THOSE MISSING BABIES

An Atlanta couple is harassed by obscene telephone calls after they and their eight children appear on a television commercial for a laundry detergent. The Good Samaritan, a large hospital in Los Angeles, closes down its maternity ward as the number of abortions in the area approaches the number of live births. Underused elementary schools are turned into bakeries or motels. Young people gather in Manhattan's Central Park to honor the "nonparents of the year" and celebrate their childlessness in a "non-fertility rite" complete with dancing.

These scenes, which only a few years ago would have seemed unusual, even extraordinary, are becoming more common week by week across the U.S. They are part of a phenomenon that is deeply concerning social planners, politicians, businessmen and educators: the falling birth rate among Americans. Although the U.S. population is still on the rise, Americans in 1974 are producing fewer babies per family than at any time in their history.

As a result, the country is moving toward the much-debated state of zero population growth--the theoretical point at which births balance deaths.

This does not mean, of course, that the total number of Americans will become a constant, like the number of degrees in a triangle. Instead, the future U.S. population is likely either to fluctuate around a base point as it seeks equilibrium, like tides around a mean high-water mark, or continue to increase, but at rates even more modest than today's.

Because of this gradual alteration in the U.S. population, which now stands at about 212 million, the American way of life has already begun to change in ways both obvious and subtle. Ultimately, few segments of society will remain untouched by the absence of those missing babies. Long before Z.P.G. is achieved, which some experts expect will happen around 2025, when they expect the population to be over 260 million, the U.S.

will be a considerably different country than it is today.

The U.S. is not alone in experiencing a slowdown in population growth. A similar fall-off has been occurring in practically all the developed industrial nations. In Sweden, West Germany, Japan, Hungary and Rumania, the birth rate has slowed strikingly since World War II. In a few countries--including Rumania, Argentina and Japan--there is talk of steps to increase the birth rates again in order to build up labor forces.

This trend has tended to be obscured, or at least overshadowed, by the wider problem of a rapidly increasing birth rate in the world as a whole. In the underdeveloped areas of Asia and Africa, which include more than half of the world's people, the population is increasing by 2.3% a year, far faster than food supplies--a serious situation that has been severely aggravated by drought in parts of Africa and India. In Bucharest last month, a United Nations conference of demographers, scientists and government planners from 141 nations held ten days of acrimonious discussions about how to combat this 20th century version of the old Malthusian nightmare (TIME, Sept. 9). Naturally, not much tune or interest was expended on the contrary trend toward lower birth rates among the industrialized nations.

While American demographers and economists have long known about the sharpening decline in the U.S. birth rate, the public at large has been much less aware of the trend. Of course, anyone who has been in a hospital for any cause recently has heard the talk of half-empty maternity wards, and the fact has begun to sink in that proportionately fewer pregnant women are seen around these days. But the full force of the trend has been blunted by the alarms of environmentalists about the rising worldwide growth rate and by the continuing effects on American society of the widely touted post-World War II baby boom --including a straining of the already weak job market and increasing demands upon the nation's natural resources.

Most demographers consider the postwar baby boom to have been an anomaly. The American birthrate curve has been generally declining almost since the foundation of the Republic. In 1800, American women had an average of seven children each (no more than five survived). By the Depression year of 1936, the total fertility rate--the number of children the average woman has during her lifetime--had fallen to a low of 2.1. Twelve years after World War II, it reached a peak of 3.8 (see chart).

But in 1957 the rate again began to fall, at first slowly and then faster until, at the end of 1973, American women were having only 1.9 children each,* an insufficient number to replace the present population. (To do that, each woman in the U.S. would have to have an average of 2.11 children.) This does not mean instant Z.P.G. Although young parents are not having enough babies to replace themselves, there are still more births than deaths in any given year (3.1 million births v. 2 million deaths in 1973). Unless the number of deaths increases drastically because of some catastrophe, the birth rate must stay down for a sustained period--50 years or so--before a stationary population can be reached.

During those decades the number of children born each year will vary greatly. The postwar generation will be bound to have a huge total number of babies, even if each family has only one or two children apiece. On the other hand, the relatively small cohort/- born in the early '70s will probably produce, in the '90s, another small cohort. Thus, on the way to Z.P.G., either the population or the birth rate will oscillate.

Whether or not to have a baby is of course a highly personal decision. So is deciding upon the number of children to have.

For some couples, two seems to be the ideal number. Timothy and Kathryn Ligosky of Oakland, Calif., have two youngsters, Jason, 6, and Joslyn, 5, and do not plan to have any more; Tim, 31, has had a vasectomy. They feel that more children would severely limit the freedom they have already used to give up their jobs in the Detroit area and move to California to pursue artistic careers. James and DeAnn Burrows of Cambridge, Mass., have a nine-month-old daughter, Monica, and are not sure they will have any more. The reason: both enjoy their jobs and such expensive pastimes as skiing; and, as they put it, "It takes a lot of money to stretch the goodies around."

Others have similar reasons for keeping their families small.

Jim and Helen Fadim of Chicago expect that their daughter Kimberly, 4, will be an only child. "I never wanted to be a mother," says Helen, 32. "I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that I have selfish feelings." Even one child is too many for James and Sherry Barnes of New York, who are concerned both with overpopulation and maintaining a life-style that includes evenings at the theater or movies, mornings at the tennis courts in Central Park. "We couldn't keep this schedule with children," says Jim, 30. The Barneses currently plan to have no children at all.

For reasons like these, a nation's birth rate is difficult to predict. The history of demographic predictions, in fact, strongly counsels humility in forecasting birth rates. During the Depression, with its dampening effect on the national psyche as well as on the economy, estimates of future birth rates proved to be much too low. Later, stunned by the postwar baby boom, demographers and sociologists of the '60s warned about cities that would be literally crawling with people. Now that specter has been replaced by the beatific vision of Z.P.G. The fact is that many births that should be occurring now have merely been deferred for economic and other reasons, and that the birth rate may well rise again by the end of the decade.

But most demographers contend that even if such an increase occurred, it would be temporary. "Any upturn in the birth rate would be just another fluctuation around the major continuing downward trend," says Philip Hauser, director of the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago. "It would fend off zero population growth a little longer, not forever."

Demographers, economists and scientists are far from unanimous on whether Z.P.G. is a good thing or not.

Some fear that an end to population growth will produce social and economic stagnation, holding that major American institutions--including Government and the free economy--require constant expansion. But most agree that the U.S. would be better off if its rate of expansion could be considerably slowed.

Almost 80% of the 270 big businessmen polled in a 1970 FORTUNE 500-Yankelovich survey believed that some effort should be made to curb population growth. Princeton Demographer Charles Westoff, former executive director of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, claims that even today a great many babies are unwanted and that more effective, readily available birth control would be enough to regulate growth.

Other demographers disagree. An increasing number of people believe that the Government should use its influence --or even its power--to depress the birth rate even further. Some support heavy taxes to discourage large families; others go so far as to urge the issuance of "licenses to procreate" or even mandatory abortions after a second child--extremes that rightly shock believers in freedom to procreate. So far, demographers point out, the U.S. Government, through its income tax structure and in other ways, like home loans, has been mildly "pronatalist," that is, supportive of child bearing. Nonetheless, the U.S. birth rate continues to fall. What are the reasons for the decline?

MODERNIZATION. Demographers explain the long-term drop in fertility in the developed countries by a complex of conditions that they simply call "modernization." Whenever societies have become secular, industrialized, educated and urban, certain population changes have taken place. Modern medicine prolongs lives and at the same time keeps infant mortality rates down. Thus for a while the population increases. Eventually, however, modernization causes the birth rate to drift downward. Children are not needed to till the land. Parents need not produce a dozen children in the hope that a few will survive to maturity. Modernization also prolongs schooling and postpones the time at which women marry and begin having families, thus shortening their child-bearing years. By this pattern, according to the much discussed theory of "demographic transition," societies in the process of becoming industrialized will move from high birth and death rates to a new equilibrium of low birth and death rates.

CONTRACEPTION AND ABORTION.

The moral objections to birth control have declined radically in the U.S. in the years since World War II. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Jewish teachings generally consider contraception morally wrong. But many members of these faiths do not, and some two-thirds of American Catholic women now admit that they practice birth control. In the U.S., in fact, more than 80% of the 26.5 million married women in their fertile years now use some kind of contraceptive regularly, more than a third of them relying on the Pill to prevent pregnancy. Sterilization of both men and women is also on the increase. Abortions, once obtainable only illegally or under special circumstances, are now easier to get in many states. In the second half of 1970, doctors performed 193,500 legal abortions; by 1972 the figure had climbed to 586,800, and last year it was about 800,000.

WOMEN'S LIBERATION.

The new wave of feminism has also helped keep birth rates down by encouraging women to challenge their traditional roles as mother and homemaker. "A woman no longer feels that she has to create children to be a whole human being," says Dr. John Blitzer, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. Instead, a woman may now feel that she has to work in order to feel whole. Many women believe that they can make a greater contribution to society or attain a greater sense of personal fulfillment by staying on the job than by staying home with children.

This point of view is increasingly accepted. Says Mrs. Lyle Voellger, 34, of Seattle, the mother of seven children: "Today a woman is almost considered an intellectual dropout if she's a mother and a housewife and enjoys it." The 36.5 million women now working constitute 46% of the American work force, and a growing number of them admit that they do not want to assume the burden of motherhood.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS. The feeling that the population of the U.S.--and, indeed, that of the world--is using up too much coal, oil and just about everything else has also made many young people hesitate to have babies. Paul Ehrlich, in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, and the Club of Rome, in The Limits to Growth (1972), commanded wide attention with their predictions that the world faces catastrophe unless both economic and population growth is slowed. Such Jeremiahs have been roundly challenged, most recently by British Economist Wilfred Beckerman, whose book, In Defence of Economic Growth, argues that man has consistently underestimated the magnitude of the world's natural resources.

Still, the notion that having too many children is wrong and selfish is a common one today. "I'm concerned that the world will eat itself up," says Hop Holmberg of Boston, who agrees with his wife Judy that two children are all they should have. Mrs. Mary Libretti of Madison, N.J., mother of eight, frequently encounters hostility. One woman told her that she and her brood were consuming "too much oxygen and too much space."

ECONOMIC CAUSES. Inflation is another current deterrent to having babies. The cost of parenthood in the U.S. today is colossal. The Commission on Population Growth calculated that, in 1969, the total average outlay for having a single child and supporting him through college was around $60,000. With inflation, the cost would now be almost $78,000--though the income of a household head may also have risen comparably during that period.

Roger Klein and William Wolman, economists at New York's Argus Research Corp., an advisory service for the securities industry, argue that children are now regarded much like any other durable good. "You get a certain amount of satisfaction at a certain cost for a child. When costs go up relative to satisfaction, demand falls," explains Wolman. Adds Klein: "I believe that the decision to have children is made on the basis of what one is going to have to give up to have them." With two incomes to spend, more young working couples can now enjoy luxuries like skiing and vacation houses, and such intangible pleasures as privacy. Many are reluctant to sacrifice these for what they consider to be the dubious rewards of having children.

Shifting population patterns can cause disruptions in any nation. Even a seemingly small change can have big repercussions. If each young family in the U.S. decided to have two children, the population in 2030 would reach 264 million. But if each family decided to have three, the population would be 444 million (see chart). Demographers have used an unattractive but vivid metaphor to describe the long-term effects of a baby boom. They compare the assimilation into society of the 64 million postwar babies, the largest cohort in U.S. history, to the process by which a python digests a pig.

As the pig moves along the snake's digestive tract, it makes a bulge, just as the boom babies are causing a traveling bulge in the economy and social life of the country. Some social scientists, for example, attribute the student riots and other disruptions of the late '60s to the sheer numbers of adolescents who abruptly appeared on the scene.

As Political Scientist Daniel Moynihan described them, "Suddenly a new social class was created in the U.S., so large in its number that it was fundamentally isolated from the rest of society ... At every level there emerged a sense that 'we are alone and separate from them.' " This generation is now largely in its twenties. As its members continue to marry, by 1980 the number of U.S. households will rise to at least 77 million (from 63 million in year 1970). Unlike members of the cohort before them, who had fewer contemporaries with whom to compete, the baby-boom generation is having problems in the job market.

Later, when they retire, the postwar cohort will cause another disruption. A comparatively small work force--the generation born during the '70s and succeeding decades--will have to support them. Today there are 3.2 workers for every person receiving Social Security payments. By 2025, the ratio will drop to 2.2, and Social Security taxes will have to increase by at least 50%. Thus the cohort responsible for the "generation gap" of the '60s may find themselves on the other side of another generation gap as their children are heavily taxed for their support.

Just as the baby boom caused a number of dislocations, the birth dearth, following so soon in its wake, is beginning to have a troublesome impact on many parts of society. Many hospital maternity wards, opened or expanded in anticipation of a further population explosion, now have nearly empty nurseries. Last year maternity wards in New York's Nassau County hospitals had an occupancy rate of only 51%. Two New York City hospitals, Doctors and LeRoy, have already shut down their maternity wards, and another plans to do so. Three Los Angeles hospitals are considering similar action following the closing of Good Samaritan. Pediatric wards are also suffering from a shortage of patients, and six New York City hospitals have requested clearance to close them, while another ten plan to reduce the number of pediatric beds.

Nursery and elementary schools have been severely affected by the declining birth rate too. The number of preschool-age children in 1970 was 17 million, a drop of 3 million in a decade, the largest recorded decline in that group. Public expenditure for education has not dropped, of course; inflation assures that the costs of operating schools will continue to go up. But new construction has been slowing down, and some schools have been forced to close for lack of pupils. Salt Lake City has closed 20 public schools, including three junior high schools, in the past eight years because of a 35% drop in enrollment. Elsewhere schools are being used for special classes, turned into offices, recreation centers or museums, or simply sold to anyone who can use them.

Teachers, of course, have glutted the labor market. From 1952 to 1968, the demand for elementary-school teachers exceeded the supply, and few teachers needed to look hard to find work. In the fall of 1969, according to the National Education Association, 1,600 beginning teachers could not get jobs. Last year the surplus of beginning elementary-school teachers was 56,900, and many young people with teaching certificates now find themselves working as bank tellers or filling-station attendants.

Colleges also expect to be hit hard as the baby-bust generation of the late '60s and early '70s begins to turn 18 in the 1980s. For economic and other reasons, enrollments have already started to shrink, but the situation will get worse in the years to come. John Silber, president of Boston University, predicts that some 200 smaller colleges, accommodating an average of 5,000 students each, will have to close, and many larger institutions will become academic ghost towns. Anticipating the coming pinch, the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts has cut three buildings and $100 million out of its $350 million building program.

What about the armed forces? The pool of 18-to 19-year-old men will shrink from its present 4.1 million to 3.5 million by late 1984, reducing the number of those available for military service. The Defense Department has already increased the number of opportunities for women in the services and wants to boost its female enlistment greatly from its present level of about 40,000 a year.

Women may also find it easier to get jobs when the number of men available to enter the labor force falls off. Girls born from 1962 on will have a large pool of slightly older men to choose from as husbands. Says Argus Research's Wolman: "The effect will work itself all the way up the line until funeral services feel it too."

The effect has already been felt by some businesses that cater to babies. Gerber Products Co. has dropped the word "only" from its long-used slogan, "Babies are our only business." The nation's largest producer of baby foods, it has also gone into life insurance, printing and prepackaged meals for single diners. Johnson & Johnson works both sides of the population street. The company still produces its line of baby powders, lotions and shampoos (good for adults as well as infants, claim its current ads). But it also owns Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp., one of the nation's largest manufacturers of contraceptives, and is pushing a full line of diaphragms, foams and birth control pills for those who want to avoid buying its baby products.

By far the most dramatic effects of a sustained low birth rate will be the graying of America. With a falling birth rate, the proportion of the young is declining, while that of the elderly increases. Today the proportion of youths under 15 (about 30%) to the whole population is almost three times as great as the proportion of people 65 and over (10%). At Z.P.G., those under 15 and those over 65 would account for 20% of the population each if the average American's life expectancy remains unchanged.

If the expectancy goes up a few years, as it probably will, the proportion of older people will be even larger. Thus in the next 50 years the number of people over 65 will at least double.

As the country's median age moves upward from 28 today to more than 37 in about the middle of the 21st century, so will the average age of those who set trends in fashion, music and films. Professional sports too may be affected as the pool of young talent diminishes. Even now, older people are more apt to vote than younger people, and as they increase in number they will also become a greater political force. "There will be a tendency for the aging portion of the population to become more powerful," says Rand Corp.'s Dennis Detray. "But there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Do the young have a right to dictate to the old?"

Although there is evidence that older people are conservative by nature, Berkeley Sociologist Kingsley Davis points out that "some of the wildest political schemes ever known have been advocated by lobbies of the elderly and some of the most atavistic movements, such as the Nazi movement in Germany, were manned by dogmatic youth." Moreover, definitions of what is conservative change with the times. Social Security and Medicare, favorite issues of the elderly, were once considered radical notions. In Sweden, a low birth rate has raised the age level of the population without altering its essentially liberal outlook.

Indeed, Sociologist Vern Bengtson of the University of Southern California's Andrus Gerontology Center foresees an "age backlash" in the coming decades, a period of social ferment in which the elderly will become the major group agitating for change. The trend is already becoming evident in a few cities, where "gray panthers" have been organizing to demand better housing, increased Social Security benefits and improved medical care. It can also be noted in news-media treatment of the elderly. Bengtson has counted the number of items concerning senior citizens in three leading newspapers--the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times--in 1960 and 1972 and noted a sixfold increase. Nevertheless, Congress has yet to fund the National Institutes of Health's newly created Institute on Aging. The institute is requesting a budget of only about $13.8 million this year, less than one-fourth the amount sought for research on child health and development. With more elderly people, such priorities are likely to be changed. Women may also play a larger role in the politics of the future. Freedom from children has already given many of them the time and the opportunity to lobby for everything from new traffic lights to more liberal abortion laws.

In any discussion about a slowdown in population growth, one of the most important issues is whether or not economic growth must necessarily slow down too. "It is absurd not to link zero population growth with zero economic growth," argues Hauser. But Stephen Enke of General Electric's research organization, TEMPO, disagrees. A rapidly growing population generates a large labor force, he says, which in turn has in the past generated large increases in the gross national product. A stationary population, on the other hand, could produce zero economic growth--if other factors remain unchanged. But, maintains Enke, as population growth slows and a higher proportion of the population is in the labor force, savings rates generally increase. This in turn would expand capital and outlays for equipment, which will help increase productivity. Thus Enke believes that a stable work force may produce equal or greater per capita G.N.P. than would a growing work force.

A third view is that there is very little relationship between Z.P.G. and Z.E.G. Sociologist Lincoln Day believes that "there is nothing in a stationary population itself that would inevitably be productive of any particular economic change or condition.

Economic change, stability or decline are all possible with a stationary population ... The determinants of prime significance are social and cultural, not demographic."

Most experts assume that Z.P.G., if it indeed arrives, will be an age of abundance for many Americans. A slowing of growth has meant relative affluence for Sweden and West Germany. Population Analyst Ben Wattenberg, in his book The Real America (TIME, Sept. 2), declares: "The birth dearth may well prove to be the single most important agent of a massive expansion and a massive economic upgrading of the already massive majority middle class."

With a declining national birth rate, American business will not have a constantly expanding market, but its customers will have more money to spend. The food industry should benefit little from the country's new-found wealth; people, after all, can eat only so much meat and vegetables, drink only so much milk.

But Wattenberg predicts that sales of expensive convenience foods will increase as more wives enter the work force and spend less time in the kitchen. Sales of discretionary goods and services will also boom. The 21st century promises to be a profitable one for airlines and hotels, developers of vacation homes, the automobile industry, and the manufacturers of such leisure goods as sports equipment, record players and tape recorders.

In tomorrow's America, children will be physically healthier, since wanted children generally receive better pre-and postnatal care than unwanted ones. Parents will be likely to take more interest in those children they decide to have. Roger Revelle, head of Harvard's Center for Population Studies, thinks that "it's less difficult changing little savages into civilized people if the ratio of adults to children in a society is high. For one thing, society becomes adult-centered rather than child-centered.

Secondly, children can get much more adult attention because there will be more adults." The rate of juvenile delinquency should go down, and certainly crime rates will, since about a third of all crimes are attributed to people under 18, and there will be proportionally fewer of them.

One of the negative aspects of Z.P.G. is that it will result in a sort of social stasis, locking people into fixed economic positions and eliminating many of the opportunities for getting ahead that exist today. "We've had a pyramid society with youth at the large base of the pyramid," explains Revelle. "Now we're going to have a pillar-type society with the same number of people throughout."

Today, older workers retire early, often against their will, but they make room for fast-rising youngsters. In the 21st century, older workers may hold on to their jobs longer, since the labor force growth will slow down along with the population.

This will limit opportunities for promotion. In such a society, 45-year-old junior executives may be common. Explains Revelle:

"There's going to be a much smaller number of people to supervise and many more people in the upper ranks. The average red-blooded American boy is going to have to get satisfaction out of being himself rather than rising in the organization."

Some employers may try to overcome the effects of this immobility by giving raises in small increments, so that a worker gets the illusion of progress up the job ladder. Still others may try to reward workers with titles, so that on paper, at least, everyone can feel that he is in charge of something. But whatever steps are taken to ameliorate it, the problem will remain. The result will be a situation not unlike that described in the novels of Balzac, in which a younger man must wait, often for years, until a senior dies or retires before he can move into his position.

The poor, while better off than they are today, will still be relatively poor. At the same time, the middle and upper classes will be even more eager to hold on to whatever they have. "If you have Z.P.G., then the only way you can improve your lot is by taking something away from somebody else," explains Chicago's Hauser, who sees increasing conflict between the advantaged and disadvantaged under such a system. Differences between ethnic minorities may also be exacerbated. The population of some ethnic groups is likely to decline at a different rate from others. Princeton Demographer Norman B. Ryder notes that "there is less likelihood of ethnic conflict when all groups are growing."

As the population becomes more stable, immigration too will present new problems. Entering the U.S. at the rate of about 400,000 a year (primarily from Latin America and Asia), immigrants at present account for about 20% of the yearly population growth. If births and deaths are balanced, immigration would be responsible for all the growth, and eventually immigrants and their descendants would loom disproportionately large in the population.

In many ways, the achievement of zero growth could have much the same effect on 21st century America as the closing of the frontier had on Americans of the 19th century. It could produce a sense of stagnation and a temporary malaise as Americans re-examine themselves and their society.

Nonetheless, Z.P.G. is likely to prove more boon than bane.

While continuously expanding, the U.S. has been too caught up in responding to the ever-changing challenges of growth itself to tackle such problems as mass transportation, housing, race relations, conservation and the search for new sources of energy. To be sure, the achievement of a stable population will not automatically provide solutions. Demands upon the cities and the country's natural resources will be even greater than they are today. But Z.P.G. can at least give the nation breathing space to meet its old challenges even as it faces its new ones.

* The decline is not limited to any single population group. Although educated, middle-class whites have the smallest families, the fertility rate among blacks and other minority groups is declining faster.

/- As used in demography, a cohort usually means the aggregate of persons born in any given year or specified period. Less frequently, it refers to the persons who share the same date for another event, like a death cohort.

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