in the post-2015 UN development agenda, co-convened by UN-DESA, UNFPA, UN-Habitat and IOM in partnership with the Government of Switzerland. 

It is an open and inclusive forum for civil society, policy makers, government officials, donors, UN staff and all other stakeholders to discuss the scope and priorities of the post-2015 development agenda. 

We aim to stimulate dialogue, facilitate an exchange of ideas and collect and document the views, experiences and perspectives of key stakeholders vis-à-vis population dynamics on this forum. It is an opportunity to contribute to the setting of shared global priorities in the context of ameliorating poverty and inequality, whilst championing universal rights and values. 

Please join us for a constructive, dynamic and lively dialogue.

This has been put into place by Barney Cohen, who recently left the US National Academy of Sciences to become Chief of the Population Studies Branch of the UN's Population Division, and we owe him a debt of gratitude for helping to improve the global visibility of population issues.

Should the Retirement Age Be Raised to Help Balance the Budget?

During President Carter's administration in the 1970s, the age at which a person can receive full Social Security benefits in the United States was raised to 66 for people born between 1943 and 1954 (basically the early baby boomers), and incrementally up to 67 for people born since 1960. People in those birth cohorts can still retire as early as age 62, but your monthly benefits are reduced because the actuarial principal is that no matter when you retire from age 62 on, you will receive the same total payout from the government. For this reason, the impact of further raising the age at which full benefits may not be very large. Rather, the short-term goal should be to keep people in the labor force as along as possible because that means that they are continuing to contribute the very payroll taxes that are being paid to the current Social Security beneficiaries.

Paul Krugman of Princeton University and the New York Times had a different take this week (as on previous occasions) on why the so-called retirement age should not be increased. He argues that life expectancy beyond age 65 has not increased enough, especially among minority group members, to justify this increase in the retirement age. So, I went back to the life expectancy data from the National Center for Health Statistics of the US Centers for Disease Control to see if that was true. Life expectancy didn't change much between 1935 when Social Security was designed, and 1950, when comparable data for more recent periods became available. In 1950, life expectancy for a 65 year old white female was 15.1 years and that increased to 20.4 in 2009 (the most recent year available), for a 5.3 year gain. For white males the gain in life expectancy over that 59 year period was 4.9 years. For African-American females the gain has been 4.4 years and for African-American males it has been 2.9 years. We don't have that same time series for Hispanics, but the current data suggest that Hispanic elders have a higher life expectancy at age 65 than non-Hispanic whites, so we can conservatively apply to them the trend shown by non-Hispanic whites. 

The conclusion: Since 1935 the age at eligibility for full Social Security benefits has increased by only two years--from 65 to 67. Yet, even for the most disadvantaged group--black males--life expectancy at age 65 has increased by nearly three years. Thus, the recommendation of President Obama's Deficit Reduction Commission that the retirement age be increased by another year (to 68) by 2050 does not seem unreasonable.

Demographics of the US Election Revisited

The discussion surrounding the demographics of the US election has tended to lump the "Red" states together as though they represented a demographically homogeneous group of people voting Republican, while the "Blue" states were somehow homogeneously Democratic. In particular, commentators laid it out that Romney had won the "Confederacy," with the implication that southern states were distinctly different from the rest of the nation. Karen Cox at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, has a nice rebuttal to that idea in today's New York Times.

Voters in Charlotte, N.C., Atlanta, Nashville, New Orleans, Birmingham, Ala., and even Jackson, Miss., gave Mr. Obama substantial majorities, not because they are out of step with the rest of the country but because they are part of the same urban-rural divide that drives voting everywhere.

So if we’re going to apply the term “Confederacy,” then perhaps we can all agree that while a majority of Southern white voters seem intransigent to change, the region is nevertheless being transformed by its changing demographics.

Virginia, home to the capital of the Confederacy, went for Mr. Obama. Florida, part of the original Confederacy, also went for Mr. Obama. North Carolina, which Mr. Obama carried in 2008, went to Mr. Romney, but by a very slim margin — more attributable to the economy and job losses than to any conspiracy of Confederate dunces.    

She argues, in particular, that much of the divide is as much along rural/urban lines as anything else. Rural areas everywhere in the country tend to be conservative politically, while urban areas are more liberal. And, since the nation is predominantly urban, you can imagine where that road goes. 

I thought about that same exact point yesterday as my wife and I watched the movie "Lincoln." The debate about the 13th amendment abolishing slavery played out in the House of Representatives of a country that, at the time, had only northern states. It passed in the House by only two votes, back in the day when the country was still largely rural.