Improving Survival Of Babies After Birth Will Decrease Population Growth

On November 15, 2022, the United Nations reported that the world population reached 8 billion people. Since then, there have been growing concerns about how “overpopulation is a serious threat.” After all, the Earth has limited resources like clean water and land during the ongoing climate crisis — which could make it challenging to feed and provide for a growing population. While some have further claimed “eight billion people in the world is a crisis”, the fact that remains ignored is that the inequitable distribution of global resources and the lack of access to adequate health care facilities in developing countries is a far bigger crisis.

Since the 1950s to date, there has been a long-term decline in fertility rates and the number of children being born worldwide. Despite that, it is estimated that by 2050, the world’s population could increase to 9.8 billion. But solely focusing on implementing population control measures could prove to be inadequate. What is far more important to enable family planning is drastically reducing infant mortality rates, according to a new study published in PLOS One.

“Although it sounds counterintuitive, higher baby death rates are linked to higher population growth because the more babies a women loses, the more children she is likely to have, which is known as the so-called ‘replacement’, or ‘insurance’ effect,” said lead author of the study, Corey Bradshaw, a pediatrician and professor of global ecology from The University of Western Australia and Flinders University, in a press release.

The main causes of infant mortality worldwide are prematurity and low-birth weight, pneumonia, birth defects, and birth trauma or injuries. In developing countries, a large number of infant deaths are due to diarrheal diseases and severe bacterial infections.

By 2030, The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals 3 aims to reduce global infant and child mortality (under the age of 5) to less than 25 per 1000 live births. But researchers warn that low-income and middle-income countries are nowhere close to preventing or reducing infant deaths.

Co-author of the study, Chitra Saraswati of The University of Western Australia’s Medical School said, “Recommendations for measures to decrease infant mortality emphasise improving the quality of antenatal care, increasing the number of trained healthcare staff at births, and improving postnatal care for both infants and mothers. Given the evidence that large households can worsen child health, improving living conditions to ameliorate high-density living could also indirectly result in lower fertility.”

“Interestingly, female education, home visits by health workers, quality of family planning services, and religious adherence all had weak, if any, contribution at the scale of entire countries,” she further added in a Flinders University press release.

The team used publicly available data from 64 different low-income and middle-income countries to assess which factors could be contributing to larger household sizes. This included data from sources like the World Bank, Demographic and Health Surveys, Family Planning Effort Index, and the World Health Organization Global Health Observatory, among others. The datasets included women between the ages of 15 to 49. In their paper, they observed that “high infant mortality was most strongly related to high fertility, followed by reduced access to contraception.”

To date, more than 222 million women of child-bearing age globally do not have access to contraceptives and other methods of family planning. To make matters worse, UN reports found that the number of men who use condoms or opt for a vasectomy is decreasing worldwide.

Melinda Judge, a co-author of the study who is from the same university as her colleagues said: “Keeping babies alive actually reduced average fertility and helps put the brakes on population growth. Essentially, higher infant mortality and a larger household size increased fertility, whereas greater access to any form of contraception decreased fertility.”