THE IDEA BEHIND CHILD ZERO

Housing and living costs, job insecurity and stagnant wages have all been cited, along with global instability fuelled by political and economic uncertainty and climate and environmental concerns.

Then there’s the challenge of finding someone to settle down with. If you haven’t met the right person, or you can’t afford to live together, then how can you start a family? Almost a third of UK 20-34-year-olds still live with their parents.

Declining fertility worries governments, particularly chancellors. If the proportion of working-age people keeps going south, who’s going to boost the economy and deliver the cash to pay for pensions and the NHS?
One answer might be a change in immigration policy, following Spain’s example who are welcoming migrants to boost their workforce and their birth rate, but that doesn’t seem popular elsewhere. Governments have their own ideas about what kinds of babies they wish to incentivise.

All of which made me wonder, if fertility rates continue to plummet, how far might governments go to reverse the trend?

Most of the baby incentive policies featured in Child Zero are being implemented in countries right now. Motherhood medals, baby bonuses, tax incentives. State-sponsored dating initiatives. Restricting access to contraception and abortion.
State-sanctioned kidnapping of another country’s children.

There are some I didn’t include, like writing to every 29-year-old reminding them the clock is ticking and they’d better crack on (yes, really: that’s just across the Channel). Or paying schoolgirls to have babies, like Putin.
It is unclear what impact these pronatalist policies are having, if any.

How does the saying go? We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Blunt interventions by the state in people’s reproductive choices don’t tend to work out well. China scrapped its One Child policy ten years ago, but still has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at just 1.0. Teetering under the strain of a rapidly declining workforce, China is struggling to support its ageing population. Young citizens appear immune to the government’s baby incentives. So now they’ve introduced a tax on contraceptives.

But let’s not be complacent. A Reform Party candidate proposed imposing a negative child benefit tax on UK couples who don’t have offspring.
If the carrot doesn’t work, try the stick.

The reality is, it’s a tough time to be a child or a parent. Some believe that, aside from economic reasons, we need young people more than ever for their energy, optimism and creativity. Others question whether it’s right to bring a child into this troubled and divided world, arguing that the planet and Earth’s other species would welcome a quiet, steady decline in human numbers.  
Either way, is it really a government’s place to intervene in decisions about who should or should not have kids?
And in the example of Child Zero, open the floodgates on interventions that go significantly further?

You can read more about these dilemmas and other themes in the book next.