Vietnam Scraps Population Control

Authors: John Stonestreet and Bob Ditmer

Paul Erlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb warned of mass starvation and environmental collapse. The cause of the coming apocalypse, he said, was too many babies. The only way to stave off disaster was to reduce the human population. 

Countries around the world took those warnings to heart, especially communist countries. Most famously, China adopted laws that attempted to control fertility, but so did a few other nations, including Vietnam. Today, facing aging populations and record-low birth rates, countries are rethinking the edicts and incentives they designed to reduce the number of children born, and some, including China, are even adopting incentives and policies designed to encourage more children. 

Earlier this month, Vietnam scrapped its long-standing, two-child policy that has tanked the nation’s birth rate and threatened its economic stability. At just 1.91 children per woman, Vietnam’s fertility rate sits below replacement but above much of the Western world. Far from a population bomb, the greatest existential threat the world faces right now is a demographic winter. It’s clear that national attempts to control fertility have not worked, and it’s just as doubtful that financial incentives and appeals to national identity will work to reverse the trend. 

There are many theories why fertility rates have been falling, especially across Western nations. Affluent and educated women in the West have long been told to not want children because they will interfere with their freedom, careers, lifestyle choices, and personal happiness. Some studies also point to a gender gap, in which women want babies, but men do not. Thankfully, that trend seems to be changing.  

In short, ideas can be just as powerful as policy when it comes to reducing fertility. Whether those ideas promise happiness and fulfillment or a way of saving the planet from an ecological crisis makes no difference in the end. The result is still a crisis that will manifest both in economics and national security. 

In his magisterial work The Way of the Modern World, Regent College professor Craig Gay noted that as the world became more godless and secular in the modern period, its values changed. Prioritized above all else, Dr. Gay argued, were the values of convenience, efficiency, and choice, each of which implied a level of control that humans, whether individuals or governments, could exert over nature: This is our world, not God’s, and we should live like it.  

In no area of human interaction has this been more evident than in the realm of human procreation. Decisions about family and having children are almost exclusively understood as matters of personal or, as in the cases of China and Vietnam, state choice. This is the precise opposite of thinking of children as blessings and our decisions to have them in light of our responsibilities as human beings in particular times and places.

The narrative that children are a matter of choice is often couched in promises of freedom and autonomy. But like the false narrative of overpopulation, this one has also proved to be flatly wrong. In the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey for 2022, almost 40% of married women with children described themselves as “very happy,” a number significantly higher than any other group of women. Less than 22% of unmarried women without children felt the same, and unmarried women with children were the least likely to say they were “very happy,” at just over 16%.   

As my colleague Shane Morris put it in a recent Breakpoint commentary, “The cultural impression that diapers and demands of little ones rob people of joy is simply wrong.” Children are a gift from God. That’s a fact of reality, not mere religious opinion. Those individuals and societies that embrace children, despite the obstacles and challenges that come with them, will flourish. Those that reject children cannot and will not.