Page 6 - Aspire April -2023 Vol 8 / Issue 2

FREE FALL INTO A ‘FERTILITY TRAP’ IS
dramatic decline in fertility rates in a widening trend that will have major geopolitical and economic consequences this century and beyond.
Nowhere is this free fall into a potentially irreversible fertility trap more evident than in increasingly affluent Asia Pacific countries including China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore.
In South Korea, the demographic crisis is revealed in new data showing that the total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime – has fallen to 0.78. It is the only country in the world with a TFR below one.
In highly industrialised China and Japan, the TFR has dropped to 1.3 with both countries experiencing an ageing population putting pressure on economies and social services.
Prosperity has also come as a cost to fertility in other so called Tiger economies such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan that are experiencing some of the lowest TFRs in the world.
The general global consensus is that a population replacement rate should be 2.1 – that is, one child to replace the mother, one to succeed the father, and 0.1 to compensate for childhood mortality.
This confronting demographic situation will come into sharp focus at the ASPIRE 2023 Congress in Adelaide in September with a milestone lecture by eminent reproductive biologist Laureate Professor John Aitken.
John Aitken
This is not sustainable, and it is time to recognise that we can no longer simply paper over the cracks that pose such a threat to our species
“Every minute of every day we are confronted by evidence of falling fertility rates, environmental destruction and climate change,” he said.
“This is not sustainable, and it is time to recognise that we can no longer simply paper over the cracks that pose such a threat to our species.”
Professor Aitken said population growth around the world started to decline in the 1970s partly in consequence to a simultaneous increase in prosperity, and in 2022 the United Nations declared that two- thirds of the global population now live in countries where fertility rates are below replacement levels.
“The traditional population age pyramid is one where you have a large number of young people at the bottom graduating to an apex of the elderly at the top,” he said.
“But in modern, industrialised societies that pyramid is being inverted in a trend that is inexorable and constant.
He has been President of the International Society of Andrology, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Biotechnology and Development, and Pro Vice- Chancellor of the Faculty of Health and Medicine at the University of Newcastle in Australia.
Professor Aitken is also the author of the book entitled
The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact Your Fertility and Why We Should Act Now. The book recently won the prestigious American Association of Publishers PROSE Prize in clinical medicine.
He said that the forces contributing to an infertility trap appeared “inexorable and constant” warning that China and other southeast Asian countries may see their population levels reduced by about one half in the coming decades.
At the ASPIRE Congress, Professor Aitken is expected to outline a range of initiatives in government policy, environmental protection and fertility management to stem the tide of collapsing fertility rates and population replenishment.
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Countries around the world are experiencing a