The question of declining fertility

TÜİK announced the fertility rate for 2012 as 2.02. This in fact also showed what kind of serious data the Prime Minister's "three children" demand, which he has voiced at every opportunity for some time for Turkey's future, rests on. The figure of 2.02 indicates a decline of 0.14 within four years compared with the figure of 2.16 in 2008. Unless effective measures are taken, it seems unavoidable that this decline will continue and that after a while we will fall into the situation that worries Europeans so gravely today.

If this decline continues despite our Prime Minister's "three children" rhetoric, does this rhetoric of the Prime Minister remain ineffective?

Truthfully, we cannot say that, because this decline is also partly related to the sociological transformation our society is undergoing. The most important dimension of this transformation is urbanization. In urbanizing societies, a child first of all loses the character of an economic or political power for a family, and descends to the level of more of a psychological need. In the village, by contrast, a child is an economic and political necessity. The number of children is also a sign of the family's economic and political power, and in this respect there is no need to encourage anyone to have more children.

Since 1950, Turkey has entered a regular and rapid tendency toward urbanization. Until the urban population ratio rose from around 25 percent to 77 percent. Moreover, we need to take into account that the remaining rural population too now lives at urban standards. For people living in these conditions, a child turns into a burden, and this burden is borne only in the name of certain values.

Until 1960, population-encouraging policies were in force in Turkey, and overnight an anti-natalist policy was adopted. In this, the fact that we were badly persuaded by the international campaign imposed on us, claiming an inverse relationship between the rate of population growth and economic development, had an effect. In fact this campaign targeted only countries like ours; the developed countries, at the very time they were imposing these campaigns on us, had already begun efforts to raise the growth rate of their own populations.

But among us, it was quickly believed that the cause of our underdevelopment was our rapidly growing population. Yet everything said about the relationship between development and population was data fabricated only to restrain our population. The cause of underdevelopment was not our population but incompetent administration or governance. The population growth rate was a scapegoat sought by those who could not show the skill to manage the population or the problems it produced. That is why they thought they could govern more easily by reducing the population, and they threw themselves into population planning campaigns. Had they probably spent the energy they spent on suppressing the population on managing the growing population, we would be in a much better place. Yet suppressing the population seemed a shortcut, but today it is also understood more clearly that the problems produced by such campaigns have literally brought us to the brink of a catastrophe. Because population policies are not policies whose results are obtained right away and whose bills are paid right away; the grandchildren pay the price.

Urbanization, which began in 1950, was in any case inclined, as everywhere in the world, to reduce the fertility rate in Turkey too within a natural balance. Avoiding this was already very difficult. Yet, as an addition, population control was put into practice by being made to penetrate even to the villages, trying all kinds of policies.

One of the most effective practices was turning this subject into an ideology of everyday life. What this means is this: population control became a mode of behavior that the people adopted as a norm. So much so that even housewives who did not work began to regard becoming a mother at an early age or having more than two children as a subject on which they shame one another. Women became unable to say they had more than two children without being seized by a complex and without shame. Other women began to shame the one with three children, to judge this situation as an indicator of ignorance. This is precisely a situation in which population planning has turned into an ideology of everyday life, and it is, unfortunately, also the picture of the success of anti-natalist policies.

We can say that the psychological pressure that the Prime Minister's voicing of three children at every opportunity has at least broken is this one. Today, people can say without any complex that they have three or more children. Thanks to this campaign that the Prime Minister carries with his own person, perhaps the rate of decline of the declining fertility has slowed. Beyond this, the task is to turn the matter into more effective structural policies, to take measures according to the needs of the urban, career-holding woman who will give birth.