Happy World Population Day… but you really don’t need to breed for Britain

The Soviet Order of Maternal Glory is redolent of the grossest form of state interference into perhaps the deepest and most personal expression of a woman – her ability to choose to reproduce.

Women were “encouraged” to have more communist babies for the Motherland, to help meet Soviet production targets.

You might think there are few in the UK who would seek to replicate the Soviet state’s policy today.

However, on the day that the United Nations has predicted that the perilous growth of the world population will mean it will reach 10 billion by 2063 (July 11 is World Population Day), there is a growing movement in the UK calling for pronatalism – the belief that the world needs more children.

Surely we all know that we are already consuming more resources than the planet can sustain? We are already living way beyond our means. We know we are tipping the world over into irreversible climate change – which in turn erodes fertile soil, meaning more people must scrabble for more resources from diminishing land and water sources.

We know we are killing off animal species at a dizzying rate. We are felling our rainforests, pumping oil and digging up and burning more coal in a frenzy to try to satisfy our increasingly voracious appetites for consumables.

But, say the pronatalists, while the birth rate is rising in many lower income countries like Nigeria, in richer countries where women have relatively greater access to education, job opportunities and healthcare, birth rates are declining.

In the UK, this is a problem, they say, because while our numbers are shrinking – if you strip out the results of immigration – the numbers of older, non-working citizens is increasing. Our population is ageing.

This, say the pro-natalists, is a problem. And they are right.

We cannot afford to support our increasingly larger cohort of economically less active elders, who place the heaviest demands on social care services, the NHS and the state pension pot.

Logically, then, we need an ever-growing pool of working-age people to make the money on which our elders, in the autumn of their years, can float.

This is why the pronatalist movement is demanding that women should breed for Britain – it is their patriotic duty. Their duty for the Motherland.

Author Paul Moreland argues in his latest book, No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, that if women do not step up, we, in the UK will be overtaken by lower income nations with booming economies turbo-boosted by higher fertility rates.

And the former Tory MP Miriam Cates, speaking at a conference in London last year, spoke of a national “malaise” towards having children, claiming it was an “existential threat” to western countries.

Let us politely step around the blaring racism and sexism in these statements.

There is a fix – and a fix that does not rely on a Handmaid’s Tale-solution of British women producing babies to pay into our pension pots. The UK population is being supported by new, working-age immigration.

New workers, keen to come to the UK, are the answer. They want to work – often in the NHS and social care, where they are needed most to support our elders – and they pay taxes to fund those services and boost our pension pots.

At the same time, immigration into the UK does not add to global population growth. The science is clear, population growth is a driver of all our environmental crises from climate change to wildlife extinctions, to millions left in poverty plagued by drought and desertification. Humanity is out of bounds, and we need to end our constant pursuit of growth at the expense of women’s bodies, and the natural world upon which we depend.

Pronatalism is a simplistic, misguided, sexist, racist and entirely irrational answer to the wrong question. The reductio ad absurdum of this philosophy is that we must destroy the planet (with more and more people) to save it.

Whisper it quietly, but it is time to reduce – not increase – our population.

Amy Jankiewicz is chief executive of Population Matters