Skip to main content

How to maintain the Japanese population?

This is a nice essay, by Alexandra Harney, on ways to address population decline in Japan. It goes a little sideways at the beginning-- it implies that the Japanese government could not focus on infrastructure projects and population maintenance at the same time, like they are mutually exclusive-- but makes standard and sound recommendations at the end.

Refreshingly, the author of the essay does not recommend reinforcing or returning to 'traditional family values'-- in other words, limited birth control and women out of the paid workforce-- as a means of addressing Japanese population decline. As the author and many others note, increased gender equity, supported through government policies, is good in and of itself and also tends to produce replacement-rate birth rates.

Links:

Essay in The New York Times (December 15, 2012): Without Babies, Can Japan Survive? 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Medically necessary abortions: The battle of the experts

Apparently, Representative Joe Walsh is not entirely alone! The assertion that an abortion is never medically necessary has been floating around in the pro-life universe for at least a little while. We are now witnessing a battle of the experts. One the one side is Joe Walsh and friends. Walsh himself released a pdf document with quotations from several doctors-- including some historically prominent pro-choice doctors, like Alan Guttmacher-- making the 'never medically necessary' claim seem quite reasonable. Also on Walsh's side are several doctors  who particpated in a recent "International Symposium on Maternal Health" in Dublin. Ireland, despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 1992 , has a total ban on abortion. Irish pro-lifers want the country's politicians to resist pressure to implement even a life exception, so the question of medical necessity is directly relevant there. The "Dublin Declaration," released after the S...

Spontaneous miscarriage and the morality of abortion

Hello, everyone! I have been away from the blog for a while, during a period of great activity regarding reproductive politics. So let's get back to discussing this always-interesting topic.  In reading an essay by Gary Gutting (subject of a separate post), I followed a link to this blog post by philosopher Peter Smith.  He wonders why intentional termination of an early pregnancy is more morally consequential than a spontaneous early miscarriage (which occurs in roughly 30% of conceptions). What he is really doing is calling attention to a perceived hypocrisy by pro-life advocates: If unborn are valuable humans from the moment of conception, why isn't there more of an outcry over the heavy loss of human life by natural miscarriage? If the value of the unborn is equal across all situations, Smith suggests, then this apparent lack of concern over natural miscarriage indicates that opposition to abortion, at least early in pregnancy, is about something else.  ...